Christmas Songs Born of Battle and Mettle, Hope and Love

As we once again approach that “most wonderful time of the year,” all of us hope to be home for Christmas.

For some this will only be possible in their thoughts, in their dreams.

But even for those of us who will be home for Christmas, our eyes moisten when we listen to the timeless, immortal, heart-wrenching “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” initially recorded by Bing Crosby in 1943.

The song became an instant hit in the U.S. It also became the most requested song at USO shows overseas, evoking hope, warm memories, bittersweetness and, I am sure, also feelings of loneliness, homesickness and nostalgia in our troops far away from home. Many a tear must have rolled down the cheeks of thousands of brave men and women.

Interestingly, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) banned the song from its broadcasts “out of apprehensions that the lyrics might undermine morale among British troops,” according to the Canadian Legion Magazine.

In a great article at Military.com, Joanna Guldin explains how Kim Gannon wrote the lyrics to “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” during World War II “from the perspective of a deployed service member. His lyrics spoke first to a generation at war and then echoed through time as the most recorded Christmas song ever.”

She adds that while “Christmas music usually evokes warm memories, wishes for peace and the joy of the season…many of our favorite holiday songs have deep connections to heart-wrenching conflict.”

And indeed, according to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), out of the top 30 most-performed holiday songs of all time, a third were written in the 1940s and another nine during the postwar decade of the 1950s.

Perhaps one of the earliest Christmas songs born out of conflict, violence and war-related family tragedy is “I heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” written during the Civil War by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on December 25, 1863, “seeking to capture the dissonance in his own heart and the world he observes around him that Christmas Day.” Longfellow’s oldest son who served in the Union Army had been nearly mortally wounded in a skirmish shortly before Christmas Day 1863.

The poem was initially set to music by the English organist John Baptiste Calkin.

First written in 1816 by a young Austrian priest, “not long after the Napoleonic wars had taken their toll,” “Stille Nacht Heilige Nacht” (“Silent Night Holy Night”) was first performed on Christmas Eve, 1818.

Eventually, the song was translated into over 300 languages and sung in churches and homes throughout the world, even in the trenches and fox holes of battlefields in Europe during the First World War.

During the Christmas of 1914, “Silent Night” and another classic Christmas song, “O Come All Ye Faithful,: were sung back and forth across the battlefield trenches. “Commonly, Germans sang ‘Silent Night’in their native tongue. In at least one instance, British and German forces joined together, singing “O Come All Ye Faithful,” as the Latin version ‘Adeste Fidelis,’” writes Guldin.

The ties of “O Holy Night” to war and human conflict are somewhat more tenuous.

It was written in the mid-19th century in a small French town and set to music as “Cantique de Noel.” In 1855, American writer John Sullivan translated, slightly revised the song and published the updated version in his magazine, “Dwight’s Journal of Music,” which “propelled the song to popularity in the United States and, particularly, in the North during the Civil War as abolitionists related to the anti-slavery sentiment.”

The beloved song “White Christmas” was written by the famous Russian-born immigrant and World War I veteran Irving Berlin just before the U.S. entered World War II and was first performed by Bing Crosby just a few days after the Pearl Harbor attack. It became America’s favorite Christmas song, especially popular among military service members — the most requested song on the American Forces Network (AFN).

Bing Crosby’s nephew, Howard Crosby, once asked his uncle what was the most difficult thing he had done during his entertainment career. Howard Crosby recalls, “He didn’t have to think about it. He said in December 1944, he was in a USO show with Bob Hope and the Andrews Sisters. They did an outdoor show in northern France…At the end of the show, he had to stand there and sing ‘White Christmas’ with 100,000 G.I.’s in tears without breaking down himself.”

“Of course, a lot of those boys were killed in the Battle of the Bulge a few days later.”

On a much lighter note, yet still World War I related, is The Royal Guardsmen’s 1967 “Snoopy’s Christmas,” delightfully described here as “a work of fan fiction, set in WWI – or rather, in Snoopy’s imagined WWI – wherein Snoopy is a pilot whose arch-nemesis is a renowned German Empire fighter pilot known as The Red Baron.”

John Lenon’s beautiful, poignant ballad “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” starts out with the lyrics “so this is Christmas and what have you done” and was not just a Christmas song. It was also a song of protest against the Vietnam War. It was released in 1971.

“Indisputably, World War II and the immediate postwar years represented something of a golden age for Christmas music, with the 1940s and 1950s accounting for nearly two thirds of ASCAP’s most popular songs,” wrote Molly Fitzpatrick.

Some of those songs:

• Hugh Martin’s and Ralph Blane’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” with “at its heart a more hopeful treatise on war and loneliness than the [Meet Me in St. Louis] movie storyline would suggest.”

• Irving Berlin’s 1942 “Happy Holidays” and Sammy Cahn’s and composer Jule Styne’s 1945 “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”

• Mel Tormé’s “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire).”

This veteran’s favorite Christmas song is “I’ll be Home for Christmas,” of course.

What is yours?

Wishing all our readers a Very Merry Christmas.

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