I felt a little bad about my only Christmas music post being a negative one, even though complaining is more or less the purpose of this site. I considered countering Top Five Worst Christmas Songs with Top Five Best Christmas Songs, but the more I thought about it the more I felt that such a post wouldn’t be remotely interesting. Favorite songs are so subjective, and there’s only so many ways of saying “I like this song – it reminds me of Christmas.”
In the course of researching the last article I found myself wondering about the origins of a lot of the famous Christmas standards that play on continuous repeat every December. The religious songs, of course, all developed from hymns, but what about the secular ones? Many of them are so old and have been recorded by so many artists few people know where they originated.
Since it’s become such a go-to conversation starter for me this month, I thought I’d share some random facts about famous Christmas songs that came up in my Wikipedia perusing:
