Mariah Carey performs onstage during her “All I Want For Christmas Is You” tour at Madison Square Garden on December 15, 2019 in New York. Credit: Kevin Mazur
The holiday season is officially creeping in with the cold, and for some, Christmas trees are put up, and carols are sung all before the first Thanksgiving turkey is even carved.
November is always prime time for the pro- and anti-Christmas music debate among those who celebrate. Eugenia Costa-Giomi — a professor of music education at Ohio State — and Luke McSherry — a member of the Amateur Radio Organization for Undergraduate Student Entertainment, also known as AROUSE — said the motivations for people’s ride-or-die stance on Christmas music are manifold.
Costa-Giomi said people’s positive opinions surrounding Christmas music can be linked to the reasons they gravitate toward any other genres of nonholiday music.
“We tend to like things that are familiar to us,” Costa-Giomi said.
Costa-Giomi said musical familiarity can be expressed in a graphical concept known as an “inverted U-shape.”
“We don’t like things that are completely novel to us, and as we are exposed to those things over time, we like them more,” Costa-Giomi said. “And then there is a point in which we start getting tired if there is overexposure.”
Christmas music can easily fall under the inverted U-shape model, as Costa-Giomi said people often grow tired of popular tracks, like Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” when they are persistently overplayed.
Listening to music is also one of the best ways to evoke past feelings and memories, Costa-Giomi said. She said listening to holiday music is an effective way of transporting individuals back to their fondest memories with friends and family around the Christmas tree.
“Music is very powerful in evoking associations with, for example, pleasant situations,” Costa-Giomi said. “We can associate the music with a particular event, with a time, with a place, with feelings and with a mood that were part of that scenario. And just a little bit of music can bring all that back. So music is very powerful in that way.”
McSherry, also a fourth-year in computer science and data analytics, identified some common tracks that are guilty of being played prematurely, be it in public spaces or on the radio.
“The main songs I really hear early are Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ as well as anything [by] Michael Bublé,” McSherry said. “Michael Bublé plays everywhere.”
McSherry said one of the opposition’s main arguments is the idea that another national holiday — Thanksgiving — can be neglected in favor of ushering in the Christmas season as soon as possible.
“A lot of people want to focus on Thanksgiving before they have to worry about anything having to do with Christmas and buying presents and anything like that,” McSherry said.
McSherry added that another argument against blasting Christmas music early is the exhaustion that accompanies “matching” its innate happiness and cheer. He said a similar effect was felt with Pharrell Williams’ 2013 song “Happy,” which resulted in a sizable portion of listeners growing annoyed by the song’s overtly sunny mood.
“I think it’s because Christmas music is very happy, and it can take energy to project that happiness,” McSherry said. “A lot of people are going through exams and stuff or just in general we’re going through a hard time at work and we’re not really feeling the festivities yet.”
Costa-Gioni said businesses and corporations undoubtedly capitalize on Christmas music’s capacity to stir up emotion. She said Christmas music playing in stores in October or November is usually a marketing strategy employed to drive sales.
“We know that music can be very effective in increasing some consumers’ behaviors,” like purchasing behaviors,” Costa-Giomi said. “The music that is played in [a] restaurant affects how long people stay at the table and affects how much they drink, for example, even the loudness of the music and the tempo of the music.”
Moreover, Costa-Giomi said sentimentality is a specific tool used by brands to drive consumer behavior.
“Christmas music creates nostalgia, feelings of nostalgia and of times that are good, and that are gone and that we try to bring back,” Costa-Giomi said. “If you are in that mode, you will be more likely to want to preserve it, to bring it back, and you will buy a Christmas tree and you will have this beautiful candle with smells that you remember.”
Costa-Giomi said commonalities found in classic Christmas music — specifically the use of choirs of multiple voices — produce a sense of nostalgia that arises out of religious tradition, despite the recent trend of holiday music moving away from Christianity to be more inclusive.
“You have lyrics that very explicitly refer to religious things, so I think it is very smart of people who release this type of music to make, perhaps, instrumental versions that avoid the lyrics,” Costa-Giomi said. “So we have, again, the celebration aspect of it and the traditional aspect of it that applies to everybody without excluding those who don’t share religious traditions that the Christian community shares.”
McSherry said togetherness is also a theme that crops up in a wide range of Christmas songs, appealing to people’s natural desire for companionship throughout life’s difficulties.
“A lot of lyrics concern wanting to be with someone for Christmas, being with family for Christmas,” McSherry said. “There’s like a canon of songs that are played every Christmas and it seems like everyone has some rendition of those.”
Christmas music’s reliance on acoustic instrumentation also helps it feel somewhat refreshing, he said.
“[There are] a lot of sleigh bells, there’s also usually a lot of stringed instruments,” McSherry said. “You don’t really hear any electronic sounds like in a lot of pop music or in a lot of music in general today.”
Costa-Giomi said in the past few years she has seen holiday music make its triumphant return at a remarkably faster pace than ever before.
“I think that it’s becoming more common and is becoming earlier and earlier, so having Christmas music at the beginning of October, it’s ridiculous,” Costa-Giomi said.
Because social media users have begun to joke about the Christmas season’s punctuality on such a wide scale, McSherry said the debate will likely bleed farther into the fall season going forward.
“I’m sure you’ve seen online all the memes where it’s Mariah Carey and an iceberg, and it’s melting that came out right around Halloween,” McSherry said.
Needless to say, the iceberg is melting and the public is starting to be immersed in the holiday season before they even get the chance to practice gratitude. McSherry said striking a balance is difficult, but not impossible.
“I really enjoy Christmas time just because I get to be around family and friends,” McSherry said. “But the music itself adds to it.”
