It’s coming on Christmas, as Joni Mitchell begins the song River, and everybody's having fun, as Slade noted in Merry Xmas Everybody. The lights are burning brightly everywhere, as Mariah Carey sings – although not in our house, partly because we’re saving electricity and the planet, and partly because we don’t play any Carey here.
From mistletoe and trees to Santa and Jack Frost, there can be nary a Christmas cliché that has not been immortalised in song, while a good many traditions began in them. Nat King Cole put chestnuts on every Christmas hearth. Rudolph’s nose would never have gone down in history so brightly had singing cowboy Gene Autry not turned Robert L. May’s 1930s poem into a hit single in 1949; Autry then returned in 1950 to bring us Frosty the Snowman. Did anyone bet on the likelihood of a White Christmas before Irving Berlin’s song was crooned into our collective mind?
