It’s no secret – I love Christmas music.  I adore it!  Heck, I love it even more than some of my Christian friends do.  You can bet your buttons that when December rolls around, I’m tuning my radio to a 24/7 Christmas music radio station.   And of course, people are always asking me, “Naomi, why do you love Christmas music so much?  Why don’t you find it irritating like the rest of us do?  And… come on, seriously, you’re Jewish!”  True, true.  I suppose there’s something nostalgic about the music, the bells, the thought of chestnuts roasting on an open fire while the weather outside is frightful…

I think that the best answer is probably that there’s no accounting for taste.

That being said, you could argue (though it’s a stretch) that I love Christmas music because much of it was actually written by Jews.  This fun fact is no secret, either.  A recent article from InterFaithFamily.com points out that in this year’s American Society of Composers and Publisher’s 25 Most Popular Holiday Songs list, more than half were composed, co-written, or performed by Jews.  We all knew that Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas”, but did you ever think that “Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer” would be a member of the tribe?

Well, doesn’t it seem a bit strange that so much of this music has been written by Jews?  Perhaps it’s not so strange if you think about the phenomenon in its historical context – and this is what’s argued by David Lehman, author of A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs. In an October interview with Smithsonian magazine, Lehman explains how between WWI and the mid-1960s, in the wake of the hardships of life in Europe, Jewish songwriters “reinvented America itself as a projection of their ideals of what America could be,” essentially creating a religion of “American-ness”.  Perhaps this is what the holiday songs were all about: the portrayal of a joyful, nostalgic America, centered around hearth and home. They saw America as a place of comfort, and sought to reflect that feeling in their music.

So there you go, that brings it back to the nostalgia argument.  Now that we’ve cleared that up, I’d like to wish you all (in the wake of this recent brutal nor’easter), a wonderful, warm week – and if you’re celebrating it, a lovely, nostalgic Christmas.

Naomi