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Readers' favorite Christmas songs

Everyone who celebrates Christmas has a favorite song, sacred or secular, of the season

by rich copley rcopley@herald-leader.com

No other holiday is as defined by its music as Christmas.

Christmas music has the power to transform radio station formats. Entire concerts are built around Christmas tunes. Almost any artist with a respectable career has put out a Christmas album, and some, like Amy Grant this year, generate enough holiday material for greatest hits albums of their Christmas tunes.

"So much of my fondness for Christmas is tied up in music — choir performances at church, school chorus 'winter concerts' (hate that term), carols in the stores and on the radio, carols on the stereo while decorating," says Lori Metcalf, 44, of Nicholasville. "There is no other time of year — or life, perhaps — that has quite the soundtrack that Christmas does."

Metcalf said that in response to a question on my LexGo.com blog, Copious Notes, asking readers to tell us their favorite Christmas songs. Last week, we took reader responses and spun them into a pair of polls to try — unscientifically, of course — to find out what readers' favorite sacred and secular Christmas songs are.

In the sacred department, it was never really a contest.

O Holy Night was the runaway winner with 36.4 percent of the vote. The closest competitor was Silent Night at 21.2 percent.

"If I could sing any song and be really great at it, it would have to be O Holy Night," wrote Lexington actor Laurie Genet Preston.

Kevin Hall of Georgetown wrote, "The song is majestic yet sounds deceptively simple. Those first few notes give no indication of the grand, sweeping arrangements yet to come, and most of us get lured into singing before realizing, 'Oh, man, this is so far out of my league, I need to just quit and sing Frosty the Snowman instead.'"

Poor Frosty. He didn't rate much mention among our readers in the secular song department.

That was a far more competitive field, with Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas eking out win over Carol of the Bells by 0.6 percentage point.

I have to admit my favorite is Carol. In junior high and high school chorus, it was the most fun to sing, and whenever I hear it play I still want to storm in with that baritone part: "One seems to hear words of good cheer from everywhere, filling the air!"

For several Copious Notes readers, it was the original Judy Garland recording of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas from the 1944 movie Meet Me in St. Louis that did it for them.

"In the context of the movie, the song is heartbreaking in its ability to communicate, via song, that sometimes we just have to 'muddle through' during the holidays and look forward to happier times in the future while remembering happier times in the past," wrote Carla Pleasant, 44, of Lexington. "Unfortunately, with the state of the economy and crises around the world, those words ring altogether too true this year."

For many, it is the pure interpretation of a song that will win them over.

Bruce Springsteen's Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, in which The Boss asks Clarence Clemons whether Santa is going to bring him a new saxophone, was a favorite among numerous commenters.

Lamin P. Swann, 31, recalls listening to The Temptations Give Love at Christmas album every year and, "when Silent Night played, my two siblings and I would try our best to hit the falsettos and baritones of the song.

"The baritone lows of Melvin Franklin and the falsetto highs of Glenn Leonard make this version of Silent Night stand out, tells you Christmas is here."

It is usually the classics that get people, though some new tunes also strike a chord.

Audrey Long, 29, writes, "For me, it doesn't become Christmas until I hear Harry Connick Jr. sing I Pray on Christmas. Not only does it remind me what exactly we are all celebrating, but it has a great, upbeat feeling that just makes me happy. Once we're past Thanksgiving, that song even becomes my ringtone and ring-back tone on my cell phone."

Some folks take a more irreverent approach, championing songs like Elmo and Patsy's now classic Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer. In the same vein, Robert Earl Keen's Merry Christmas From the Family also rated a mention from several readers. That song, covered by artists such as the Dixie Chicks and Lexington's own Montgomery Gentry, recounts a drunken, strife-filled down-home Christmas:

Fred and Rita drove from Harlingen,

I can't remember how I'm kin to them,

But when they tried to plug their motor home in,

They blew our Christmas lights.

"I think I know those people!" Metcalf wrote, endorsing the Montgomery Gentry rendition.

Christmas is a season that brings people together, and sometimes, the music can be the glue.

Championing Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas Is You, one reader wrote, "That one never fails to make me love everyone around me."