Sobbin’ Around the Christmas Tree: The 100 Greatest Sad Holiday Songs
variety.comChris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Is Christmas really the saddest day of the year? There’s a whole history of holiday music that explores what it’s like to be down-and-out during the season.
Are you mourning absent family members? Resenting the ex who ghosted you for Xmas? Or just wondering why, in 2024, everybody else is celebrating the holly instead of the melancholy?
Take heart: We’ve got the unmerry miserabilists for you. Sad Christmas music is practically a genre unto itself. One good starting point, if you can find it, is Rhino’s long-out-of-print “Bummed Out Christmas” CD.
But we’ve got our own playlist of classics and obscurities to help you turn that fake holiday smile upside down. Most performers sing the version with the happy, rewritten lyrics that Frank Sinatra asked songwriter Hugh Martin to come up with in the ‘50s to “jolly it up a little.” But the superior version is the more ominous and morose “have to muddle through somehow” original, as sung in the ‘40s by Judy Garland.
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