What makes a song sound ‘Christmassy’? Musicologist explains

Within the first notes of many classic Christmas songs, we’re transported directly to the festive season. Why is it that it’s these particular pieces of music that get us thinking of the holidays?

In his book Music’s Meanings, the popular music researcher Philip Tagg explores the ways in which we as listeners construe the music that we hear. Tagg applies semiotics, the study of how we interpret signs in the world around us, to music. These signs may be viewed differently by different people and may change their meaning over time.

To illustrate this concept, Tagg cites the example of the pedal guitar, originally drawn from Hawaiian musical tradition and carrying connotations of the islands. Eventually this instrument found its way into country music, so successfully that Tagg argues at this point, we are likely to immediately think of country music when hearing the instrument, without the concept of Hawaii ever crossing our minds.

As the pedal guitar may place us immediately within the realm of country music, there is one instrument that will likely do the same for Christmas – sleigh bells.

Sleigh bells

From light orchestral pieces such as Prokofiev’s Troika (1933), right through to Ariana Grande’s Santa Tell Me (2014), sleigh bells have long acted as convenient shorthand for composers to tell their listeners that this piece belongs to the Christmas canon.

The reasons for this link stem from the non-musical world. We associate Christmas with the winter season and snowy weather. Sleighs, through their use as transport in such weather, developed a direct associative link with Christmas, and as a result, so did the bells used to warn pedestrians of their approach. As with Tagg’s pedal guitar example, we’ve reached the point where we generally link sleigh bells directly with the concept of Christmas, rather than thinking of the intermediary idea of the sleigh at all.

There’s a link to the wider instrument family of bells too. Through the practice of churches ringing out their bells, particularly in celebration of the birth of Christ, larger bells have also developed a presence, not only in Christmas music, but in Christmas decorations and art.

Last year, the UK Official Charts Company published a list of the “top 40 most-streamed Christmas songs”. If you were to listen to the list, you’d find bell-like sounds in the majority of them, from the glockenspiel-like introduction of Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You (1994) to the synthesised tubular bells of Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas (1984).

Read more: Band Aid at 40: how the problematic Christmas hit changed the charity sector

There are other musical elements which help spread the Christmas cheer, from lyrical melodies to strident brass parts. Most of these elements though, have one thing in common. They aren’t modern sounds, or particularly common in modern pop music, and instead, they remind us of the past.

The nostalgia of Christmas

Christmas is a nostalgic holiday, in more ways than one. The word “nostalgia” initially referred to a type of homesickness, rather than the fond remembrance of a hazy past time that we more commonly use it to refer to now. But both senses of the word can be used to describe the feelings we associate with Christmas.

It’s a time where many of us travel home to family, taking not only a geographical trip, but a temporal one, immersing ourselves in a world of well-worn tradition and familiarity, where the pace of our day-to-day life doesn’t apply.

Artists know this, feeding our nostalgia through music, lyrics and visuals which evoke the past. This is possibly why most Christmas albums consist of interpretations of past holiday classics, rather than original material. It’s a straightforward appeal to the nostalgic and the familiar; if we already know a song, it’s easier to immediately latch on to this new recording. Some artists though, take the nostalgia trip one step further, emulating what is arguably the ultimate Christmas style of music – the easy listening crooner song.

Whether it’s Bing Crosby or Nat King Cole, the warmth of a crooning voice nestled among light orchestral instrumentation has become inextricably linked with Christmas. It’s a sound that, unless you have a personal affinity with the style, you’re unlikely to hear much outside of the festive season.

It’s telling that when Billie Eilish performed a version of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas on Saturday Night Live in 2023, she eschewed her usual synthesised sounds in favour of a traditional trio of piano, drums and upright bass, and delivered the vocal in a gentle, warming tone. It all conspires to make us think of some imagined, simpler past, with chestnuts by the fire and picturesque snow settling outside.

Finally, we return to that list of the most-streamed Christmas songs. There’s one artist, and indeed one album, that makes the top 20 with two entries – Michael Bublé, with his 2011 album Christmas. Checking this album against our list of Christmas musical elements reveals a clean sweep. It’s crooned from top to bottom, features lightly orchestrated versions of classic Christmas songs, and yes, includes sleigh bells. It doesn’t get much more Christmassy than that.

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Samuel J Bennett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.