Listening to Christmas music on the radio can be a risky game to play. Sometimes you get absolute classics that hit all the right nostalgic notes, sometimes you get a pop-music star's rendition of "Blue Christmas", and sometimes you have to grind your teeth and make it through a million different versions of "My Favorite Things" which is definitely not a Christmas song.
For reasons unclear, society has chosen to adopt this song into the folds of Christmas classics. For a few years I have been perplexed when I heard it in a commercial or in a store, but now things have just gone too far. The song is absolutely everywhere. There's no escaping it. To confirm my suspicions that this is definitely not a Christmas song, I went ahead and found the lyrics and bolded any words that mention Christmas or wintery things and spoiler alert: there's not a lot of bolded text in here.
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things
Cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudels
Door bells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things
Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
Silver white winters that melt into springs
These are a few of my favorite things
When the dog bites
When the bee stings
When I'm feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don't feel so bad
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things
Cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudels
Door bells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things
Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
Silver white winters that melt into springs
These are a few of my favorite things
When the dog bites
When the bee stings
When I'm feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don't feel so bad
When the dog bites
When the bee stings
When I'm feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don't feel so bad
See what I mean?? Sure, some of this lady's favorite things are winter-related, but no explicit mention of Christmas is ever made, nor does the song indicate at all that it is a seasonal one meant to be played only in the winter.
After doing some light research, I've come to the conclusion that the reason most of these cold-weather favorites were included in the song is because the character who originally sang them in The Sound of Music lives in Salzburg, Austria where it is very cold. Weather Spark lists the average daily high for Salzburg to be "below 45 degrees F" for this time of year. For reference, Florida's average high this time of year is a full 20 degrees higher at 65 degrees. This is also only three degrees below Salzburg's average high for the hottest time of the year meaning that the weather outside right now where I live is about as hot as it gets in Salzburg. My point is, it's cold in Austria which is why the woman singing has favorite things like "warm woolen mittens" while a Floridian like me may say my favorite thing is "a cold glass of lemonade".
So who can we blame for making this definitively non-Christmas song inescapable on our Christmas Pandora playlists? For starters, I would look to Jack Jones' 1964 Christmas album. He was the very first of many artists to come to lump this song into a Christmas collection. This leaves us with just one question: Jack why would you do this? How does one man go from recording the iconic Love Boat theme to including this song on a Christmas album?
According to Jones himself, the song was added simply as a promotional measure for the upcoming spring release of The Sound of Music film. A promoter from the film is said to have told Jones and his record label to "just add sleigh bells" when they initially protested that the song was "not a Christmas song" and therefore shouldn't be on the album. Turns out you can "just add sleigh bells" to pretty much any old song and put it on a Christmas album, only for it to perplex listeners 60 years down the line. So with that in mind, I hope you'll all enjoy my upcoming Christmas album Holiday Classics featuring hits like "Fortunate Son-just with sleigh bells", "Blitzkreig Bop-just with sleigh bells," and the beloved Christmas song "Hotel California-just with sleigh bells". If Jack Jones can record "My Favorite Things" and cement the song as a staple of the holiday season just by adding sleigh bells to his recording, I bet someone could make it work with these songs too. After all, they are all equally in the holiday spirit in terms of origin and lyrics, which is of course, not at all meant for Christmas.
