STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Christmas music evokes a lot of emotions. Listen to these songs and see if you feel it.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "JOY TO THE WORLD")
ELLA FITZGERALD: (Singing) Joy to the world, the Lord is come.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "JINGLE BELLS")
FRANK SINATRA: (Singing) Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN")
THE JACKSON 5: (Singing) Santa Claus is coming to town. Santa...
INSKEEP: Depending on the song and who you are, those emotions may include joy, happiness, pleasant memories, depression, rage. There's another feeling that many people experience around the holidays - yearning. NPR's Milton Guevara reports on music that captures that.
MILTON GUEVARA, BYLINE: Yearning is that feeling of longing for something.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHITE CHRISTMAS")
BING CROSBY: (Singing) I'm dreaming of a white Christmas.
GUEVARA: Slate music critic Carl Wilson describes it as a combination of melancholy and hope.
CARL WILSON: There's this sense of there's something that you want, there's something that you desire, but it's a little out of reach.
GUEVARA: Since 2019, Wilson's been putting together an annual Christmas playlist. He says the yearning songs are some of his favorite.
WILSON: Christmas songs are about missing people or wanting to be together with someone, you know, whether with your lover or with family or whatever it might be, and this question of whether or not you can be together. So even Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You" has that kind of undercurrent of, like, are we going to be together at Christmas?
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS YOU")
MARIAH CAREY: (Singing) All I want for Christmas is you.
WILSON: And then there are songs about the state of the world and wishing for peace. You know, John Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HAPPY XMAS (WAR IS OVER)")
JOHN LENNON: (Singing) So this is Christmas.
HARLEM COMMUNITY CHOIR: (Singing) War is over...
LENNON: (Singing) And what have we done?
HARLEM COMMUNITY CHOIR: (Singing) ...If you...
WILSON: Aside from maybe in, you know, "Jingle Bells" and "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town," there aren't a lot of Christmas songs that don't have some little undercurrent of the blues in them.
GUEVARA: Wilson's favorite Christmas yearning song is "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," which Judy Garland sings in the 1944 film "Meet Me In St. Louis."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HAVE YOURSELF A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS")
JUDY GARLAND: (Singing) Have yourself a merry little Christmas.
WILSON: It was a wartime song. So there are all these lines of, next year all our troubles will be miles away, and we'll be together if the fates allow.
GUEVARA: And new Christmas yearning songs are still being recorded today.
ALEX CRICHTON: I wanted to make a Christmas song. But I didn't want it to be, like, a traditional Christmas song, like, talking about, like, snow and reindeer and stuff.
GUEVARA: That's Ottawa-based songwriter Alex Crichton. He released "Merry Christmas, I Miss You" last year. In it, he debates whether to call someone he misses on Christmas.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MERRY CHRISTMAS, I MISS YOU")
CRICHTON: (Singing) Oh, what if you're lonely and you know I am, too? And I get the chance to say, Merry Christmas. I miss you.
Every year, going into the holidays, I'm reminded of past relationships. You know, people you spent past Christmases with that maybe aren't in your life anymore, people that you can't see.
GUEVARA: It's Crichton's most listened to song, with over 12 million plays on Spotify. He didn't write it with the word yearning in mind.
CRICHTON: But I think as I shared it with people and as people explained what it means to them, I realized that, yeah, the way I was feeling was yearning or reminiscing.
GUEVARA: Critic Carl Wilson says the combination of Christmas plus yearning just works, adding to the range of emotions people feel around the holidays.
WILSON: Yearning is really fundamental to something about what music does. And so when, like, those two things come together, I think that's part of really why Christmas music is so powerful.
GUEVARA: So if you're yearning for something or someone this Christmas, there's probably a song for you.
Milton Guevara, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF VINCE GUARALDI TRIO'S "SKATING") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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