Christmas Songs

At Hollywood  and Highland today, heard the song It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year. Very cheerful and uplifting.

Which doesn't fit the mood of the day at all. Where are our depressing Christmas songs? We're solidly in our Crisis, so where is our White Christmas?

Was that really a Crisis tune, though, or did it just become famous then? When was it actually composed? The answer is (according to Wikipedia), nobody really knows. It says, though, that the first performance was Christmas Day, 1941 - also known as a few weeks after Pearl Harbor.  They'd really earned their hopeful-but-not-happy Christmas song.

What other not-quite-happy ones are there? There's The Christmas Song,  although that's more solemn than depressing. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, certainly counts, though - it's all about how your life can only get better from here. Both of those were from 1944 -  when the War was ongoing, that is, even if there was some hope that it would be done in Europe soon.

Maybe that happy one was from the same time, though? Nope, 1963. Probably released a month after  JFK, but still sounds like the cheery post-war period.