Over at Times and Seasons (quite possibly the most peripatetic, yet ludic, onymous Mormon group blog in history), there is a post about Christmas music, asking for comments on the best Christmas songs. That's all fine and good, but one comment, by one D. Fletcher, caught my eye:

It is interesting that most of our Christmas pop standards were written in a 10-year time frame, basically, the 40s. What was it about the 40s? The war, I guess. Anyway, White Christmas, Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, Chestnuts Roasting (The Christmas Song), Rudolf, Frosty the Snowman, Silver Bells, Winter Wonderland were all written during this time. There was a slight resurgence in the early 60s with the TV specials and songs like Do You Hear What I Hear? But no song since then has become a standard.

I think D.'s comment is very perceptive. I mean, you've got more recent entries like Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You," John Lennon's "Happy Christmas (War is Over)" and a bunch of other pop-star wannabes making a cookie-cutter love song and just setting it in Christmastime, so it'll get played inordinately often on those 24-7 Christmas radio stations. But to me the definition of a "standard" is a song that is sung and re-sung by various different artists. Sure, Nat King Cole's "The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting)" is the quintessential version of that song, but others do it, too. It's a standard. It's in the books of Christmas songs.

Why can't we do it now? Why are there no new Christmas standards? I have two theories, either of which may be right or wrong, because I have no evidence to support either theory other than my own musings.

1. Record labels are for some reason restricting their new artists from either making Christmas albums at all (because everyone knows that non-Christians (a huge majority in America) are deeply offended by the word "Christmas"), or else are restricting covers of other people's songs. Maybe they think that it's better to come up with a new, forgettable song, than to do a new version of someone else's. Everyone's hoping to be the first one to record the new classic, instead of being the one to make a good song into a classic.

2. The market is just too saturated. In the 1940s, and even in the 1960s, maybe there weren't 24-7 Christmas radio stations. These days, we're so used to certain Christmas songs, it wouldn't be Christmas without them. So people keep recording the same old ones, knowing that a new one just won't sell. The Christmas canon is already pretty full--you've got everything from "O Holy Night" to "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" to "Wooden Soldiers on Parade." Our collective Christmas music memory just isn't big enough to hold more data.