What makes a Christmas song a Christmas song?
Making the case for a new song to be added to the season's playlist
Labor Day weekend is when it starts. A time that signifies the closing of summer, which is sad, but also the beginning of fall. Leaves are slowly beginning to change from green to orange. The temperature, depending on where you live, is dropping. Not a drastic drop, mind you. But if you’re going from 90 degrees to 79, it feels precipitous.
Labor Day weekend is also when college football truly kicks off. There are big games. Big teams. Big multi-million dollar brands marching out to play other multi-million dollar brands. And nothing gets me quite as excited as the start of college football season. College football season and a paid day off work. What a glorious time! Labor Day weekend. It’s wonderful.
But no. I’m not talking about fall or cooler weather or even college football starting back up. I’m talking about this local radio station. 98-something, or 106-point-something, I can’t recall. But what I do know is when I’m driving to the grocery store on Labor Day weekend to buy hot dogs and chips and what not and I’m flipping through the radio stations, what I do not care to hear is this:
It’s not even close to Christmas time. It’s over three months away. Football games haven’t started. For crying out loud, Brenda, it’s nowhere close to 79 degrees outside yet.
Maybe it’s a joke. Right? Maybe this radio station’s DJ got confused and accidentally hit the wrong button. Because what I don’t want to hear when I’m driving with windows down in the still-humid Carolina summer/fall is something about a Christmas party hop.
But no. No, this is their thing. It’s this radio station’s shtick. Every year for the past few at least, they tease us with Christmas music for an entire weekend. In fairness it’s a station I’m not typically listening to. It’s the one they’re playing over the speakers at your dentist’s office. It’s the one playing when you’re in the middle of getting a cavity filled and you hear a Celine Dion song play or maybe Backstreet Boys or Adele. Adult contemporary. Nothing soothes the pain from a dentist’s drill quite like hearing Adele blare I SET FIRRREEE TO THE RAAAAIN!
So yeah. Labor Day weekend. Summer weather and Christmas carols. Like oil and water. They just don’t go together. It’s like those weird people who take salty Wendy’s french fries and dip them in a chocolate frosty. And I know I shouldn’t talk bad about those people because I’m married to one of those people. My daughters are those people. So it’s fine, but also…come on man. Come on.
Fast forward a few months. It’s the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Not Thanksgiving Day, because that still feels a tad early. Not Black Friday because Christmas music is about joy and peace and Black Friday contains neither of those things. So the Saturday after Thanksgiving. And you flip on the radio. And that adult contemporary station that teased you on Labor Day before flipping violently back to their regular programming has now planted its flag firmly in the seasonal ground. Nothing but Christmas music from here to December 26. Hit it, Wham!
That’s “Last Christmas” from Wham! released in the mid-80’s. The most fun thing about Wham! is the exclamation point attached to the word wham. It’s fantastic. But can I tell you that this song “Last Christmas” is…not good? It’s quite bad, actually. This original version does not age well. The synthesizer buries it in the 1980’s. Not even the people covering the song since 1984 make it much better. Not even Taylor Swift or Ariana Grande can save this song. But it’s on the radio now and will be for the next month or so, so deal with it.
Okay. Where were we? It’s the Christmas season. Holiday songs on the radio. 98-point-something is playing the classics from Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole and…sure. Wham! These songs take the place of the usual Madonna or Duran Duran or Bob Seger hits.
Did I mention it’s 1987? Yeah. So in our scenario, it’s 1987 and the Christmas songs you’re hearing take you back perhaps to a younger time. Memories of Christmases past. Time with family. Time with friends. But let’s be honest: if you’re thinking back on past Christmases, especially ones from when you were a kid, you’re thinking about gifts. The ones your parents, errrrrr Santa Claus brought you. Those gifts. Those fond memories of seeing a Christmas tree filled with nearly wrapped gifts under the tree.
Now, like I said, it’s 1987. And I’m six years old. I know Christmas carols. I go to church a lot. I’m well aware of “Away In A Manger” and “Silent Night” and “O Come All Ye Faithful”. I’m acutely less aware of Wham!, but that’s not the point. The music that makes me think about Christmas as a child isn’t any of these songs. The music that brings me joy and peace isn’t anything on the radio or being sung by a church choir. It’s the music playing in the background while an Italian plumber tries to save a princess.
Christmas Day, 1987. I unwrap a present from my parents…errrr…Santa Claus and find a big black box with another gray box inside: a Nintendo Entertainment System complete with two controllers and a 2-in-1 game cartridge featuring Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt. The NES also came with a cool gun to use for Duck Hunt, one that unfortunately does not work on newer TVs. Bummer. No matter in 1987! It will work just fine on any classic tube TV.
We travel to my grandmother’s house and there in the spare bedroom my dad hooks up this Nintendo to a TV and my world is transformed. Along with my two older sisters, we’re sitting there on what I remember to be a putrid yellow shag carpet moving 8-bit Mario across the screen, stomping Goombas and smashing bricks for coins. I am enthralled. Six-year-old me is now addicted to whatever this is that we’re doing. Gaming? Video games? Sure. Yes. This. Give me this for hours. And I’m here to tell you that Christmas night I did play for hours, well past my 8:00 bedtime. I probably didn’t hit the pillow until somewhere around 9:30. Leave me alone! There’s another castle to rummage through.
I still own that very Nintendo I got when I was 6. And when I have the time and temerity to do so, I’ll hook it up and get lost. Again. Throwing fireballs at flying ducks and trying my hardest to swim around those giant swirling jellyfish.
No matter what time of year I play Super Mario Bros. either alone or with my wife and kids, I can’t help but think back on that Christmas decades ago when this gift changed everything for me. Super Mario music is, to me, Christmas music.
Fast forward a few more years to 1994. I’m older now. Wiser. More mature, one might say. I’m 13 and am at the beginning stages of knowing more, much more than both of my parents. I’m a teenager. The world is my oyster. I have evolved from 8-bit video game consoles and stomping Goombas to the more sophisticated world of the 16-bit Sega Genesis and dominating my friends in NBA Jam.
The sounds of Christmas are evolving for me as well. The older songs are still there. The songs I hear at church still hum in my head. “Joy To The World”. “O Little Town Of Bethlehem”. All the hymns of the season. They’re still there. They won’t go away or be forgotten.
But you’ll excuse me, please, because a new voice has disrupted the Christmas music scene. And it turns out this song would become the new staple for Christmas pop songs. Not right away, at least not for everyone. But it was impossible as soon as it came on the radio to deny its power. It was impossible to deny the joy it squeezed from every note. Crank it up, people. I don’t even care if it’s Labor Day. I’ll listen to this song any time of the year.
Do you remember the first time hearing this song? Do you remember the first time you saw the video? Or do you just remember buying the album? I spent north of $15 at a mall in Charlotte, North Carolina buying Mariah Carey’s Merry Christmas album. It was a Saturday trip with our church youth group. And as I’d like to sit and judge today’s teens for staring nonstop at their phones when they’re in a vehicle, in 1994 we were staring at our portable CD players, switching out one disc for another.
Mariah Carey’s Christmas album, her first one, remains to this day one of the best Christmas gifts I’ve ever purchased. And no, I do not carry shame in telling you that I bought this CD as a gift to myself. Not someone else. Not a girlfriend. Not an 8th grade teacher. And certainly not one of my older sisters. I’m 13! I’m not that generous. Don’t judge me.
This Mariah Carey Christmas CD is all mine. And I would listen to it all the way through on the one-hour trip back home from the Charlotte mall. But as much as 13-year-old me knew about the world, I never could have predicted just how massive, how all-holiday-consuming “All I Want For Christmas Is You” would become. Just this past week, the song tied the record for most weeks spent at #1 on streaming charts. The term streaming wasn’t something we connected to music in the 1990s. Now decades later, Mariah Carey is carrying the season’s greetings to new heights. If you’re wondering what song Mariah has now tied with, it’s “Old Town Road” by Nas and Billy Ray Cyrus. And if you’re unfamiliar with that song, consider yourself one of the lucky ones.
Whatever we try to tell ourselves and our families, Christmas is about gifts. We bemoan the commercialism of it all, but we can’t deny our role as accomplices. Even the song that now permeates Christmas radio is drenched in it. All I want for Christmas is you. Or a new car. Or a new pair of slippers. A diamond ring. Or necklace. All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth. A hippopotamus. World peace. Whatever it is, we all want something. We sing about it. We make lists. Handwritten ones. Amazon ones. We make suggestions. Hints. We speak in generalities. We speak in specifics. But we all want something. We all want other people to know we want something.
If we spend some serious time on it, we can think of the best gifts we’ve ever gotten at Christmas. We can think of some pretty bad ones, too. Not just Christmas, of course. Maybe Christmas isn’t your thing. Maybe it’s a birthday. Anniversary. Valentine’s Day. Whatever the gift-giving day of your choice, you’ve got a memory of the best and/or worst gift you’ve ever received.
Maybe you’re more inclined to consider the best and worst gifts you’ve ever given. I’m pretty sure it was that same 1994 Christmas when my grandmother got me and all of my cousins sweatshirts with a row of puppy faces wearing cowboy hats. Not cool, Granny. I’m a mature teen and cannot be caught in public wearing this. Of course, I didn’t tell Granny that. She had good intentions. I wonder if I had asked Granny to get me a Sega Genesis game just which game she might have purchased?
I never asked my cousins if they wore the puppy sweatshirt in public at all. I doubt they did. I wasn’t upset with Granny. The saying goes “It’s the thought that counts.” That applies to most gifts. The more you sincerely care about someone, the better the gift is. That is unless you’re a complete doofus like Jerry Seinfeld.
In one of the best episodes of Seinfeld, Jerry and Elaine have rekindled their romantic relationship. This happens right around the time of Elaine’s birthday. The hilarity ensues first with Jerry and his friend George looking around aimlessly in a gift shop for something Jerry can buy for Elaine. And then comes the giving of the gift.
The best part is after Elaine opens Jerry’s gift and then asks for his card, hoping for some redemption. It doesn’t happen.
In this situation, you’ve been Elaine before. You’ve opened a gift from a loved one only to get something you never wanted: a pair of socks, a mix tape of obscure indie rock songs from the 80s, or even $182 in cash. Whatever the case, you’ve been there.
You’ve probably been Jerry before. You’ve given a gift you thought would be loved only to see someone open it and it’s like the pin from a grenade of embarrassment gets pulled. And you’re left searching for words to explain away your unexplainable gift.
And maybe if you’re just lucky, you’ve had a moment of being Kramer. You give the best gift, give the best card, use the best poem, and become the gift-giving savior.
Here’s a question. Are the best gifts expensive? Does someone need to spend a large sum of money to give a good gift? Or does it all come down to effort? A homemade gift might not cost a lot of coin, for example, but it might take hours upon hours to complete. In that light, it’s an expensive gift.
Here’s another question, if you will. What makes a Christmas song a Christmas song? We don’t debate this as much with songs as we do movies. Die Hard, according to many, is a Christmas movie. But there are songs that, I would argue, belong in a similar category. Songs about gift-giving, about love, joy, all the themes that litter the season.
So with that said, can I make a proposition? That alongside the Brenda Lees and the Nat King Coles and the Silent Nights and the songs about mangers and Christmas trees and Bethlehems, we make room for one more. That beside the iconic “All I Want For Christmas Is You” we add another song to the playlist. One about gift-giving. One about sacrifice. One about a joy so deep it might threaten to embarrass its giver.
Merry Christmas, everyone. This is the holiday edition of 60 Christian Songs That Explain the 90s, and this week, this Christmas season, we’re talking about “Alabaster Box” from the incomparable CeCe Winans from her 1999 album Alabaster Box.
CeCe Winans was born on October 8, 1964, in Detroit, Michigan. She’s the eighth out of ten siblings, all dedicated just as their parents were to singing gospel music. I’m not even joking around here.
Delores and David, or Mom and Pop Winans, met while part of the Lucille Lemon Choir and helped organize yearly Christmas concerts that all 10 children participated in. Four of CeCe’s older brothers joined and formed The Winans, a gospel group signed to Light Records in the early 80’s. Carvin, one of the members of The Winans performed background vocals on Michael Jackson’s “Bad”. CeCe’s younger sisters Angie and Debbie formed a duo and released their first record in 1993. The lead single from that album was “Light Of Love” and it featured Whitney Houston on background vocals. I said Whitney Houston…ON BACKGROUND VOCALS. Sheesh.
It is impossible to look at gospel music from any angle over the past forty years and not connect it to at least one member of the Winans family. Their reach, their influence was and continues to be massive. CeCe would join her brother BeBe and create their own dynamic duo getting accolades for recreating Peabo Bryson’s classic “Up Where We Belong.”
I could write a few thousand more words on the Winans family. I could write that on CeCe Winans alone. But I want to narrow our focus a bit here. Because this song “Alabaster Box” is worthy of thousands of words. Call it a worship song, if you want. It’s most certainly that. But can I present this song, this story, as a song maybe not directly about Christmas, but at least strongly adjacent to the season?
If you’re not familiar, the song’s story can be found in all four gospels in the New Testament. Jesus is having dinner at a Pharisee’s house when a woman enters who, by all accounts, has not been invited. The gospels record her name as Mary.
Mary does not come to the house for dinner. She isn’t coming to convene with the Pharisees. She’s coming to see one person. She’s coming to see Jesus. And she’s bringing a gift.
When she sees Jesus, she kneels at his feet and begins weeping. Just constant tears streaming down her face. And so she uses these tears to wash Jesus’ feet. She then uses her hair to dry his feet. And this act alone, one done by a woman off the street in front of a group of pious men is a quite extraordinary gift. But the physical gift she’s brought into the room is one of great worth.
In her hands she hold a jar, or box, made from alabaster. Inside the box is nard, a type of perfume-like oil. To the Pharisees and the disciples gathered the monetary value was somewhere around a year’s wages. Mary is unconcerned with that because she has come to give a gift. And this gift is an act of service. It’s an act of gratitude. It’s an act of worship.
A year’s wages. If the average worker’s salary in America is somewhere between $50,000 and $75,000, imagine spending that amount on one gift. And here’s the thing. The alabaster box of nard, of this fragrant oil, it isn’t given to Jesus to take home and put on a bedroom dresser. Once she’s done washing and drying his feet, Mary pours the nard, all $75,000 of it, on Jesus.
One disciple proclaims this act a waste. “That’s money that could be spent on the poor,” he says. A Pharisee, perhaps the very man who is hosting these people, says that Jesus must not know about this woman because if he did, he wouldn’t let her touch him. “She’s a sinner.”
There are no details in this story as to what Mary’s sins were, but I don’t think any of it matters. It doesn’t even matter that the Pharisee knows she’s a sinner. All that matters is that Jesus knows. Mary knows. She doesn’t need a reminder. Her sins are many. That’s why she’s here.
I love this clip of CeCe performing “Alabaster Box” and how, after the first chorus and the audience begins applauding she raises a hand. She raises both hands almost to ask them to stop clapping because this isn’t just a story about Mary and her gift. It’s a story about ours.
It’s how clear she is when she says “I can’t forget”. It’s how she reminds us all of our many sins. It’s how she tells us that no gift can be too extravagant, too expensive, too grand for Jesus.
This song, this story has little meaning to us if we are unable to place ourselves in the position of Mary. Because if we’re honest with ourselves, it’s easier to be one of the disciples at the table, sitting in stunned silence. It’s easier to be the Pharisee judging the gift and the woman. In Luke 7, Jesus addresses the Pharisee: Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.” (Luke 7:44-47, NIV)
Our sins are great. They are many. And we want to be known as forgiven people, but only for the smaller ones. The sins that won’t have others looking at us like a woman of disrepute coming in from the streets. No Savior can be great if we only let them forgive the small sins. Mary didn’t have that problem. She couldn’t care less about her reputation. She was going to give her Savior the grandest gift she could, no matter who was around to see it.
Can I tell you, briefly, about the two times I attended a Black church? I don’t know the best way to say that, but you know what I mean. I mean a church where the pastor and choir are all Black and the majority of people in the pews are as well.
The second time I ever attended a Black church was in high school with my friend Brandy. There were a few other White people around, but we were clearly outnumbered. I don’t recall now much of the sermon or the specific songs that were sung. But what I can remember is how I felt. I remember how it looked like others felt. People who would stand and shout in agreement when the preacher spoke some truth. How people danced in place with their eyes closed during the music. How people clapped with genuine joy at the name of Jesus being pronounced from the stage.
In an episode of their dinner conversation series, Mark Lowry and Andrew Greer sit down with CeCe Winans. As they begin talking, Andrew tells CeCe of the time he went to her concert when he was 10 years old. He talked about growing up in mostly Caucasian church settings and how the MO was always to “sit down and shut up.” CeCe looked at Andrew and Mark and said “Wow! How do you have church sitting down and being quiet?”
She has a point. When I was with my friend at her church, even though part of me was undeniably uncomfortable, I couldn’t help but feel that intimacy with Christ. I couldn’t help feeling that desire to stand and lift my hands. I don’t dance, but I cannot tell you that something in that church service didn’t prompt me to want to move my feet at the glory, the goodness, the awesomeness of God, and what He has done.
I told you about the second time I went to a Black church. The first time was also while I was in high school under much different circumstances. When I was a sophomore, a classmate named Marvin Foster was killed in a car crash. I went to his funeral and was not prepared for the experience. I was not prepared for the emotional state of the attendees. I watched people weep, I watched people sing, and I heard the pastor preach with a fiery reverence I had only, to that point, seen from my own father in the pulpit.
Unrestrained emotion. In joy and grief, whatever the case, it is the crying out to God that matters. It’s the worship. It’s the gift, the extravagant gift we give because of the extavagant gift given to us.
As you get older, the mood at Christmas around giving gifts shifts. When you’re a parent, it’s no longer about getting great gifts. You’re now laser-focused on giving the best gifts to your children. Each year we say we’re going to not overdo it. But we always end up spending too much. We always end up giving more gifts than we had intended. I guess that’s just what you do when you love someone.
That’s Mary. She is unconcerned with appearances or budgets or extravagance. She simply wants to bring to Jesus the very best gift she can give. She’s a sinful woman. She knows that. Everyone knows that. But more than that, she is a forgiven woman.
My favorite Christmas song will always be “Hark The Herald Angels Sing” mostly because it’s joyful and preaches the gospel. It’s really a worship song. And I’d love to make the argument that “Alabaster Box” is just as much a song made for the Christmas season. Because there’s no better way to express what the birth of Jesus means to us than to give lavishly, without restraint, all that we have back to Him.
I’m not asking you to replace the songs you know. I’m not suggesting you abandon the memories of racing through castles to save a princess with Mario or Luigi. I’m not suggesting you forgo the tradition of letting Mariah ring in the holiday. I am simply wanting you to consider this song to be one you turn to when the season feels heavy. When the stress of gift-giving replaces the joy of gift-giving. I am asking you to sit down, close your eyes, and listen to CeCe Winans sing of what it means to be broken, what it means to be healed, and what it means to fully recognize that healing.
I hope you all have the most joyous Christmas season. I pray among the busyness of it all you take time to thank God for all that He has done for you. And please, take a moment and reflect on the story of one of the best gifts ever given in Mary’s alabaster box.