3# Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas 🎶

2 min read

6 months ago Nathan

Here’s the surprising history behind your favorite Christmas Carols!
What if “The Red-Nosed Reindeer”, Frosty and the “One Horse Open Sleigh” had nothing to do with Christmas?
Singing Christmas songs goes hand in hand with baking Christmas treats, listening our favorite Christmas tales, watching our favorite Christmas movies, and not only.
Like everything around this period of the year, everything has a story.
From songs that have been saved from being erased forever to not really knowing for sure where a song came from, here is the history of a few Christmas Carols you know and sing still today!

Enjoy our Advent Calendar 2022!

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🎄🎅🏻 THERE ARE ONLY 22 DAYS UNTIL CHRISTMAS 🎅🏻🎄

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Saved from the trash. Yes, literally.
Songwriter Hugh Martin was fooling around with a little melody back in 1944, but it wasn’t working.
“So he played with it for two or three days and then threw it in the wastebasket,” his songwriting partner Ralph Blaine told, in 1989. Together they wrote it along with dozens of other songs for MGM and Broadway musicals.
In any case, Ralph made him get it out of the trash.
And it was a good thing, as the song ended up being “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

Hugh was writing the song for the film Meet In St. Louis—one of the top 20 Christmas movies of all time.
Supposedly, the song was a bit too melancholy for Judy Garland’s character in the movie, so he and Blaine rewrote the lyrics to be cheerier.” The film producers said, “It’s a sad scene, but we want a sort of upbeat song, which will make it even sadder if she’s smiling through her tears.”

In 1989, Hugh and Ralph, who has since died, joined Terry Gross for a discussion about their lives and the story of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which has since been recorded by scores of musicians — including Tori Amos, Garth Brooks, Robert Goulet, Lady Antebellum, James Taylor and Bob Dylan, to name just a few….