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Before I delve into this Christmas' Christmas song, I have to apologize for doubling up. I was looking through past Christmas song reviews and didn't realize that I wrote about Brenda Lee's "Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree" twice, last year and in 2019. I don't know how I forgot I did it twice. Sorry. I will do better and check beforehand.
My Christmas song for 2025 is a challenging one because it's not originally a Christmas song. It's "My Favorite Things," from the musical The Sound Of Music. I'm still trying to understand how it accreted its Christmas meaning after it was made, but let me go through the chronology as I understand it. I'm using articles from Mental Floss, Billboard, and Wikipedia (two articles) to research this.
The Sound Of Music first appeared on Broadway in 1959, with the song showing up in Act I, completely devoid of its current meaning. The cast album was released that year and topped the Billboard charts for 16 weeks, then stayed in the Top 10 for the next two years. Now here's where it gets weird: Julie Andrews, who plays the main character of Maria in the film adaptation of The Sound Of Music, performed "My Favorite Things" on a variety show on CBS called The Garry Moore Show at Christmastime in 1961. Note that Andrews has no connection with the original stage version of The Sound Of Music. She was eventually cast as Maria for the film version, but that was made in 1964 and released in 1965. According to Wikipedia, a man by the name of Ernest Lehman was hired to write the screenplay in December of 1962.
It looks as though the "Christmasifying" (I'm taking that word from the Mental Floss article) of "My Favorite Things" came in 1964 due to, ironically enough, the film version of The Sound Of Music. The music publishing division of the The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization (Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote the music and lyrics for the stage musical, their last together before Hammerstein died of stomach cancer in August 1960) knew the film adaptation was going to be released in March 1965. It was being marketed as a tentpole movie (it would go on to win five Oscars, including Best Picture), but that publishing division wanted a song from that movie to become a hit before the movie came out, otherwise they were afraid the movie wouldn't make any money.
Someone from the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization went to a music producer named Mickey Kapp to see if there was a way to get a song from The Sound Of Music into any album Kapp was producing. He told the representative that he was currently producing a Christmas album for a singer named Jack Jones; Jones, who died in October 2024, sang the theme song to The Love Boat, by the way. This rep thought that "My Favorite Things" would be a good song for Jones to sing and for Kapp to add to the album, which is called The Jack Jones Christmas Album.
But why "My Favorite Things" for a Christmas album? Well, that's where you listen to the song and note all the references to winter and Christmas, or at least references that lend themselves to the season and the holiday if you imagine big enough: "Warm woolen mittens"; "Brown paper packages tied up with strings"; "Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes"; etc. Who knows if Rodgers & Hammerstein picked up on the Christmas allusions when they wrote the song. But Kapp, sticking to the original context of "My Favorite Things," said it wasn't a good idea to put it on a Christmas album because it wasn't a Christmas song. To which this promoter said, "Just add sleigh bells."
Well, Kapp did add sleigh bells, and Jones sang the song, and "My Favorite Things" was put into The Jack Jones Christmas Album, and ... it looks like it didn't become a hit, nor could people directly credit that song for people buying tickets to The Sound Of Music, the movie. But people in the music industry apparently saw "My Favorite Things" as a Christmas song then, and thought it was good, because from then on other artists did their own version of "My Favorite Things" for their Christmas albums, and it then became the standard holiday song it is now.
But I'm not going for Jack Jones's or Julie Andrews's or even the original version of "My Favorite Things." I love, and I mean love, John Coltrane's cover of it. It swings so effortlessly, and my Buddha, his playing after the verses lifts me up to the sky. I shouldn't leave out McCoy Tyner; his revolutionary piano playing on the song is a heaven-sent complement to Trane's virtuosity. Only in the past year or so have I realized I now have a song that makes me feel happy every time I hear it.
And here's the ironic part of that: The album "My Favorite Things" is on (and the album is named after the song) was released in March 1961 -- a couple years after the stage musical premiered and almost four years before Mickey Kapp and Jack Jones put it on a Christmas album. It wasn't a Christmas song when Coltrane recorded it, and yet you hear it come Christmastime. I can't call this "retconning," short for retroactive continuity, but maybe this phenomenon could be called, uh, retroactive meaning-making ... or something?
OK, maybe not. But here's John Coltrane doing "My Favorite Things." Get happy, and Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays:
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