The unlikely story of Christmas pop and the Great Depression

One only has to note the best selling physical single of all time—Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” has shifted 50 million copies since 1942—to reveal the commercial pull of the Christmas song.

It’s strange to think that a pop culture phenomenon so tied to Christmas’s consumerist side—the music marketing, the chart data, the potential for profits generated by millions of sales—actually emerged during the Great Depression, when there was very little money floating around at all.

The year was 1934, five years into the banking crash that shook the world’s economy.

Entertainer and radio sensation Eddie Cantor was searching for a new Christmas song to broadcast, sensing, in the words of pop historian Ace Collins, “the need for a bright holiday song” to cheer his listeners.

Multiple compositions had landed on his desk, but none stuck, until one music publisher by the name of Leo Feist sent in an outlier, penned by the songwriter Haven Gillespie. 

It’s a surprise that Gillespie’s song saw the light of day at all. When Feist alerted him to the opportunity, Gillespie initially refused to write anything, grief-stricken as he was by the news of his brother’s death that morning.

But on the subway home from Feist’s office, memories of his childhood came flooding in, and he began scrawling snatches of poetry on the back of an envelope. 

Once it was set to music, it was Feist’s turn to doubt Gillespie’s tune—the publishing company deemed it too childish to warrant much commercial potential. Cantor agreed. Popular myth has it that it was his wife who convinced him to give the oddball song a go. 

Her intuition turned out to be right. "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" got its debut in a national broadcast at Macy's Thanksgiving parade, with Cantor adding his own embellishments to fit the national mood—his additional verses asserted the importance of charity, with lines like "We’ve gotta dig deep and cover the list,/Gotta see that nobody is missed”.

The song became an overnight sensation, selling 30,000 records and 100,000 copies of sheet music within 24 hours.

But the story doesn’t end there. The same conditions that inspired “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” also hamstrung the golden age of Christmas music for another eight years—with people’s budgets too tight for luxury items like phonographs, it wouldn’t be until 1942 that Christmas’s real commercial power was unleashed. 

World War Two had brought the Great Depression to a halt, but now many were bidding farewell to their homes and leaving to fight abroad. Only 17 days after the Pearl Harbour invasion, Bing Crosby performed “White Christmas” for the first time on his NBC radio show.

Once again, the nostalgic and melancholy tone of refrains like “Just like the ones I used to know” mirrored the zeitgeist, with the song spending 11 weeks at No.1 on the Billboard charts by the end of 1942.

Over the next decade, it would sell 9 million records and 3 million copies of sheet music.

After the war, the record industry accelerated, fuelled by new consumer wealth and the birth of the vinyl LP.

As the popularity of songs like “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” and “White Christmas” endured, the music industry learnt to capitalise on the Christmas song and its emotional hold—a homey, at times misty-eyed, genre, which continues to offer its listeners joy and comfort.