Christmas music is a nostalgia trip.
Generally speaking, pop music prizes novelty fresh songs, surprising sounds, this week’s hit, the Next Big Thing. But once a year, a soundtrack that reaches back decades and centuries chimes into earshot once more. Of course, nostalgia is built into the holiday season, when our secular religion of capitalist consumption gets stirred together with Christian traditions, ancient pagan rites and a vague longing for the old-fashioned comforts of home, hearth and the pastoral yesteryear. In December, we long to hear songs, as Irving Berlin once put it, “just like the ones I used to know.”