Sooner or later we’ll all be Ariana Grande. We’ll be living out our own versions of Winter Things, her 2015 song, by indulging in that strangest of seasonal traditions: pretending it’s colder and snowier than it actually is.
“It ain’t even cold outside, not where I’m from / Feeling like it’s mid-July under the sun,” the singer from Boca Raton, Florida, sings at the start of this modern festive classic.
Winter Things is one of those Christmas songs that is conscious of its delusions. Grande’s jacket “don’t get no love”, she can forget about hats and gloves, and most of her friends are at the beach.
Why is this a problem? Well, her “baby’s in town”, and the allure of cosy romance imagery from cooler climates is so strong that she feels compelled to “do some winter things” with him. These include ice-skating at a downtown rink “even though it’s 100 degrees” and fantasising about laughing by the fireside of her non-existent Arctic cabin.
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It’s far from the only festive song to address the fact that not everyone lives in the London of A Christmas Carol or the New York of Miracle on 34th Street.
The much-covered Mele Kalikimaka (Merry Christmas), from 1949, gives us an island greeting “from the land where palm trees sway” and Christmas will be “green and bright”, aka Hawaii.
On 100 Degrees, from 2015, Kylie Minogue plays to both hemispheres, contending that, whether it’s “mulled wine or cocktail time”, it’s “still Christmas”.
The title of White Wine in the Sun, Tim Minchin’s 2009 ode to an Australian family Christmas, speaks for itself.
These songs are distinct from the ever-expanding subset of offerings where the temperature is magically delinked from external conditions and instead depends on the comings and goings of another person.
“My arms so lovin’ / a kind of oven,” Julie London claims on Warm December, from 1956. It’s the sort of trick that would save a lot of money on heating bills.
I’m more partial to It Doesn’t Often Snow at Christmas, a 1997 song by the Pet Shop Boys, which is one of the few to tackle the great weather lie we all just seem to go along with in this part of the world once the festive-music season tinkles into being.
“It doesn’t often snow at Christmas / The way it’s meant to do,” Neil Tennant sings. Luckily, he’s got one of those human radiators to hand, as he concludes, “But I’ll still have a glow at Christmas / Because I’ll be with you.”
To be fair to Bing Crosby, who the Pet Shop Boys appear to momentarily berate on their track, he’s only dreaming of a white Christmas; he’s not insisting they’re a universal norm.
Estimated to be the biggest-selling single of all time, White Christmas is the product of the ache that its composer, Irving Berlin, reportedly felt for his New York home while spending Christmas in Beverly Hills in 1937. After its wartime release in 1942, it became the definitive template for festive nostalgia.
The idea that a proper Christmas involves snow remains so ingrained in the cultural imagination that on Better Than Snow, a 2023 song by Norah Jones and Laufey, someone is informed that “Christmas with you is better than snow.” That’s not the highest praise, is it?
I don’t want to tempt fate, but there hasn’t been a white Christmas in Ireland since 2010. No child can remember one. Any yearning among adults for snowiness on December 25th owes more to the combined efforts of Berlin, Charles Dickens and George Michael than it does to our lived experience of snow.
The good news for the legacy of Last Christmas is that Saas-Fee, the Alpine village where the Wham! video was filmed in 1984, isn’t one of those lower-altitude ski resorts that have awkwardly found themselves shy of snow in recent winters.
Still, as the planet heats up, and real-life memories of a white Christmas melt away, those snowy mid-century American perennials will only sound increasingly incongruous to chalet-deprived ears.
“We can be wherever if we visualise,” a loved-up Grande suggests on Winter Things. Indeed, most years it would take either considerable visualisation or an extreme quantity of hot chocolate to transform Dublin into a marshmallow world. When I’m battling along Grafton Street, blinded by low sun and trying not to be strangled by my own scarf, I can categorically say I am not walking in a winter wonderland and don’t want to hear that song.
Frosty the Snowman promises he’ll be back someday. At the rate we’re going he might only make a return if ocean currents collapse and Ireland is plunged into the sort of big freeze where the weather outside really is frightful and lovin’ arms fail to help.
We’ll be dreaming of a mild and slightly damp Christmas, just like the ones we used to know.
