Ranking the Best Secular Christmas Songs
November 22, 2021
Whenever one goes about compiling a list of the best Christmas songs, they are forced to figure out how to put both secular and religious songs into a single list. This seems remarkably unjust to me, for two distinct reasons. For one thing, secular and religious Christmas songs are two entirely different genres of music. Their melodies, lyrics, timbre, rhythm, and even meter and key are often quite different. To rank them in the same list would be akin to ranking rock and country songs in the same list. For another thing, I think that all religious Christmas songs are objectively better than all secular songs. This is not because all religious songs are more melodically sound, or lyrically beautiful, or even meaningfully deeper than secular Christmas songs, but rather because they are the very reason secular songs exist in the first place. If it were not for the influence of the religious aspect of Christmas, we might be singing strange pagan incantations while dancing drunkenly around a yule log, or perhaps belching out a round while preparing to burn a human sacrifice to Tammuz the goddess of winter. It, therefore, seems unfair to rank religious and secular songs in the same list, and so here I will rank the best secular ones, and I will perhaps at some point go about ranking the religious ones.
10. Deck the halls
9. Jingle bells
8. Silver bells
7. Carol of the Bells
6. I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas
5. All I Want for Christmas is You
4. Christmas Time is Here
3. I’ll be home for Christmas
2. You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch
1. Snow Miser