If you need an antidote to Christmas schmaltz, Morgan Daniels offers ten songs with a more critical outlook on the season

Past radical Christmas songs collections: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024

The Cutty Wren (trad.)

Typically sung on Boxing Day, ‘The Cutty Wren’ is concerned with the archaic ritual of hunting wrens on or shortly after the winter solstice. The earliest record of the song is from 1776. In 1944, however, AL Lloyd declared in The Singing Englishman that ‘The Cutty Wren’ actually dates back to the fourteenth century: 

‘when peasant rebellion was in the air, the old magical song of the gigantically powerful bird (presented by a kind of folklore irony as a tiny wren) took on a tinge of new meaning. For here was the story of a great fowl so hard to seize, so difficult to dismember but so apt for sharing among the poor; and what did that suggest but a symbol of seignorial property?’

Ever since Lloyd’s possibly over-enthusiastic association of ‘The Cutty Wren’ with the Peasants’ Revolt, the song has become something of a radical staple. Chumbawamba included it on their 2003 collection of rebel songs, for instance. In the clip above, taken from a 1967 BBC adaptation of Arnold Wesker’s Chips with Everything, two soldiers (Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick) perform ‘The Cutty Wren’ at an RAF Christmas party. The song serves as a conduit for class consciousness, stirring a room full of recent conscripts to the edge of mutiny. It is a mesmerising scene.

Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger — Come Fill Up Your Glasses (1960)

Here is a song overflowing with joy and solidarity. Written by Peggy Seeger, ‘Come Fill Up Your Glasses’ is a drinking anthem for the new year: one by one, Seeger and MacColl toast a variety of workers, from miners and farmers to cleaners and shunters, wishing everyone peace on earth and higher wages. The song is also a call to arms, because peace on earth and higher wages will not be gifted from above, but won from below:

‘Let’s drink to our children and let us prepare
A world where they’ll live free from sorrow and care
A world where goodwill among men is the law
A world without fallout, a world without war.’

Stan Freberg — Green Chri$tma$ (1958)

Stan Freberg was a star of post-war American light entertainment.  His talents as a voice actor, singer, and satirist landed him work at Disney, Warner Bros., Capitol Records, and CBS radio, among others. Freberg  was also a devout Christian, and was appalled by the increasing commercialisation of Christmas. In 1958, he expressed these concerns with ‘Green Chri$tsma$’, a single for Capitol flitting between spoken word and song. It revolves around a discussion in an advertising agency led by a man named Scrooge, who has called a meeting of his clients to discuss how they might promote their products in a seasonably appropriate way:

Scrooge: You there, Crass, uhh, I suppose your company’s running the usual magazine ads showing cartons of your cigarettes peeking out of the top of Santa’s sack?

Crass: Better than that! This year we have him smoking one.

Sometimes, just sometimes, satire hits its target with flawless accuracy. Freberg’s direct attack on the advertising industry (‘Profit never needs a reason / Fa la la la la la la la la / Get the money, it’s the season / Fa la la la la la la la la’) made him many enemies. Complaints from advertisers meant that the single received very little airplay: Martin Block dared to play it twice on ABC Radio in New York, but was threatened with dismissal by the station’s sales department if he did so again. In fact, ‘Green Chri$tma$’ wasn’t played on commercial AM radio in the US at all until the 1980s.

Stevie Wonder — Someday at Christmas (1966)

‘Someday at Christmas’ has been performed by some of the very worst pop stars of our time and has long occupied a comfortable position in the American holiday music canon. Yet at its core, it’s an unabashed protest song, one inseparable from both the civil-rights movement and the US war in Vietnam. Wonder dreams of a Christmas without war, without hungry children, ‘when all men are equal and no man has fears’. One might call this mawkish. But there are two important things to bear in mind here. First, such overt use of Christmas for social commentary was fairly novel and risky at the time for an artist of Wonder’s stature. We are still four years away from ‘Happy Xmas (War is Over)’ at this point. Second, there is something inherently radical in the wide scope of ‘Someday at Christmas’. To decry war abroad and inequality at home in the same breath is to imply their necessary connection; this is systemic critique, Motown-style — and it’s probably playing in Walmart right now.

Billy Bennett — Please Let Me Sleep on Your Doorstep Tonight (1930)

Written by the prolific music hall legends R P Weston and Bert Lee, ‘Please Let Me Sleep on Your Doorstep Tonight’ was the b-side to Billy Bennett’s 1930 single ‘Christmas Day in the Cookhouse’. Bennett was one of the great comedians of his age but there is nothing much funny about this song which, as John Baxter notes, has similarities with the folk ballad ‘Dives and Lazarus’. It tells the tale of a ‘tramp with a haggard face’ who knocks on the door of a ‘rich millionaire’s palace’ one snowy Christmas Eve. The homeless man begs to be allowed to sleep on the doorstep of this palace, but the rich man, wearing pyjamas trimmed with gold, turns him away. As in ‘Dives and Lazarus’, the millionaire faces consequences for his actions, not least when he dies from pneumonia, ascends to heaven, and gets turned away at the pearly gates …

The Emotions — Black Christmas (1970) 

This relatively forgotten soul number was first performed by The Emotions in 1968 at a shopping centre in Chicago as part of the inaugural Black Christmas parade. Led by the Reverend Jesse Jackson in a horse-drawn wagon, the parade was watched by more than 50,000 people and was an important plank in the agenda of Operation Breadbasket, an organisation established in 1966 to increase levels of black employment through targeted boycotts and pickets. As Jackson put it: ‘white Christmas does not refer to snow. It is a white holy day set aside for whites and they profit from it.’ Black Christmas, he explained, was not anti-white, but ‘simply the materialistic, psychological and spiritual forces being defined and controlled by black people’. This meant encouraging black Chicagoans to shop at black-owned businesses; it also meant rethinking Santa as a ‘projection of the household’, bringing nuts and fruit to children whilst parents give the significant things.

It was against this backdrop that The Emotions sang:

‘With a black way of living
a soul way of giving
it’s gonna be
a beautiful black Christmas for me’. 

The song effectively glossed Jesse Jackson’s vision; black Christmas was not a metaphor, but a mission statement.

Anaïs Mitchell — Song of the Magi (2007)

Ethereal is not the word for Anaïs Mitchell’s retelling of the wise men’s trek to see the baby Jesus. From the very first note, one is drawn into a dreamscape of unfolding horror, the Holy Land now mapping onto the Holy Land then:

‘A child is born
born in Bethlehem
born in a cattle pen
a child is born on the killing floor
and still he no crying makes
still as the air is he
lying so prayerfully there
waiting for the war
welcome home my child
your home is a checkpoint now
your home is a border town’.

Here is poetry at its timeless best. When Mitchell first wrote these broken, ghostly words, their power had to do with putting contemporary Gaza into dialogue with the past. Now, more than a decade and a half later, our present, our time of genocide, affords ‘Song of the Magi’ whole new meaning.

The Bitter Withy (trad.)

This deeply strange song tells the story of a young Christ gone wild. Rooted in the apocryphal gospels which were popular in the Middle Ages, it relocates Mary and Jesus to an English peasant setting and begins with Our Saviour asking his mum if he can go outside to ‘play at ball’. Up and down a hill he runs, until he encounters three snooty rich boys who have no desire to play with a pauper:

‘We are all lords’ and ladies’ sons
born in a bower and hall
And you are nothing but a poor maid’s child
born in an ox’s stall.’

Jesus responds, reasonably enough, by drowning the lot of them. ‘The Bitter Withy’ remained for centuries one of the most popular of the vernacular carols in English folk culture, and this is surely no accident: its longevity, argued the medievalist Gwendolyn Morgan, is reflective of ‘class antagonism and a desire for retribution in the here and now.’

Bob Dylan — Jesus Christ (1960)

We have previously discussed Woody Guthrie’s ‘Jesus Christ’, his seminal contribution to the ‘rebel Jesus’ canon that stands as an emblem of the singer’s sincere Christian socialism. Here is a very young Bob Dylan covering the song at his home in Minneapolis in September 1960. This recording, released in October as part of the Bootleg Series, captures Dylan on the eve of stardom – he is already, at nineteen, the complete folk package – yet, all the same, he is in complete service to Guthrie and his art. ‘That’s Woody’ he explains as the song finishes.

Together for Palestine — Lullaby (2025)

Performed by an all-star line-up including Brian Eno, Neneh Cherry, and Nadine Shah, ‘Lullaby’ aims ‘to send a message of hope and solidarity to the very place where the Christmas story began’. It is adapted from one of Palestine’s most famous folk songs, ‘Yamma Mwel El Hawa’ (‘O My Song of Longing’), a slow, haunting account of dispossession and occupation. In an interview for David A McDonald’s My Voice is Weapon (2013), Adnan Odeh, one-time conductor of the Palestinian resistance ensemble Firqat Aghani al-ʿAshiqin, explained that ‘Yamma Mwel El Hawa’ is a song ‘that every Palestinian knows from the time they were children. It sings about the people and their struggles, no matter where they were scattered. When we perform it, it is one of the only times in the concert when people would stop dancing and just listen’.

How remarkable it is, then, that ‘Lullaby’ charted as high as fifth in the UK singles chart last week. What a testament it is to the resilience of the Palestinian people that a folk song of resistance has survived in this way and found a mainstream audience. ‘Lullaby’ is not just the highest-charting Arabic song in this country’s history; it is one which dares to ask:

‘Is it better to die in freedom
Than a captive life in chains?’

And ‘Lullaby’ is testament, too, to the strength of the Palestine movement over the past two years. The single evolved out of that movement, and is reflective of it. The unspeakable horrors in Gaza have given rise to an extraordinary monthly cycle of demonstrations involving millions of people, demonstrations which are empowering and at times, even, triumphant; ‘Lullaby’, likewise, is almost unlistenable on account of the reality it describes, yet it is the rousing demand for dignity, for freedom from oppression, that drives the song. It is inspirational.