Christmas with the Beatles

While The Beatles remains immensely popular here as evidenced by the brisk sales of the group’s latest offering, the album Love, the group is hardly associated with the Christmas season, unlike artists such as the Jackson 5, Carpenters and Ray Conniff. Today, almost every artist has a Christmas single or album out. The only exception among The Beatles is probably ex-band member John Lennon whose song Happy Christmas (War Is Over) still fills the airwaves. Some have probably heard of Paul McCartney’s Wonderful Christmas Time, while most could only have a faint recollection that George Harrison and Ringo Starr ever came up with related materials that hardly got airplay here anyway.

As a group, The Beatles did release a series of Christmas-related recordings but these were intended exclusively for the Official Beatles Fan Club. The year The Beatles split, Apple released a compilation of these recordings from 1963 to 1969 called From Then To You – The Beatles Christmas Record 1970. In the US, it came out as The Beatles Christmas Album. This was never reissued. In many Beatles aficionados’ circles though, the record, including some outtakes of these recordings, is not difficult to find.

What induced the band to produce these novelties was the growing number of Beatles fans. It dramatically swelled in 1963 from a few thousands to 25,000, making it impossible to process application forms on time. Tony Barrow, The Beatles’ press officer, thought of coming up with a recorded message for fans as a sweetener according to Beatles encyclopedist Bill Harry. The Beatles agreed to the idea and instructed Barrow to author the message. The first vinyl came out in 1963 as accompaniment to the second issue of the national newsletter of the fans club with the following excerpts from the introductory letter:

Dear Beatle People,

With this Newsletter comes your own special Christmas gift from John, Paul, George and Ringo – a copy of THE BEATLES’ CHRISTMAS RECORD. This record is exclusive to our Club and will not be made available elsewhere — it has exceptional souvenir value too because only 25,000 copies of the disc have been pressed. Just enough to supply every existing club member with a free copy in time for Christmas. We hope you enjoy it and you’ll be able to make your non-member friends just a little bit jealous by playing it to them over the holiday!

Al Barger describes these records thus, "They’re not really songs, but odd spoken word recordings that give an interesting angle on their evolving worldview. The first few are something like a Beatles year in review, high points from their professional year, a few jokes, and a couple of bars of classic Christmas songs here and there. As they got further into their career, their Christmas greetings turned into surreal little free association plays. By the last couple, they were degenerating from any sort of story element to experimental sound collages (Think Revolution 9)."

In some way, these Christmas offerings reflected both the personal and professional relationships between the individual Beatles. The first five issuances were recorded together while the last two were minted separately. George Harrison brought in Tiny Tim to sing Nowhere Man accompanied by a ukulele in the 1968 Christmas record, something like the idea of drawing Eric Clapton into the studio to do the guitar solo for While My Guitar Gently Weeps in The Beatles’ White Album. John Lennon, in the last two records, had become inseparable from Yoko Ono, making his contribution a combined effort of both artists. Indeed, "a fascinating insight into how their lives changed dramatically between 1963 and 1969," the British Broadcasting Company sums up concerning the group’s evolution that is mirrored in the novelty collection.

John Lennon deliberately intended to write a substantial Christmas song that will forever be remembered. He succeeded with Happy Christmas (War Is Over), co-written with his wife, Yoko. The song reinforced the two-year peace campaign John and Yoko were waging especially against the war in Vietnam by putting up billboards in major capital cities in the world boldly declaring, "WAR IS OVER, IF YOU WANT IT."

Songfest, an on-line site, recounts John and Yoko wrote this in the evening of Oct. 28 and into the morning of Oct. 29 in their New York hotel room exactly 25 years ago. They recorded it in November with Phil Spector who produced the single and suggested they employ the Harlem Community Choir for the chorus. In the US, the single came out on Dec. 1, 1971 but barely charted there. It met bigger success in the UK the following year, peaking at No. 4. John and Yoko can be heard whispering the name of Kyoko and Julian at the beginning of the song. Yoko’s Listen The Snow Is Falling occupied the single’s flipside.

George Harrison came out with his own three years later. Ding Dong is basically a "New Year’s flavored tune" issued in the Dark Horse album he released in 1974. It breached the Top 40 in the US and UK. Considered a well-forgotten single, Ding Dong, according to Mistletunes, reflects George’s characteristic solo sound, especially when he combined his trademark slide guitar with church bell chimes, which to this day still sounds unique.

George himself acknowledged the words of the song are not his own. "The words of Ding Dong are taken from the wall of the house (Friar Park). It’s from Lord Tennyson. Also the middle-eight lyric is carved on the wall of the garden building:

Yesterday — today — was tomorrow

Tomorrow — today —will be yesterday

"I don’t know of its origin. Maybe Sir Frank (former owner of the estate) knows?" he quips. He then adds, "I was just sitting by the fire, playing the guitar and I looked up on the wall, and there it was written."

Paul McCartney followed in John’s footsteps and released in 1979 Wonderful Christmastime b/w Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reggae, which received generally harsh reviews. "Several critics felt that the song was some kind of a joke," writes Garry McGee, biographer of Paul McCartney and the Wings, "but Paul was indeed serious." Nevertheless, Wonderful Christmastime, since its release, has become a staple Yuletide season song on both sides of the Atlantic.

In fact, it was a Top 10 hit in the UK though it failed to chart in the two leading trade magazines in the US. BBC Sold on Song noted that in recent years, the song gained a new life with hip-hop artist De La Soul sampling it in the group’s single Simply that appeared on its album AOI: Bionix.

When it initially came out, Wonderful Christmastime was registered as Paul’s solo effort though recorded with Wings, whose last lineup also made cameo appearance in the promotional video. This will be corrected in a subsequent reissue.

Aside from this solo effort, Paul contributed twice to the powerful single Do They Know It’s Christmas?, which was written as a charity single for Ethiopia by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure. First, in the original Band Aid release in 1984, Paul taped a few spoken lines. Twenty years later, Paul played bass in the re-recording of the song by the updated cast Band Aid 20.

Completing The Beatles’ individual Yuletide contribution, Ringo Starr, 20 years after Paul’s effort, came out with I Wanna Be Santa Claus, a full album of Christmas songs. Ringo started working on this record with band mate Mark Hudson in mid-1998, then finished and released it a year later. This went on sale in the U.S. practically without any publicity, which accounted for the album’s weak sales performance. Following its issuance, Ringo left Mercury. It was not released in the U.K.

Comprising an equal collection of covers and new materials, the album is a wonderful listen. Probably a combination of nostalgia and tribute to The Beatles urged Ringo to record his own version of Christmas Time Is Here Again, revisiting the group’s 1967 record for fans. Apart from this, Pax Um Bisum (Peace Be With You), an Indian music-inspired cut that closes the album, sounds like it was taken directly from The Beatles’ 1966-1967 repertoire.

Ringo’s rendition of old carols gives these songs a refreshing treatment. As rightly anticipated, Ringo did his own version of The Little Drummer Boy, putting extra accent on his drums. In the same breath, Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer received the unique Ringo touch, while Winter Wonderland is reprised with I Was Walkin’, a cut from his album Vertical Man released the previous year. In this album, Ringo showed as well his appreciation of other genres. His reggae version of White Christmas brought new vitality to the song, while The Christmas Dance and Blue Christmas demonstrated once again his affection for country songs.

The other original compositions penned for the album include Christmas Eve, Dear Santa, I Wanna Be Santa Claus and Come on Christmas, Christmas Come On.

In retrospect, this collective Christmas-related repertoire by The Beatles should be taken in a continuum. What the band failed to do, that is, come up with complete Christmas records as a group, it accomplished as solo musicians. What started out to be a perfunctory task every Christmas turned out as a commitment to fans; so great was this commitment that even when The Beatles began to drift apart and grew individually as artists, they did not turn their back on their legions of fans. If anything, this is the value of The Beatles’ Christmas records for all of us who continue to enjoy and cherish the music they produced.