5 Christmas Songs That Originally Had Nothing to Do With Christmas

Many of our favorite festive songs are typically chock-full of references to quintessential Christmas staples like roasting chestnuts and jingling bells. Many of our favorite Christmas carols, meanwhile, make the true meaning of the festive season clear with references to the nativity scene, the birth of Jesus, and the story of the very first Christmas. 

But alongside all of these, oddly, some of our other favorite Christmas songs were originally nothing of the sort, and have only become attached to the festive season thanks to the likes of their overall wintry theme, their jaunty or joyous melody, or their tinkling, jingling instrumentation. The true histories of just some of these Christmas-tunes-by-proxy are explored here. 

1. “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”
2. “Jingle Bells”
3. “Joy to the World”
4. “O Tannenbaum”
5. “Troika” from Lieutenant Kijé, Sergei Prokofiev

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside”

This classic festive duet has been included on holiday albums by everyone from Rufus Wainwright to the cast of Glee, and even found its way into the Lady Gaga and the Muppets Holiday Spectacular back in 2013. Not a bad track record for a song that originally had nothing to do with Christmas. 

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was written in 1944 by Tony Award-winning Broadway legend Frank Loesser (perhaps best known for his music for Guys and Dolls). According to legend, Loesser wrote the song—which famously features back-and-forth, alternating male-and-female lyrics—as something of a jokey, flirty party piece for him and his wife, the singer Lynn Garland, to perform for their friends.

The pair first sang the song at a housewarming party later that same year, but their performance soon proved so popular that they were being invited to parties across the city merely so people could see them sing it. 

In 1948, Loesser sold the rights to the song to MGM, who promptly used it in the comedy musical Neptune’s Daughter; Loesser, meanwhile, went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song for the track. With “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” now more famous than ever, all the biggest artists of the day took a stab at recording it, and the track swiftly established itself as a standard.

At no point in all this, however, was the song ever explicitly intended to be a holiday song; in fact, it has only come to be attached to the festive season thanks to its decidedly chilly (and now, somewhat controversial) lyrics.

“Jingle Bells”

This may just be the most surprising entry on this list: no, “Jingle Bells” was not originally a holiday song. 

The true history of “Jingle Bells” has undergone considerable research in recent years, with even the longstanding theory that the song was actually written for Thanksgiving, not Christmas, now being called into question.

What is known for certain about “Jingle Bells” is that it was first published in Boston in 1857 under the title “The One Horse Open Sleigh,” and credited to the American composer and organist James Lord Pierpont; Pierpont changed the title on the reprinted sheet music two years later. 

Precisely where and when Pierpont actually wrote the song is unclear, but popular history claims it was while he was staying at a boarding house in Medford, Massachusetts, back in 1850. Allegedly, Pierpont penned the song on the house’s piano, having spent the afternoon watching the town’s famous sleigh races, and intended it to be sung by his Sunday school students for Thanksgiving. After the song proved just as popular with the parents as it did with the chorus of kids, the song soon became a holiday standard. 

More recent research published in the journal Theatre Survey, however, has shown that actually the earliest recorded public performance of “Jingle Bells” was at a minstrel revue show in Boston in September 1857—casting doubt on the song being written for Pierpont’s students, and indeed for Thanksgiving. Whatever the song’s true history may be, though, we can be fairly certain that it was not written with Christmastime in mind. 

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“Joy to the World”

Despite often finding its way onto surveys of our favorite Christmas carols, “Joy to the World” actually started out as an adaptation of the Old Testament’s Psalm 98; although modern carollers understandably tend to associate the song’s lyrics with the birth of Jesus, the psalm itself in fact deals with the Second Coming of Christ. 

Written by an English minister and hymn-writer named Isaac Watts, the lyrics to “Joy to the World” first appeared in Watts’s 1719 collection of The Psalms of David, along with robust instructions in the preface of the book advising what traditional tunes the psalm were intended to be performed to.

Throughout the later 1700s and early 1800s, however, Watts’s words were set to a variety of different melodies, before the existing joyous tune was written for them by Boston composer and church musician Lowell Mason in 1839. Mason, in turn, is thought to have based the tune on a mixture of compositions from Handel’s famous “Messiah” oratorio—so neither Watts’s original lyrics nor biblical inspiration, nor Mason’s musical inspiration, were ever explicitly festive. 

“O Tannenbaum”

Tannenbaum is the German word for a fir tree, and this popular Christmas song is more usually translated into English as “O Christmas Tree.”

The roots of this piece lie in an old Silesian folk tune, “Ach Tannenbaum,” which is thought to date back to the 1500s. A variety of lyrics have seemingly been put to this tune over the centuries (before it became better known as “O Christmas Tree,“ this tune was often sung in German with the words “Es lebe hoch der Zimmermannsgeselle,” or “Long live the carpenter’s apprentice”), but in 1820 a German teacher and folklorist named August Zarnack wrote a new set of verses for this tune, reimagining the fir tree as a metaphor for strength and reliability, and contrasting its steadfastness with an unfaithful lover.

In Zarnack’s version, the second verse opens, “O Mägdelein, o Mägdelein, / Wie falsch ist dein Gemüte!” or “Oh maiden, oh maiden, / How false is your heart!” A Leipzig schoolteacher named Ernst Anschütz then went on to further adapt Zarnack’s song, adding his own (somewhat less resentful) lyrics, and “O Tannenbaum,” as a tribute to a fir tree, was born. 

Although the English version of this song now makes overt reference to Christmastime, however, both Zarnack’s and Anschütz’s original lyrics did not, and it was only the widespread adoption of decorated fir trees in the Victorian era that turned this into a festive favorite. 

“Troika” from Lieutenant Kijé, Sergei Prokofiev

This might not be the most familiar title in the world, but you’ll doubtless know this short, bouncy, sleighbell-strewn piece of orchestra sound by the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev as one of the most popular pieces in the Christmas classical music repertoire. (In fact, you might know this piece better as “Sleigh Ride,” not least given that a troika is a kind of horse-drawn Russian sledge.) 

Despite those festive associations, however, Prokofiev originally wrote this piece as part of a suite of music used as the soundtrack to Lieutenant Kijé, or “The Czar wants to Sleep,” a farcical Soviet comedy movie from 1934.

The piece appears roughly halfway through the film, accompanying a farcical scene involving a late-night drunken troika journey; the melody comes from an old Hussar folk song (“Like a roadside inn is a woman’s heart”), which the two characters in the scene sing before boarding the sleigh.

Not one bit of this takes place at Christmastime, however, and the jingling, tinkling sound of Prokofiev’s music here is meant only to recreate the sound of the bells of the horses’ harnesses. Nevertheless, the piece has long since become so closely associated with the holiday season that the Troika melody has even been incorporated into festive pop songs.