CAROLS IN THE SQUARE, TRADEOFFS EVERYWHERE.

Christmas and Hanukkah overlapped this year, which motivated Free Press contributor Eli Lake to meditate on "Why Jews Wrote Your Favorite Christmas Songs."

His opening paragraphs refer, directly, to the title of the post.

I love Christmas—the parties, the spirit of charity, the lights glowing on modest row houses, the tree at Rockefeller Center, even the schmaltzy movies. What I really love, though, is the music.

I am Jewish, so you won’t find me dragging a small Douglas fir into my living room. I will not attend midnight mass or keep an advent calendar. On Christmas Day, I eat wonton soup and sweet and sour chicken at a Chinese restaurant, as is my people’s tradition. But the music of the season is a balm and a bop. And it’s not only infectious; it’s secular.

What we understand as "caroling" got its name from the Medieval French custom of singing in public with musical accompaniment.  And longtime Christmas carol maven William Studwell, late of Northern Illinois University, would recognize the sacred and the secular alike in his "Carol of the Year" series.  "The complete list includes Adeste Fideles and Stille Nacht, as well as a few favorites of a less religious nature."

It is those of the "less religious nature" that Mr Lake hails.

Think of the most beloved Christmas songs, like “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!.”

It's about winter and romance: "When we finally kiss goodnight / How you'll hate going out in the storm.” There’s no mention of Nazareth, three wise men, frankincense, or myrrh. It’s warm and homey, but vaguely sexy too. Cheeky and charming, and not remotely Christian. Any American can relate.

Or “The Christmas Song,” with references to Santa, turkey, and mistletoe; it doesn’t feel like revelation so much as cocktail hour. It’s not about Christ. It’s about Christmas.

And there, dear reader, is your tradeoff.  There are songs you would put in a hymnal.  Then there are songs you would put in the Muzak rotation at the department store, preferably with the autocall for the supervisors dinging in the background.  That commercial Christmas is an inclusive Christmas.

What’s most surprising, however, is that the Americans who wrote those two Christmas standards—and most of the other seasonal classics—were, like Jesus himself, Jews.

They were often children of parents who fled Russia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe during the great wave of immigration between 1880 and 1920. There’s Sammy Cahn, who wrote “Let It Snow.” The son of Galician Jewish immigrants, Cahn rose to become Sinatra’s favorite lyricist. There’s also Mel Tormé, the singer and songwriter who, with Bob Wells, penned “The Christmas Song,” more commonly known as “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.” His father, William Torma, a Jewish cantor, emigrated from Belarus in the early 20th century. Frank Loesser, a titan of Broadway and Hollywood musicals who composed the slightly naughty “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” was born into a middle-class Jewish family. His father left Germany in the 1890s to avoid serving in the Kaiser’s military.

Johnny Marks gave us “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” and “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree,” a yuletide bubblegum favorite introduced in the 1950s by Brenda Lee. Marks, too, was one of the chosen ones. “He was Jewish and didn’t even believe in Christmas,” Lee told Billboard Magazine years later. “And all that would come out of him was Christmas music!”

“All everyone’s favorite Christmas songs were written by Jews, and this is a fact,” David Lehman, a poet and editor and the author of A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, told me. “The most famous example being “White Christmas” by Irving Berlin.”

There's an institutional and a musicological dimension to the story.  The institutional dimension is as old as the Gospels.  Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all include the parables and the crucifixion and resurrection.  The Magi make a brief appearance in Matthew and the shepherds, as Linus van Pelt reminds us, in Luke.

Americans weren’t always the most Christmassy of Christians. The Puritans even made celebrating Christmas a criminal offense in the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1659 because back in Europe it had been an occasion for drunkenness and debauchery. St. Nicholas, who would later transform into Santa Claus, retained his old-world sensibilities by meting out judgment to children every December. The bad kids were beaten with a rod from a birch tree.

But by 1823, American Christmas was beginning to crystallize with Clement Moore’s poem A Visit from St. Nicholas. Santa had become a jolly man with a sleigh who handed out gifts. And by the late 1800s, the building blocks for modern American Christmas were all there. But the music was not.

Miss Fanny Bright was not available for comment.

Mr Lake's musicological hypothesis is instructive.

Much of the Jewish migration to the U.S. at the start of the 20th century came from the Pale of Settlement, the area ruled until the Russian Revolution by the Romanov dynasty. Jews were segregated into isolated towns known as shtetls where they were marginalized and often subjected to pogroms. Imagine, then, these people arriving at Ellis Island, where they were greeted by opportunity, diversity, and technology, finally free to express themselves in a new land.

They brought with them the Jewish musical tradition: the cantorial minor keys found in Jewish prayer. It’s no accident that Harold Arlen (born Chaim Arluck), the composer of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Stormy Weather,” was the son of a cantor.

Then, there was the Yiddish language, a hybrid tongue with words plucked from German, Hebrew, and other languages. Yiddish lends itself to surprising rhymes and pleasant meter. In this respect Yiddish is a lot like American music itself—an alchemy of cultures that create a delightful and unexpected new combination.

So it’s this combination of factors—the Yiddish language, the freedom America afforded Jewish immigrants, and the haunting minor key found in Jewish prayer—that help explain why Jews wrote so many of the great American songs.

They gave us the American songbook. George and Ira Gershwin, the brothers who wrote “I Got Rhythm.” Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, who together wrote “The Sound of Music” and many other unforgettable Broadway shows. The great Jerome Kern, one of the first breakout stars of New York’s Tin Pan Alley, who composed the scores for “Show Boat” and “Swing Time,” two of the first major modern musicals.

Plus, of course, George M. "Yankee Doodle Dandy" Cohan and Irving Berlin, whose "White Christmas" came out in time of war.  "It was serendipitous that a song about winter raced up the hit parade as American troops were at war in deserts and jungles, longing for the tranquility of a snowy holiday."  That longing was more explicit in "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" with its "until then we'll have to muddle through somehow."

Muddling, though, included expanding the Festive Season.

The American songbook is a precious heirloom. And so is the American Christmas music we know today. In 1954, when Irving Berlin was 66, he told The Washington Post that while he didn’t celebrate Christmas as a child on the Lower East Side, he still felt connected to the holiday.

“I bounded across the street to my friendly neighbors, the O’Haras, and shared their goodies,” he said. “This was my first sight of a Christmas tree. The O’Haras were very poor and later, as I grew used to their annual tree, I realized they had to buy one with broken branches and small height. But for me that first tree seemed to tower to heaven.”

“What an unbelievable accomplishment the American version [of Christmas] is relative to everything that came before,” said Rabbi Lamm. “Everybody is a part of it. And we're going to sing a bunch of songs written by Jews and we're going to play them in every mall, restaurant and office and private home in the country. What an unbelievable, almost unimaginable achievement on the part of American culture. It’s something that we as a nation should be very proud of.”

So this Christmas, even though there’s no tree in my home, no mistletoe, and no presents to be exchanged, this holiday doesn’t exclude me. I live in a country so welcoming of Jews that it allowed my people—as they fled the horrors of the old world—to build a new American Christmas, whose songs are reinvented and perfected every season.

Amen.