Most Christmas music does absolutely nothing for me. Not because it’s sentimental, but because it pretends certainty.
The traditional religious songs project confidence: everything is already resolved, the story already finished. Even if you’re not religious, that confidence is baked in. And after hearing those songs year after year, there’s nothing left for me to listen for. The newer secular Christmas songs are worse, so overplayed they’ve lost any emotional signal entirely.
What I eventually noticed is that the few Christmas songs I do enjoy aren’t really Christmas songs at all. They’re anti-war and war-aware songs. Songs written by people who understood how fragile peace actually is, and how easily it can disappear.
This week’s Three Tune Tuesday is built around that idea. Let's dive in.
Do You Hear What I Hear?
For years I liked this song without fully understanding why. I assumed it was just one of the more tolerable religious carols: gentler, quieter, less preachy, and with a more interesting melody than the others which are more or less hymns.
Then I learned it was written in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Once you know that, the song changes completely.
This isn’t ancient religious confidence. It’s Cold War anxiety. The structure itself carries that tension. Each verse passes along fear like a whispered message — wind to lamb, lamb to shepherd, shepherd to king — until it reaches a plea rather than a proclamation:
Pray for peace, people everywhere.
No doctrine. No certainty. Just the sense that something terrible could happen, and that everyone is holding their breath.
It’s not really about the nativity. It’s about whether humanity can restrain itself and survive.
Happy Xmas (War Is Over) — John Lennon
Musically, this song is almost disarmingly simple. The melody repeats. The structure barely evolves. And yet it works because of that simplicity. The line that carries everything is:
War is over, if you want it.
No God. No prophecy. No savior descending to fix things. Just a blunt statement of human agency.
That idea — that the responsibility is ours, collectively — is what makes the song powerful. The children’s choir isn’t decoration, it's the main thing; it’s a reminder of who inherits the consequences when adults fail.
Like Do You Hear What I Hear?, this is a song born of nuclear-age awareness: the realization that we now have the power not just to wage war, but to end everything.
I’ll Be Home for Christmas
This one is trickier. I wouldn’t call it anti-war in a political sense. It doesn’t argue against war or question its causes. In fact, it was written to comfort soldiers and families during World War II.
But emotionally, it’s devastating. The song focuses entirely on what’s missing: home, warmth, ordinary life. There’s no battlefield imagery, no patriotism, no sacrifice elevated into meaning—only absence. And then it undercuts itself with one line that changes everything:
I’ll be home for Christmas… if only in my dreams.
If only in my dreams. That’s not hope. That’s resignation. There’s no heroism here, no victory, no meaning imposed on the suffering. Just the quiet acknowledgment that many won’t return and those that do will be forever changed, with various forms of PTSD — and that for some, Christmas will exist only as memory or imagination.
That's — as Marty would say — heavy.
What ties these three songs together isn’t Christmas cheer or religious belief. It’s something much rarer in holiday music: uncertainty, restraint, and human responsibility.
They don’t say everything is fine nor say God will save us. They ask whether we’re capable of saving ourselves.
But what do you think?
❦
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David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Bluesky. |