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Sobbin’ Around the Christmas Tree: The 100 Greatest Sad Holiday Songs
Variety collects the greatest sad Christmas songs of all time, from "I'll Be Home for Christmas" to "River" to "Fairytale of New York."
Though Crosby and other interpreters are rarely accused of playing a trick on anyone, this is a stellar example of the “gotcha” song — seeming to promise home and hearth, until we get to that “only in my dreams” line, and realize the singer is probably stuck on a WWII battlefield. Seasonal affective disorder had an early advocate in Stafford, whose classy, brassy reading of this 1953 Tin Pan Alley classic by Sammy Cahn and David Jack Holt really gets to the heart of what a lot of unpaired souls feel during the holidays: The guitars get kind of cranky here as Dave Lowery goes on a nostalgic reverie recalling popping pills and getting drunk with an ex named Emily, “from a good family / They fucked up your head and sent you to me.” Some of the details of this long-gone relationship are rather specific, but the core couple of lines are something almost everybody can relate to in cataloguing Christmases past: “I still think about you.
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