Thanks! A helpful visualization of what I was thinking

And for #1, if the canon has indeed shifted significantly, then what am I missing? Are we still following a standard 20-30-year nostalgia window?

Curious to hear others’ thoughts on this…

…and now back to cooking 🧑‍🍳 🎄 14/end

For #2, I’m wondering if it might be an example of a broader but still unusual phenomenon of “cultural time freezing,” similar to how you can still find radio stations that claim to play “the hits from the 80s, 90s, and today,” even though “today” now spans 25 years. 13/

Is it tied to the creation of the modern Christmas holiday, taking shape in the era of post-WWII consumerism? If so, was there a particular “freezing event” or group of people who played a key role in “freezing” the Christmas canon? 12/

Any of these answers would be interesting, and I’d be curious to hear others’ thoughts. At the moment I’m leaning towards #3, but even there, I have so many follow-up questions. 11/

3) The Christmas canon has indeed largely remained frozen in the 1940s, but this is a classic example of how canon formation works. Canons “freeze” at a certain moment in time, due to a confluence of events, and from that point on are hard to unfreeze. 10/

2) The Christmas canon has indeed largely remained frozen in the 1940s, and this is a pretty unusual phenomenon; or 9/

1) My perception is wrong, and the Christmas canon has indeed shifted considerably in the past 50 years; 8/

To my mind, there are three possible answers to the question, although I might have missed something: 7/

This is of course to be expected, as most new music doesn’t break through. But it does seem unusual to me that, for the most part, the Christmas canon seems to be frozen in the 1940s. 6/

This is of course not for lack of new Christmas music. To the contrary, every year there are dozens if not hundreds of new Christmas albums to choose from. But much of that music is covers of established Christmas classics, and the vast majority of the new material doesn’t break through. 5/

Overall what we consider “Christmas Classics” consists of 1) traditional 19th century Christmas carols and religious hymns; and 2) a distinct set of more “modern” Christmas songs largely written in the 1940s, some inching into the 1950s. 4/

There are a few exceptions, “All I Want For Christmas” and “Last Christmas” being the big ones, but even those are 30-40 years old now. 3/

Obviously Christmas music is all about nostalgia, but here the usual 20-30 year “nostalgia window” doesn’t apply. My *sense* is that the songs that were considered “Christmas Classics” when I was growing up in the 1980s are largely the same songs that would be in that category today. 2/