Classic Christmas Songs With Surprising Secret Meanings

What meaning could possibly be hidden in this one? It's a wholesome holiday song about a portly, generous man named Santa Claus. But the song was written at a particularly dark time in the life of songwriter Haven Gillespie. In fact, Gillespie was asked to write a jolly Christmas tune for children directly after attending his brother's funeral.

Gillespie reluctantly began writing the song on his subway ride home from the meeting with his publisher, Leo Feist, Inc. The publishers thought he'd do a great job because he had a "good vocabulary..." and they were right. The song, which was first recorded by Eddie Canto, was a total hit — selling 25,000 records per day at its peak. But Gillespie could never enjoy it as it always reminded him of his late brother, Irwin.

"Do You Hear What I Hear?" has solidified itself as a classic since its initial release in 1962 — with artists such as Whitney Houston and Andy Williams having covered it. But the lyrics, which on the surface retell the tale from the Nativity, conceal a dark meaning. Gloria Shayne Baker revealed it in an interview some years after it became a hit.

When Baker and her husband, Noel Regney, wrote the track in 1962, their fear of the Cuban Missile Crisis inspired the tune. They just wanted peace, and the song details that. “Noel wrote a beautiful song,” Baker said, “and I wrote the music. We couldn’t sing it, though... Our little song broke us up. You must realize there was a threat of nuclear war at the time.”

This popular little tune was originally performed by Judy Garland in 1944's Meet Me in St. Louis. The credited songwriters on the movie are Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane — although Martin claims he flew solo for this particular song. In the finished film, you may remember, the song depicts the family's gloominess over celebrating the last Christmas in their beloved home. Yet the original lyrics were a little too gloomy.

Martin's first pass at the song included the lyrics "Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last" and "Faithful friends who were dear to us, will be near to us no more." But Judy Garland thought these were too depressing. Martin eventually changed the lyrics, and the slightly more uplifting Christmas track we know today was born.

Separation from family during the holiday season is the worst, and "I'll Be Home For Christmas" captures that loneliness. But when Walter Kent and James Gannon wrote the song in 1943, they had more than isolation in mind. After all, when Bing Crosby recorded the track with the John Scott Trotter Orchestra, America was in the depths of World War II.

The song was an instant hit in America, charting at number three in 1943. It also became the song that the soldiers wanted to hear the most during Christmas U.S.O. shows. Yank, a magazine for the troops, claimed that Crosby boosted morale with the track more than any other entertainer. On the flip side, the BBC banned the song in the U.K. for being too depressing.

Bing Crosby first released the best-selling single "White Christmas" in October 1942 to capitalize on the success of the film Holiday Inn. And the song began to work its way up through the charts when the Armed Forces Radio began to play it for GIs fighting the war abroad. But it's possible that songwriter Irving Berlin was not exactly filled with Christmas cheer when he penned the classic.

Firstly, Irving Berlin was a Jewish immigrant, so he didn't celebrate Christmas growing up. Then, in 1928, his family suffered a tragedy on Christmas Day when Berlin's three-week-old son, Irvin Berlin Jr., died. "The kind of deep secret of the song may be that it was Berlin responding in some way to his melancholy about the death of his son," author Jody Rosen told NPR in 2000.

People have argued that "Coventry Carol" isn't technically a Christmas song — but they're wrong. The English Christmas carol dates all the way back to the 1500s and is part of a play called The Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors, which tells the story of the Nativity. But it's true that "Coventry Carol" is actually about a graphic event from the Bible known as the Massacre of the Innocents...

The Massacre of the Innocents is marked in the Church of England calendar as December 28. The bible story is essentially about the slaughter of hundreds of children under the order of Herod “the Great," King of Judea. By killing all the male infants in the land, Herod hoped to get rid of the child who would later become the Messiah. This Christian tale is surely a gruesome one.

In 1939 retail pioneer Montgomery Ward asked writer Robert L. May to write a Christmas story for the store's promotional booklet that year. May then turned in "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer" — after running it past the toughest of critics: his four-year-old daughter. And by Christmas 1946, the store had given out more than six million copies of the booklet. But the reason that "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer" appealed to people is the personal story that inspired it.

Barbara May Lewis told NPR in 2015 that her father — Robert L. May — drew on his childhood feelings of being an outcast to define Rudolph's journey. "It was his opinion of himself that gave rise to Rudolph, I think, so all the better," she said. May got the rights to the Rudolph story in 1947, but the story didn't become ingrained in the public consciousness until 1949. That's when Johnny Marks developed the song, based on the book, and Gene Autry recorded it. The song shifted two million copies in 1949 alone.

The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl’s 1987 hit is considered by many to be the ultimate Christmas song. With the passing of lead singer Shane MacGowan, the track is surely going to become even more of a classic. A song with a depressing plot about a couple who’ve fallen on tough times and its fair share of vulgar language doesn’t seem like a likely Christmas hit, and yet, it’s become the U.K.’s most-played holiday song of the 21st century. However, few know the true story behind the duet and how it ignited controversy over some of its lyrics.

The Pogues’ manager, Frank Murray, maintains that writing a Christmas hit was his idea. On contrary, the late MacGowan insisted the song was written off the back of a wager with the legendary Elvis Costello. Costello apparently bet that the band couldn’t create a festive duet to be sung with Cait O’Riordan, a bass player and his future spouse. Following several problems — and the song nearly being abandoned — Costello and O’Riordan walked away from the project. Later, MacGowan saw MacColl performing and knew she was the perfect fit. Originally called “Christmas Eve in the Drunk Tank,” he eventually settled on “Fairytale of New York” after a book by J.P. Donleavy. Apparently, the bizarre lyrics and imagery came to MacGowan in a fit of delirium while suffering double pneumonia!

The history of "O Holy Night" is perhaps the most fascinating of any song on this list. In 1847 poet Placide Cappeau de Roquemaure penned the words — based on Bible stories about the birth of Christ — and Adolphe Charles Adams wrote the music. The song was initially beloved by the French Catholic church... until Placide Cappeau turned to socialism and the powers that be found out Adams was Jewish.

The church immediately banned the song — but the French public had already embraced it and it continued to be popular. Then abolitionist John Sullivan Dwight brought the song to America and latched on to the lyrics "Chains shall he break, for the slave is our brother." So "O Holy Night" was later adopted somewhat by the abolitionists during the American Civil War.

It's possible that "Carol of the Bells" became a Christmas song because it features a common Christmas sound: bells chiming. The song also has lyrics that explain how silver bells bring the holiday spirits into houses across the land. Yet "Carol of the Bells" is not really a very merry song — this is no "Silver Bells" — and it's not actually about Christmas at all.

The song actually used to be a chant in Ukraine known as “Shchedryk.” Composer Mykola Leontovych turned into a carol in the early 1900s. Still, the song was never intended for Christmas — instead, it was about the coming of Spring. It tells the story of a swallow that tells a man he is about to have a very good year. Another composer named Peter Wilhousky rewrote the chant for an English audience — creating what we know as “Carol of the Bells” along the way.

All together now: "Dashing through the snow, on a one-horse open sleigh..." Everybody knows the words to this classic Christmas tune, right? But if Kyna Hamill — a lecturer and the director of the College of Arts & Sciences core curriculum at Boston University — is to be believed, "Jingle Bells" is really about a guy rebelling against his overbearing father.

The writer was James Pierpont — whom Hamill called "kind of a jerk" — and it was written in the 1850s. Hamill told Daybreak South, "I think that there's something about the relationship between the father and the son which kind of shows how he doesn't want to be like his father in this song. He wants to have fun."

In recent years, "Baby, It's Cold Outside" has received backlash — and even been banned — for its controversial content. To a modern audience, the story clearly involves a man pressuring a hesitant woman to stay the night at his place on a chilly evening. Yet people have argued that the 1944 duet written by Frank Loesser likely wasn't intended to sound creepy.

Music historian Thomas Riis told NPR in 2016 that the lyrics read differently in 1944. He claims that the woman in the song makes her decision at the end — and that would have been seen as empowering at the time. "In a sense, it's, 'I can do what I doggone please. I'm a modern woman,'" he said.

It's not uncommon for popular songs to have forgotten or hidden meanings, mind you. Take "Hotel California." Checking out anytime you like but never being able to leave — sounds like typical customer service at the worst hotel ever. But it's actually a veiled reference to the greed of the music industry — which Don Henley was feeling trapped by at the time.

"Imagine" has been widely accepted for years as a peaceful, feel-good anthem, but John Lennon openly stated that the lyrics of his famous song were more politically charged than people realize. "Anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, but because it is sugarcoated it is accepted," he said in an interview. "Now I understand what you have to do. Put your political message across with a little honey."

This classic down-your-drink-and-get-out ballad is a favorite of bartenders who, when it's lights-on time, have no patience for subtlety. But Dan Wilson wrote the tune about childbirth. "My wife and I were expecting our first kid... what a funny pun it was to be bounced from the womb," he said.

When Jim Steinman wrote the song, he was also working on a Nosferatu musical at the time. A bit of vampiric influence seems to have seeped over, then. In fact, Steinman wrote this classic ballad about vampire romance — almost calling it "Vampires in Love." "If anyone listens to the lyrics, they're really like vampire lines," he told Playbill in 1997.

Fans wondered for years what the "trick" was that's alluded to in the song's opening lines. Robert Smith later said it was just an allusion to magic tricks or tricks of seduction and that the song was about "hyperventilating — kissing and fainting to the floor."

Written by Billy Steinberg, the song wasn't about virginity — or about either of the two theories famously discussed at the beginning of Reservoir Dogs. Steinberg wrote it about being in a healthy relationship that made everything feel new again. “I was singing about how something made me feel a certain way – brand-new and fresh," Madonna told Rolling Stone in 1987.

Fans actually read more into this song than Petty intended. His adoring public created a widespread urban legend that it was about a girl tragically jumping from her balcony. "The song has nothing to do with that," Petty said in 2005. "But that story really gets around... They've really got the whole story. I've even seen magazine articles about that story. 'Is it true or isn't it true?' They could have just called me and found out it wasn't true."

Though it sounds like it's about a relationship gone wrong, the band's classic track is actually about their frustrations with their label. "That song comes sheerly from wanting to throw something. It was the 11th hour, and the label wanted more songs," Adam Levine told MTV in 2009. "It was the last crack... I wanted to make a record and the label was applying a lot of pressure, but I'm glad they did."

An urban legend swirled around Collins' first solo single. Rumor had it that "In the Air Tonight" was about a man he'd witnessed refusing to save a drowning victim. The story was even referenced in Eminem's "Stan." Collins later called the urban legend "frustrating" and "wrong." More likely, the song is about his divorce from Andrea Bertorelli. "It's the angry side or the bitter side of a separation," Collins told the BBC.

Here's a song that should apparently be thought about a bit more than most people do. "It's not really about a blackbird whose wings are broken... it's a bit more symbolic," Sir Paul McCartney once said. He claimed he was by the American Civil Rights Movement and wrote the song about desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Although it enjoys a reputation as being a criticism of British politics, the song actually has a jumble of influences. "We felt that we were struggling about to slip down a slope or something, grasping with our fingernails. And there was no one there to help us," Joe Strummer once said of his view of the world at the time. The band was also concerned about the possibility of the Thames overflowing its banks.

This song is actually about Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong's horrible breakup with a former girlfriend. These days, though, the track is a favorite prom song... and that's okay with Armstrong. "The people that you grew up and braved the trials of high school with will always hold a special place," he said. "Through all the BS of high school you hope that your friends had the time of their life, and that's what the song is talking about."

It's been used in political campaigns, at sports events, and basically, anywhere you could envision a rowdy American anthem being played. But the lyrics for "Born in the USA" are really a criticism of the country's terrible treatment of Vietnam veterans and working-class citizens. "'Born In The USA' is a classic situation of a song misinterpreted by some because of its chorus," the Boss told NPR in 2005.

"Wake Me Up When September Ends" is a thoughtful memorial for Billie Joe Armstrong's father, who passed away when Armstrong was only ten years old. But, possibly because the music video featured a couple torn apart by the Iraq War, many listeners believed this song had a secret deep meaning about war and 9/11.

For some, this could be a fun pop song about fancy sneakers. But the lyrics of this smash hit are a reference to the alarming prevalence of school shootings and the uptick in mental health problems among American youth. "The song came from a place in my heart," Foster the People's frontman, Mark Foster, told The Washington Post in 2011. "I was thinking about, 'Why are kids doing this, why is this an epidemic in our country?' Kids are getting younger and younger and bringing a gun to malls or schools or parks and killing people."

Although it seems to be about a cavalier flirtationship, this song was actually a hint at Gaga's bisexuality. She admitted to crowds at a 2009 concert that the "poker face" in question concerned fantasizing about a woman while she was with a man. She has explained this on Ellen and on The Jonathan Ross Show, too, so people should really know this by now!