#Christmas December 10

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Last year the blog was co-written by John Rancke and myself. John did a piece on Christmas Songs that I want to republish.

Parts of the post below were published on July 16, 2018 by John Rancke

Christmas

What’s the all-time favorite Christmas song?

But for traditional Christmas songs, give me “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”. The song official title is “The Christmas Song.”

First recorded by Nat King Cole in 1946, it was written by two Jewish gentlemen in July. The story of Christmas in July follows.

It was a sweltering hot July afternoon in 1945 when Mel Tormé showed up for a writing session at the Toluca Lake house of his lyric partner Bob Wells. Mel let himself in and called out for Bob. No answer. He walked over to the piano, and there, resting on the music board, was a pad of paper with four lines of a verse:

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire
Jack Frost nipping at your nose
Yuletide carols being sung by a choir
And folks dressed up like Eskimos

When Wells finally walked in the room, dressed in tennis shorts and a T-shirt, Tormé asked him about the little poem.

“It’s so damn hot today, I thought I’d writing something to cool myself off,” Wells replied. “All I could think of was Christmas and cold weather.”

The “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” image was a memory from Wells’ childhood in Boston, when there’d be vendors on street corners at Christmas, serving up paper cones full of roasted chestnuts.
“I think you might have something here,” Tormé said.

As Tormé relates in his autobiography, “Improbable though it may sound, ‘The Christmas Song’ was completed about 45 minutes later. Excitedly, we called Carlos Gastel [manager of Nat Cole and Peggy Lee], sped into Hollywood, played it for him, then for [lyricist] Johnny Burke, and then for Nat Cole, who fell in love with the tune.

Here is a link with more on Nat King Cole

It took a full year for him to get into a studio to record it, but his record finally came out in late fall of 1946.

Seventy three years later the song is still with us. Merry Christmas!