Christmas Songs You Don’t Know that You Know

Some Christmas songs are so familiar we can pick out a tune in the middle of July. Other Christmas songs have titles so obscure or from another language that we couldn’t pick them out if they were handed to us.

The brand new episode of the Merry Podcast explores this in depth with an hour long exploration into great music you maybe have heard but can’t talk about.

Here’s a good example: last Christmas hot vocal super group Pentatonix released the following single of a famously old Christmas tune brilliantly performed…that almost no one can name:

What is great about Christmas music like this is that the songs are so very old and many have a back story of Christmas that just need to be heard. (That song, by the way, is called Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy).

Also of note is that some of the new/old songs of Christmas now coming out on modern recordings were NOT originally about Christmas at all…but they are now.

Case in point is the song featured in the below video titled Suo Gan.

The tune is actually a centuries old Welsh lullaby and it was featured in a movie by Steven Spielberg called Empire of the Sun.

The movie tells the story of a rich English kid thrust into a prison camp during World War II when his parents were stationed in Shanghai. The kid is played by a very young Christian Bale and in the movie he sings Suo Gan in this famous scene:

This song — not the Christian Bale lip sync version — is now appearing on albums as a Christmas song. How did that happen?

This is the stuff we’re exploring on this nearly hour-long version of the Merry Podcast available exclusively now for premiere members of My Merry Christmas.