{"id":23334,"date":"2015-10-17T09:07:16","date_gmt":"2015-10-17T15:07:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/?p=23334"},"modified":"2015-10-16T22:15:01","modified_gmt":"2015-10-17T04:15:01","slug":"the-christmas-song-celebrates-70-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/the-christmas-song-celebrates-70-years\/","title":{"rendered":"The Christmas Song Celebrates 70 Years"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It was a sweltering hot July afternoon in 1945 when Mel Torm\u00e9 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:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Chestnuts roasting on an open fire<br \/>\nJack Frost nipping at your nose<br \/>\nYuletide carols being sung by a choir<br \/>\nAnd folks dressed up like Eskimos\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>When Wells finally walked in the room, dressed in tennis shorts and a T-shirt, Torm\u00e9 asked him about the little poem.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s so damn hot today, I thought I\u2019d writing something to cool myself off,\u201d Wells replied. \u201cAll I could think of was <a href=\"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/celebrating-20-years-of-the-merry-forums\/\">Christmas<\/a> and cold weather.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/__kQ1PCP6B0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The song was first recorded by the Nat King Cole trio in 1946. Over objections of the record label Cole insisted on adding strings to the arrangement and it was this version that became a huge hit for Cole and made the song a staple of <a href=\"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/celebrating-20-years-of-the-merry-forums\/\">Christmas<\/a> listening.<\/p>\n<p>The song has been made and remade in a variety of genres and by countless artists. Here\u2019s one of the more recent, brought to us by Pentatonix:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Yh6Y1mkE7bg\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was a sweltering hot July afternoon in 1945 when Mel Torm\u00e9 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23335,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","iawp_total_views":10,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,6],"tags":[366,368,367,290],"class_list":["post-23334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-christmas-features","category-christmas-music","tag-christmas-music-history","tag-mel-torme","tag-nat-king-cole","tag-the-christmas-song"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23334\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mymerrychristmas.com\/x\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}