{"id":120163,"date":"2026-11-13T18:10:20","date_gmt":"2026-11-13T23:10:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=120163"},"modified":"2026-11-13T18:10:20","modified_gmt":"2026-11-13T23:10:20","slug":"why-do-christmas-songs-make-me-sad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/entertainment\/music\/why-do-christmas-songs-make-me-sad\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Do Christmas Songs Make Me Sad? One Carol Was Written in Grief"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='booster-block booster-read-block'>\n                <div class=\"twp-read-time\">\n                \t<i class=\"booster-icon twp-clock\"><\/i> <span>Read Time:<\/span>12 Minute, 56 Second                <\/div>\n\n            <\/div><p>It happens in a shop. You are holding a basket, half thinking about dinner, and a Christmas song comes on over the speakers. Nothing happens for a few bars. Then your throat closes, your eyes sting, and you have to study a shelf of tins until it passes.<\/p>\n\n<p>If you have ever typed &#8220;why do Christmas songs make me sad&#8221; into a search bar, you already know the usual answers. Nostalgia. Minor keys. The gap between what the songs promise and what your year actually was. Those answers are true as far as they go. But there is one they all miss, and it is hiding in plain sight inside one of the carols itself.<\/p>\n\n<p>One of the best-loved Christmas carols was written by a man in the worst years of his life. It has a verse about despair that most people sing without noticing. And the two verses that explain the despair were cut.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Why Do Christmas Songs Make Me Sad? The Ordinary Answers First<\/h2>\n\n<p>Start with the honest, unglamorous reasons, because they are real.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Christmas songs are a calendar.<\/strong> You hear the same handful of songs once a year, every year, for your whole life. That makes them a measuring stick. The song has not changed since you were small. You have. The room has. The people in it have. A song that stays exactly the same is the quickest way to notice everything that did not.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>They are tied to people.<\/strong> Most of us did not learn these songs from a recording. We learned them from someone. A grandmother humming in a kitchen. A parent who always sang the wrong words. When the song plays, the person comes with it, whether or not they are still here.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>They promise a lot.<\/strong> Peace. Joy. Everyone home. A song that insists everything is merry can land hard in a year that was not merry at all. The louder the promise, the wider the gap.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Some of them really are sad.<\/strong> This is the part people forget. Plenty of carols sit in slow tempos or minor keys, and some of the lyrics are plainly about longing, absence, or waiting for something that has not come. You are not imagining the ache. In some cases it was written in.<\/p>\n\n<p>Now the answer almost nobody gives.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"convertkit-form wp-block-convertkit-form\" style=\"\"><script async data-uid=\"6491fb8269\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.kit.com\/6491fb8269\/index.js\" data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" data-no-defer=\"1\" data-no-optimize=\"1\" nowprocket><\/script><\/div>\n\n\n<h2>The Man Who Wrote &#8220;I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day&#8221;<\/h2>\n\n<p>Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the most famous poets alive in the 1800s. By the summer of 1861 he had a big house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a wife he adored named Fanny, and six children.<\/p>\n\n<p>On the afternoon of 9 July 1861, Fanny&#8217;s light summer dress caught fire. According to the hymn-history site <a href=\"https:\/\/hymnologyarchive.com\/i-heard-the-bells-on-christmas-day\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Hymnology Archive<\/a>, she had been in the library sealing locks of her daughters&#8217; hair into packets when a fallen match set the dress alight. Henry tried to put out the flames with his own body and was badly burned doing it. She died the next morning.<\/p>\n\n<p>She was buried three days later, on 13 July. It was their eighteenth wedding anniversary. The U.S. National Park Service, which keeps the Longfellow house, records that Henry could not attend the funeral because of his own burns.<\/p>\n\n<p>That December, in his journal, he wrote a single line about the season that the Park Service still quotes: &#8220;How inexpressibly sad are all holidays!&#8221;<\/p>\n\n<p>It got worse. In March 1863 his eldest son, Charles, still a teenager, left home to join the Union army in the American Civil War. He did not ask permission. He wrote his father a letter after he had already gone: &#8220;I have tried hard to resist the temptation of going without your leave but I cannot any longer.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n<p>On 27 November 1863, at a fight near New Hope Church in Virginia, Charles was shot. The ball went in under one shoulder blade, passed across his back, clipped a piece of his spine, and came out under the other shoulder blade. He lived, but his soldiering was over. Henry got the news on 1 December, travelled to Washington, found his son, and brought him home for a long recovery.<\/p>\n\n<p>Then he wrote the carol.<\/p>\n\n<p>Here is the first thing the brief version of this story gets wrong. Most retellings say he wrote it on Christmas Day 1863, a few weeks after the shooting. The authoritative Riverside edition of his collected poems dates it 25 December 1864. Hymnology Archive calls the 1863 date erroneous, and the Park Service notes that his own grandson, going through the papers decades later, landed on Christmas 1864 too. One more detail, stated once in the Park Service record and easy to read past: around Christmas 1863 and Christmas 1864, Longfellow wrote nothing in his journal at all.<\/p>\n\n<p>So he did not write it in the shock. He wrote it a year on, in the long grey part that comes after the shock, with his son home and healing and the war still going. That is the Christmas most grieving people actually have. Not the first one, when everyone is checking on you. The second one, when the song comes on in a shop and no one else notices.<\/p>\n\n<h2>The Two Verses the Carol Cuts<\/h2>\n\n<p>Longfellow called the poem &#8220;Christmas Bells.&#8221; It has seven verses. Here is the whole thing, as he wrote it. The two verses most hymnals and recordings leave out are marked.<\/p>\n\n<blockquote><p>I heard the bells on Christmas Day<br>Their old, familiar carols play,<br>And wild and sweet<br>The words repeat<br>Of peace on earth, good-will to men!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<blockquote><p>And thought how, as the day had come,<br>The belfries of all Christendom<br>Had rolled along<br>The unbroken song<br>Of peace on earth, good-will to men!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<blockquote><p>Till, ringing, singing on its way,<br>The world revolved from night to day,<br>A voice, a chime,<br>A chant sublime<br>Of peace on earth, good-will to men!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p><em>The two verses that are usually cut:<\/em><\/p>\n\n<blockquote><p>Then from each black, accursed mouth<br>The cannon thundered in the South,<br>And with the sound<br>The carols drowned<br>Of peace on earth, good-will to men!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<blockquote><p>It was as if an earthquake rent<br>The hearth-stones of a continent,<br>And made forlorn<br>The households born<br>Of peace on earth, good-will to men!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p><em>And the two verses everyone keeps:<\/em><\/p>\n\n<blockquote><p>And in despair I bowed my head;<br>&#8220;There is no peace on earth,&#8221; I said:<br>&#8220;For hate is strong,<br>And mocks the song<br>Of peace on earth, good-will to men!&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<blockquote><p>Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:<br>&#8220;God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!<br>The Wrong shall fail,<br>The Right prevail,<br>With peace on earth, good-will to men!&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p>Read the cut verses again. The cannon drowns out the carols. The earthquake splits the hearth-stones, which is a very old way of saying it broke up families. Those two verses are the reason for the despair in the verse that follows.<\/p>\n\n<p>Now notice what happens when you sing the hymn without them. &#8220;And in despair I bowed my head&#8221; arrives with nothing before it. The cause is gone. Only the despair stays.<\/p>\n\n<p>Which is exactly what a sad Christmas feels like. Everyone else in the shop is hearing a cheerful song. You are hearing a verse with its reason cut out. The grief is real, the cause is real, and nobody around you can see it in the room.<\/p>\n\n<p>And look at what Longfellow did not do. He did not tidy the despair away before the last verse. He let &#8220;hate is strong, and mocks the song&#8221; stand as a whole stanza of a Christmas carol. The sadness gets its full say first. Only then do the bells answer.<\/p>\n\n<p>If you like the hidden stories behind the carols, the one behind <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/articles\/silent-night-lyrics-meaning-and-the-broken-organ-behind-it\/\">Silent Night and its broken organ<\/a> is just as surprising.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Three Things Almost Nobody Mentions About This Carol<\/h2>\n\n<p><strong>It was first printed in a children&#8217;s magazine.<\/strong> The poem&#8217;s first appearance was in a magazine for young readers called <em>Our Young Folks<\/em>, in February 1865, while the war was still on. A poem with cannon, earthquakes, and a man in despair, printed for children. Longfellow did not think they needed protecting from it.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>The famous tune was written for a different hymn.<\/strong> The melody most churches sing, called WALTHAM, was composed by a London organist named John Baptiste Calkin. Hymnology Archive traces it to an 1872 hymn book, where it was set to a completely different text, and can only confirm it paired with Longfellow&#8217;s words by 1919. The melody you may know from radio, the one Bing Crosby recorded in 1956, is a separate tune written by Johnny Marks, the same man who wrote &#8220;Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>The Sunday school story is probably not true.<\/strong> It is often said that Longfellow wrote the poem for a church Sunday school in Boston. Hymnology Archive points out that no early biography of Longfellow mentions this, and says that without supporting evidence it should be treated as a myth.<\/p>\n\n<p>One more pattern worth noticing. Crosby&#8217;s recording used verses one, two, six and seven. The 2008 Casting Crowns version used one, six, seven and three. Different eras, different singers, same choice every time. Everyone keeps the despair. Everyone cuts the war.<\/p>\n\n<h2>So Is It Grief?<\/h2>\n\n<p>Often, yes. Not always in the clinical sense, but in the plain one. A song can carry a person, or a house, or a whole year you did not get. When it plays, you are not reacting to the music. You are reacting to what the music is holding.<\/p>\n\n<p>That is not a malfunction. It is the song doing its job. Christmas songs are built to be the same every year precisely so they can show you what is different.<\/p>\n\n<p>And here is what Longfellow seems to have understood in 1864. He did not argue with his sadness. He did not pretend the cannon were not firing. He wrote the despair down in full and then let the bells answer it, with something much older than his poem: the idea that God is not asleep in the middle of your worst year, and that the wrong you are looking at will not get the last word. He does not explain how. He just lets that line ring louder than the cannon. If a song in a shop can still make you cry, it is because some part of you still believes peace was supposed to be true. That belief is not the problem. It might be the most honest thing in the whole shop.<\/p>\n\n<p>If this is your first Christmas without someone, there is a quiet page here for exactly that: <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/prayer\/prayer-for-the-first-holiday-without-a-loved-one\/\">a prayer for the first holiday without a loved one<\/a>. And if you want to understand where you are in it, our free <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/what-stage-of-grief-am-i-in\/\">What Stage of Grief Am I In?<\/a> quiz takes a couple of minutes and asks nothing of you.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What to Do When a Song Undoes You in a Shop<\/h2>\n\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Let it finish.<\/strong> A song is about three minutes long. You can stand by the tins for three minutes. Fighting it usually takes longer than feeling it.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Say the name.<\/strong> Quietly, to yourself. The song is almost always about a person. Naming them turns a vague ache into something you can hold.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Choose the honest carols on purpose.<\/strong> Make a short list of the ones that admit something, like this one, and play them at home where you can cry properly. The relentlessly merry ones can wait.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Tell one person.<\/strong> &#8220;That song gets me every year&#8221; is a full sentence. Most people have one too, and you will be surprised who says so.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Skip the ones you cannot bear this year.<\/strong> You do not owe any song a listen. Next year it may be different.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p>Next time it happens in a shop, you could do what Longfellow did. Bow your head. Then stand there until the last verse.<\/p>\n\n<h2>A Question for You<\/h2>\n\n<p>Longfellow wrote seven verses and most of us sing five. Do you think the two war verses should be sung again, or is the carol better without them? Tell us what you think in the comments.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"convertkit-form wp-block-convertkit-form\" style=\"\"><script async data-uid=\"6491fb8269\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.kit.com\/6491fb8269\/index.js\" data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" data-no-defer=\"1\" data-no-optimize=\"1\" nowprocket><\/script><\/div>\n\n\n<h2>Share This<\/h2>\n\n<p>Found out today that &#8220;I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day&#8221; was written by a man whose wife had died in a fire and whose son had just been shot in the war. The despair verse is on purpose. https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/entertainment\/music\/why-do-christmas-songs-make-me-sad\/<\/p>\n\n<p>If Christmas songs make you cry in shops, read this. One of the carols was written about exactly that feeling, and they cut the two verses that explain why. https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/entertainment\/music\/why-do-christmas-songs-make-me-sad\/<\/p>\n\n<p>&#8220;There is no peace on earth, I said.&#8221; That line is in a Christmas carol. Here is why Longfellow left it there. https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/entertainment\/music\/why-do-christmas-songs-make-me-sad\/<\/p>\n\n<h2>Questions People Ask About Sad Christmas Songs<\/h2>\n\n<h3>Why do Christmas songs make me sad?<\/h3>\n<p>Christmas songs make many people sad because they stay the same every year while life does not, so they measure what has changed. They are also tied to specific people and rooms, and they promise peace and togetherness, which can hurt in a hard year. Some carols are also genuinely sad by design. &#8220;I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day&#8221; was written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow after his wife died in a fire and his son was badly wounded in the American Civil War, and it includes a whole verse of despair.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Who wrote &#8220;I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day&#8221; and why?<\/h3>\n<p>Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the poem &#8220;Christmas Bells,&#8221; which became the carol &#8220;I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.&#8221; His wife Fanny died after her dress caught fire in July 1861, and his son Charles was shot through the back in November 1863 while serving in the Union army. Longfellow wrote the poem on Christmas Day 1864, hearing church bells ring &#8220;peace on earth&#8221; while the Civil War was still being fought.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Which verses of &#8220;I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day&#8221; are left out?<\/h3>\n<p>Most hymnals and recordings leave out the fourth and fifth verses of Longfellow&#8217;s original seven-verse poem. Those two verses describe cannon thundering in the South and drowning the carols, and an earthquake splitting the hearth-stones of a continent. They are the verses about the American Civil War, and they are the reason for the despair in the verse that follows, &#8220;And in despair I bowed my head.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n<h3>When was &#8220;I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day&#8221; written?<\/h3>\n<p>The Riverside edition of Longfellow&#8217;s collected poems dates &#8220;Christmas Bells&#8221; to 25 December 1864. Many popular accounts say 1863, but the hymn-history site Hymnology Archive calls that date erroneous. The poem was first published in February 1865 in a children&#8217;s magazine called Our Young Folks. The common tune WALTHAM, by John Baptiste Calkin, dates from 1872 and was written for a different hymn.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Is it normal to cry at Christmas music?<\/h3>\n<p>Yes. Crying at Christmas music is a common and normal response, especially after a loss or a hard year. The songs are tied to memories of people and places, and they repeat every year, which makes change and absence easy to feel. It is not a sign that something is wrong with you. Letting the song finish, naming the person it reminds you of, and telling one other person about it are simple ways to get through the moment.<\/p>        <div class=\"booster-block booster-reactions-block\">\n            <div class=\"twp-reactions-icons\">\n                \n                <div class=\"twp-reacts-wrap\">\n                    <a react-data=\"be-react-1\" post-id=\"120163\" class=\"be-face-icons un-reacted\" href=\"javascript:void(0)\">\n                        <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/booster-extension\/\/assets\/icon\/happy.svg\" alt=\"Happy\" title=\"\">\n                    <\/a>\n                    <div class=\"twp-reaction-title\">\n                        Happy                    <\/div>\n                    <div class=\"twp-count-percent\">\n                                                    <span style=\"display: none;\" class=\"twp-react-count\">0<\/span>\n                        \n                       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src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/booster-extension\/\/assets\/icon\/surprise.svg\" alt=\"Surprise\" title=\"\">\n                    <\/a>\n                    <div class=\"twp-reaction-title\">Surprise<\/div>\n                    <div class=\"twp-count-percent\">\n                                                    <span style=\"display: none;\" class=\"twp-react-count\">0<\/span>\n                                                                        <span class=\"twp-react-percent\"><span>0<\/span> %<\/span>\n                                            <\/div>\n                <\/div>\n\n            <\/div>\n        <\/div>\n\n    ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why do Christmas songs make me sad? Part of the answer is memory. The rest is a carol written by a grieving father, with two verses cut, built to hold it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":120162,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_wp_convertkit_post_meta":{"form":"-1","landing_page":"0","tag":"0","restrict_content":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[788,3715],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","category-personal-growth-and-life-skills"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120163"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":120164,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120163\/revisions\/120164"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}