Special Holiday Edition: Why "Last Christmas" by Wham! is the "Die Hard" of Christmas Songs
A re-post from December 18th
The following article was first published December 18th as part of the regular Sunday post. I’m including it here again in case you missed it. Feel free to share it with someone special.
Top 5 Records Music Review: “Last Christmas” is the Die Hard of Christmas Songs
Since the death of George Michael on Christmas Day, 2016, “Last Christmas” by Wham! (1984) has become a staple of the holiday season. Don’t get me wrong: It is not as though radio stations avoided playing the song in years past. It just wasn’t beloved the way it is now. In every year since Michael’s passing, “Last Christmas” has charted in the top ten on the UK singles chart, even peaking at #1 in 2020 and early 2021. In the process, it set a record for the longest time for a song to reach the top spot on the UK singles chart following its release (a record since broken this year by “Running Up That Hill [A Deal With God]” by Kate Bush from 1985; thank you Stranger Things and the collapse of the recording music industry.1) Since 2016, the song has also steadily climbed year-by-year into the Top Ten in the United States, getting as high as #7 on January 1 of this year.
Like many pop Christmas songs, “Last Christmas” is a product of its time. It was not the first widely-played Christmas song to rely heavily on synthesizers (I’d guess that honor would go to the oft-maligned “Wonderful Christmastime” by Paul McCartney [1979],) but it hit the radio at a time when synthpop songs like it were all the rage. It’s probably no coincidence that 1984 was the year Mannheim Steamroller released their first collection of synthesized Christmas instrumentals. In a few short years, we’d also have synth-driven covers of “Winter Wonderland” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” by Eurythmics and Pretenders, respectively.
As it would be, by the 1990s, the sleek, icy sound of synthesized holiday songs came to be associated with Christmas in yuppie America. Remember in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation when Clark Griswold sent that spear of ice flying into his suburban neighbors’ bedroom, destroying Margo and Todd’s CD collection? I one-hundred percent guarantee you that at least two of those CDs contained laid-back adult contemporary Christmas tunes dusted with synths and paced by a drum machine. Sure, this song came out in 1998, but you know the type: They’re as cozy as chestnuts roasting on an open fire, but also maybe a little too cozy. Or alternately, they’re as chill as Jack Frost nipping at your nose, but also probably a little too chill.
Anyway, I think that’s what accounts for the diminished reputation of “Last Christmas” in the 90s and 00s. During that time, the song was dragged as a pop novelty that hadn’t aged well. It didn’t even make the cut for the original 2001 Now That’s What I Call Christmas! compilation, having to wait two years to be included on Volume 2, an honor it shared with classics like Elton John’s “Step Into Christmas”, the Waitresses’s “Christmas Wrapping”, and—stunningly—the now-standard “All I Want For Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey. Despite the slight, a prescient, up-and-coming country singer by the name of Taylor Smith—no, check that, Swift, Taylor Swift, my bad—placed a cover of “Last Christmas” on her 2007 Christmas EP. She was probably on to something.
The status of “Last Christmas” in 2010 is best summed up by a game called “Whamaggedon” (I have no idea why the geniuses who came up with this contest didn’t stylize it “Wham!aggedon) in which players try to avoid hearing the song during the first twenty-four days of December. Someone who hears any snippet of the song in its original form as performed by Wham! must post #Whamaggedon on their social media page to inform the other players they’ve lost. The last player not to hear the song wins.
The existence of this game at that time signaled both a.) a general disdain for the song, morphing into an ironic—and soon genuine—appreciation—of it, and b.) The song’s ubiquity on Christmas playlists. “Last Christmas” had never gone away, and people were coming around to it again. Why? By 2010, audiences had started re-embracing synthpop, so that helped. So did the fact that a lot of Gen Xers who were kids in the 1980s were now adults and nostalgic for the Christmases of their youth, which for a few years probably sounded like George Michael singing about giving his heart to someone special. (The same thing happened with Carey’s anthem; what was once a disposable holiday slice of cheese is now as central to Christmas as Santa Claus.)
But do you want to know a little secret about “Last Christmas”? It’s not really about Christmas. It’s a song about unrequited love that just happens to be set during Christmas. The lyrical authorities at Genius agree with me on this, so don’t even try arguing with me about it.
Here’s how I imagine it played out: Michael had the hook—“Last [something or another], I gave you my heart/ But the very next day, you gave it away/ This year, to save me from tears/ I’ll give it to someone special”—but he needed an identifiable date to plug into the song. It couldn’t be a month like April or a season like summer because he’s working in days, and it couldn’t be a day of the week because he’s referencing something that happened last year rather than last week. An actual date—say, March 5th—doesn’t work because that would be dumb and insignificant. It can’t be “yesterday” because…you know. So he needs a holiday or specific annual occasion. By process of elimination—it can’t be Halloween or Arbor Day or the four-syllable Valentine’s Day or the three-syllable Homecoming—it has to be Christmas. And it doesn’t hurt that you “give” things to people on Christmas either, but that’s more of a happy little accident in my book.
My main point, though, is that “Last Christmas” spends no time dwelling on the meaning of the season, references none of the holiday’s hallmarks (bells, mistletoe, reindeer, etc.) nor singles out any Christmas tradition beyond the word “wrapped.” Perhaps the Christmas setting adds to the heartbreak—you’re supposed to be happy at Christmas—but the song isn’t leaning on Christmas to generate that sense of heartbreak the way “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” does. And a song doesn’t become a Christmas song just because it mentions Christmas in it’s title. (You definitely want to click on that link.) Like I said, it’s a song about unrequited love…that happens to be set at Christmas time.
That makes “Last Christmas” the Die Hard of Christmas songs. Die Hard (1988) is an action movie set on Christmas Eve. People get into big arguments about whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Here’s a pretty good qualitative analysis of that question. (OK, maybe not that great. After posing the question, “Do any of the film’s major themes apply to Christmas,” the author replies in the affirmative, stating, “Since Hans Gruber and all the other terrorists end up dead, it’s safe to say the movie is a big ‘no’ on killing innocent people for profit,” which, come on, is a moral that applies year-round and not only to the Christmas season!) And for those who scoff at qualitative studies, here’s a pretty good quantitative analysis of this most pressing of questions. (Yes, the methodological rigor isn’t great, but there is counting along with some graphs, which is enough for this political theorist.) But come on, Die Hard, like “Last Christmas”, doesn’t need Christmas to work. It’s just a backdrop the screenwriters and songwriters can play with every now and then. The Christmas motif is not a critical element of either work, and neither work develops themes associated with the holiday. Just as Die Hard is not a Christmas movie, “Last Christmas” is not a Christmas song.
But, you know what? It’s the Christmas season, and I’m feeling generous. So here’s what “Last Christmas” has going for it: Unlike Die Hard, which hit theaters in the middle of the summer, Wham! released “Last Christmas” as a double-A side with the equally excellent “Everything She Wants” on December 3, 1984, right at the start of the Christmas season. There’s also the fact that no one, including myself, listens to “Last Christmas” when it isn’t December, which puts it in the same company as “Joy to the World”, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”, and “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”. (BTW, speaking of “Christmas [Baby Please Come Home]: You are welcome.) Other memorable songs that fall into that same category include “Jingle Bells” and “Frosty the Snowman”, yet it should be noted that, by my own criteria, neither ought to be considered a Christmas song since their lyrics make absolutely no reference to the holiday. (Sorry, Frosty, but John McClane’s definitely got you on that one.) And really, shouldn’t an honest-to-goodness Christmas song really be about the events surrounding the birth of Jesus? He is the reason for the season, after all. That criteria would disqualify most of the songs heard on that radio station that starts playing holiday songs at the start of November before stopping promptly at noon on December 25.
I guess Christmas has come to encompass a lot of things. It’s the Christmas Eve service with the whole family in tow, angels we have heard on high, shepherds tending their flocks by night, visits to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, caroling and cookies, poinsettias and Charlie Brown, presents under a tree, Home Alone on the television, “Santa Baby” on the radio, even a Scrooge or two. There’s a lot of room for maneuver there, and plenty of space for John McClane and a synthpop song by Wham!.
Thanks for reading. And to quote a lyric from George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s holiday classic: “Merry Christmas.”