I love this song. Just musically, it’s great. Powered by a solid four-note ostinato, its 3/4 feels like 6/8, plus it has a frankly anthemic chord progression, and unlike most Christmas music, it succeeds without schmaltzy lyrics (more on this later). Unfortunately, these same qualities have led to this song’s utter ruination, as one shitty version after another piles up in our holiday party playlists like leftover Mariah Carey B-sides. This, combined with the lack of a definitive original version, has transformed a once-interesting Christmas carol into an avatar for musical excess, a bare wireframe stripped of its personality so some of our worst recording artists and brands can act out their hysterical fantasies on its corpse. 

You’ll see some familiar names in this elegy, which to me indicates a box-checking approach to holiday songs, as if recording “Carol of the Bells” is like making a vampire movie. This time I’ll put my own unique stamp on the genre!Whether we need that take never seems to matter. Sadly, I’m the only one brave enough to say it: this has gone too far and cannot be rectified. It’s time to remove this song from the canon, for ten years at least. It’s for the good of us all. 

This 1941 track is the earliest recording of the song I could find on secondhandsongs.com. It features the English lyrics, written in 1936 over an earlier Ukrainian work, “Shchedryk,” which was itself a pastiche of older folk songs. Feel free to go down a Wikipedia rabbit hole about this song’s origins as a New Year’s tune featuring a talking bird. 

Anyway, so far, so good. Nice song, not overplayed yet. However, 1941 was smack in the middle of the peak of popular Christmas music in the United States, throwing “Carol of the Bells” in the mix with Rudolph, Frosty, Santa, and various inanimate items and abstract concepts, like jingling bells or winters wonderland. And as we’ll see, the Christmas song industrial complex ended up being kinder to those creations than it was to this one. 

I think it’s salient that this piece was not originally about Christmas at all. The fact that its success as a Christmas song is the result of musical reinterpretation means there’s no platonic version, no original you have to respect or consider when recording the song anew. On some level, every version of “Silver Bells” or “Feliz Navidad” is covering Bing Crosby or José Feliciano, and that influences the performer in some way, even unconsciously. Not so with “Carol of the Bells,” a song that musicians and brands alike have thus been free to twist into whatever they want it to be. 

An early canary in the coal mine was this cheap commercial for cheap champagne, which apparently ran every year in the 1970s and 80s. Seems innocuous enough, right? The musical track sounds to me like a Moog or similar synthesizer, which is not automatically bad, unless you’re my mom and you think that Switched-On Bach was a travesty. That record came out in 1968, and it must have been clear by the time of these commercials that electronic music was not going away. And “Carol of the Bells” fit perfectly, with its lack of lyrics (in this version) and driving tempo. 

However, something else happened in the 80’s; specifically Mannheim Steamroller, a.k.a. former jingle maestro Chip Davis’s mall-soundtrack juggernaut. Was Davis reminded of this song by the annual André commercials? Or its appearance in the 1987 Claymation Christmas Special? Or had he already planned to ruin it himself on 1988’s multiplatinum A Fresh Aire Christmas, where he interpolated its spare melody with unnecessary horn blasts, THX power tones, synth drums that would make Phil Collins cringe, and a “Rockit”-style robot voice in the middle for some reason? 

Just two years later, we hear the same song in Home Alone, which is basically the beginning of the end. Go ahead and start writing “Carol of the Bells”’s obituary. From that point on, every year saw more high-profile “interpretations” of this song clogging our holiday music arteries, typically by the kind of artists who offer exclusive editions of their CD at Target, like Natalie Cole, Kenny G, Placido Domingo, and SheDaisy. Aside from hearing this song incessantly mangled, these recordings reinforce its new role as a generic Christmas party staple, watered down to fit nicely in the background with a Michael Bublé song whose name you can’t quite remember.

The thing of it is, people love this song. If they didn’t, Trans-Siberian Orchestra wouldn’t even exist. But people also liked pumpkin spice until it took over October and November, and now everyone’s kind of like, could we not? 

“Carol of the Bells” is facing a similar fate. Throughout the 2000s, it became fodder for anyone trying to cash in with a Christmas album, whether that was Barenaked Ladies, Rick Springfield, Patty Loveless, Brian Setzer Orchestra, Sixpence None the Richer, Jessica Simpson, or Emmy Rossum. By the time Twilight vampire quintet Pentatonix got around to releasing their inevitable version in 2013, it was too late to save this song. 

The biggest problem, however, is the commercials. At least a musician theoretically views a song with some kind of respect or reverence. An advertiser is more likely to say, “How can I change the lyrics to something cheesy about (insert product here)?” Either that, or they play up the song’s soaring, “O Fortuna”-like power for a rhapsodic celebration of satiny lingerie.

The problem is that this song’s versatility is its downfall. It successfully wears so many hats that you can’t resist using it for whatever need you’ve got. It can play the ravishing holiday epic for pirouetting pop violinist Lindsey Stirling. It can stand in as a dumb-lyrics-about-Target patter song. You can play it straight and solemn, like harpist Deborah Henson-Conant did, or turn it into a silly Muppets viral video. You can do it with lyrics or without, meaning John Tesh and LeAnn Rimes both got to take it out for a spin. You can simultaneously project old-world class and Poochie energy by creating a glitchy remix for Christian Dior. You can do it as smooth jazz or straight-ahead jazz. Did I hesitate to type “carol of the bells synthwave” into my search bar? That tells me you aren’t ready for the vaporwave cover, and definitely can’t handle the dubstep version either. If that’s too out-there for your Xmas Eve party, go with this orchestral rock bombast from 80s hitmeister David Foster — which, to paraphrase William H. Macy’s character in State and Main, sounds like Yanni puked and then the puke recorded this song.

Other holiday songs have many of these same characteristics, of course. “Greensleeves” is a folk song turned carol. “Joy to the World” can get pretty bombastic. “O Tannenbaum” has had its words changed a million times. “Jingle Bells” topped the charts with a version performed by dogs over 50 years ago. “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” is perfect for a full choir, “Silent Night” is completely overplayed, and none of the tunes from The Nutcracker have lyrics. But “Carol of the Bells” may be the only one that combines all these things into one package.

I previously mentioned this song’s Ukrainian roots. The composer, Mykola Leontovych, had arranged it from a traditional folk tune before its first performance in 1916. He was later murdered by the predecessor to the KGB when the Bolsheviks took over the tiny republic and subsumed it into the Soviet Union. You can read this fascinating article at Slate for more, and consider how Russia suppressing this song in their efforts to destroy Ukrainian identity fits into our current geopolitical climate.  

In that same article, the song’s current copyright holder boasts breathlessly about how frequently he licenses it for third-party use. “It’s used all the time. I can’t begin to tell you how many times it’s used.” Yeah dude, that’s the problem. I don’t care if Pringles ruins some novelty song about a flying reindeer or a melting snowman, but this song is unlike any other holiday music, from its haunting melody and driving block chords to its newly resonant backstory. I shouldn’t be hearing it in shitty Verizon commercials and watching the California Raisins shart all over it for yuks. I know I’m an outlier, but I think this particular opinion is sound. When I learned the history of this song, all I could think was that while the Russians killed Leontovych quickly, the death of “Carol of the Bells” has been far more excruciating.