Christmas songs advent calendar Day 12

‘I Believe in Father Christmas’ by Greg Lake

They sold me a dream of Christmas
They sold me a silent night
And they told me a fairy story
'Til I believed in the Israelite
And I believed in father Christmas
I looked to the sky with excited eyes
That I woke with a yawn in the first light of dawn
And I saw him and through his disguise

When thinking about which songs to include in this advent calendar I’ve realised just how inattentive I’ve previously been to the content of many of the songs. ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’ is a very good example. As a part of the unofficial Christmas songs’ canon it’s become so familiar to me that I assumed I knew it well, and I certainly know the music well but I had never really listened to the lyrics. ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’ is an anti-Christmas song, unmasking the lie of Santa and the bigger lie of Christ. I’m not sure the video has aged too well, at times looking a little like a 1970s Turkish Delight advert (as Alan Partridge would say: “different times”) but, rather esoterically, it was partly filmed at the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. It’s interesting to note how easily the Christmas machine can digest counter-propaganda of this sort, just as capitalism can easily digest and monetise punk and protest songs (and anything else).

Talking of monetisation, Wikipedia quotes a letter that Greg Lake wrote to the Guardian in 2005 regarding whether it was possible to live off the royalties from a Christmas hit.

In 1975, I wrote and recorded a song called "I Believe in Father Christmas", which some Guardian readers may remember and may even own. It was a big hit and it still gets played on the radio every year around December, and it appears on more or less every Christmas compilation going. So I can tell you from experience that it's lovely to get the old royalty cheque around September every year, but on its own, the Christmas song money isn’t quite enough to buy my own island in the Caribbean. I'm on tour at the moment and the Christmas song is as well received now as it was 30 years ago – maybe even more so. If Guardian readers could all please request it be played by their local radio stations, maybe that Caribbean island wouldn’t be so far away – and if I get there, you’re all invited.

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I’ll be adding these songs to a Spotify playlist, ‘Christmas songs advent calendar 2024’.