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This time of year, Run-D.M.C.’s Darryl McDaniels doesn’t like to leave the house. “I’m scared to go to the mall, because every five steps somebody’s screaming, ‘It’s Christmastime in Hollis, Queens!’ Kids, grandmothers, it’s crazy,” McDaniels says. “I can’t be going shopping till after Christmas.” Run-D.M.C.’s “Christmas in Hollis” is a modern holiday standard, making McDaniels a member of a vanishingly small club: Most lyricists of classic Christmas songs are dead. “Christmas in Hollis” was originally released in 1987, during a 10-year span that produced two other classics, Wham’s “Last Christmas” (1984) and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” (1994). There hasn’t been an enduring holiday song released in the 20 years since. No one, not even such superstars as Taylor Swift, Coldplay or Beyoncé, has managed to turn a temporary seasonal hit into an evergreen since Carey’s tune. Some recent songs that showed promise, like Faith Hill’s “Where Are You Christmas?” or Justin Bieber’s “Mistletoe,” couldn’t survive their singers’ waning popularity. Others, like Christian group NewSong’s tearjerker-turned-novel-turned-TV-movie “The Christmas Shoes,” flamed out early.

Christmas

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What we think of as "Christmas music" is really just a seasonal exercise in baby boomer nostalgia. That, at least, is one takeaway from the list of the top 30 most-played Christmas songs of all time, compiled by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). Nearly two-thirds of these songs were written in the 40s and 50s -- when the baby boomers were small children. No holiday songs from the 2000s or the present decade crack the top 30. The closest is Mariah Carey's 1994 hit "All I Want for Christmas is You." And only one 80s song makes it -- George Michael's risible "Last Christmas." But that's far from the worst song on the list. That honor goes to the MIDI-synthesized abomination that is Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime," which I'm forcing myself to listen to as I write this. Overwhelmingly, though, the sound of Christmas is trapped in the mid-20th century. Web comic artist Randall Munroe (of XKCD fame) made this observation back in 2009, when ASCAP released its original list of the 20 top Christmas songs of the 2000s: "Every year, American culture embarks on a massive project to carefully recreate the Christmas of Baby Boomers' childhoods," he wrote. Or, more concisely, "an 'American tradition' is anything that happened to a Baby Boomer twice." Plenty of ink has been spilled on why it's so hard for new holiday songs to gain traction with listeners. Part of the reason the boomers' childhood classics endure is that the postwar era really was an exceptional time in American history: jobs were plentiful, the economy was booming, and America's influence on the world stage was at its peak.

Christmas