Richard Bratby

What makes a Christmas song Christmassy?

From werewolf films to Soviet Russia, the origins of many Yuletide classics are hard to get your head around

The original poster for the 1934 Soviet film Lieutenant Kijé, Prokofiev's soundtrack of which has become an unlikely Christmas classic. Image: Alamy Stock Photo  
issue 17 December 2022

Temperature records for Los Angeles in the summer of 1945 are patchy, but 90 in the shade seems to have been the norm. It was during one such scorcher, presumably, that the songwriters Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn pulled up at a red light on the corner of Hollywood and Vine.

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