Beyond the mistletoe kisses, marshmallow worlds, and tinsel-topped cheer, festive music holds a bittersweet place in its heart for sadness and longing. Moments of joyous pop confetti contrast with yearning wintery laments, and a number of the season’s cosiest toe-warmers — “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas,” and “Blue Christmas,” for example, both currently featured on Billboard’s feted Holiday Hot 100 chart — evoke the mellow blue felt by many of us when December rolls around. Across the holiday genre, Christmas songs run the gamut of ‘melancholic’ moods, from heartbroken, blue, and sad to nostalgic, chill, and emotional.

Kacey Musgraves summoned this anti-festive spirit gracefully on her 2016 country-pop tear-jerker "Christmas Makes Me Cry." “It feels like we’re supposed to be happy during the holidays, but sometimes they just make you really sad. So, I wrote this song for anybody who might be feeling a little bit lonely,” she says in the spoken intro to a track that has seen a steady increase in Spotify streams since late October. The song title doubles as the playlist tagline for Spotify's ‘sad christmas’, which is dominated by 2020s releases — 15, or 30% — with the 2010s coming in second at 28%. The tagged moods are exactly what you’d expect: “lonely,” “heartbroken,” “melancholic,” “sad,” and “longing.” 

These emotional cues map out an ever-growing body of alternative Christmas songs. “... Some are unquestionably sad. Some are funny, some take the piss. But they're all finding far more personal ways of dealing with Christmas,” offers Alex Rawls, a New Orleans-based journalist and podcaster whose podcast 12 Songs of Christmas ‘flies the flag for Christmas music being made now.’ “And I guess, rather than treating Christmas as this elevated special moment, they treat it as a day on the calendar that we all have to deal with.” 

Are modern artists finding fewer reasons to be cheerful at Christmas and, in the process, subtly shifting the holiday soundtrack? 

The mainstream popstars making sad holiday pop 

Although it’s far from being the dominant mood on the holiday charts — which largely feature jolly standards like “All I Want For Christmas Is You” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” — it’s clear that contemporary pop voices are musing more on melancholy at Christmas. In 2017, Phoebe Bridgers  began her annual holiday tradition of reworking seasonal favorites into ghostly covers, offering her gray-shaded take on everything from Merle Haggard’s ​“If We Make It Through December” (2020) — released to raise money for the Downtown Women’s Center in Los Angeles — to "7 O'Clock News/Silent Night" (2019) by Simon & Garfunkel. Charmetric data reveals the former picked up an average of over 20K additional daily streams on Spotify throughout November, while streaming metrics show the latter has also been growing in popularity, adding over 10 points to its Chartmetric track score in the past month. 

It would seem the sharp, sobering truths of the season are being increasingly reframed through a mainstream pop lens. Miley Cyrus originally wrote “My Sad Christmas Song” in 2015, but revisited the track in 2019 while in 2020, Carly Rae Jepsen harnessed humour to deliver her relatable romp about the conflict and chaos of the family dinner table, “It’s Not Christmas ‘Til Somebody Cries,” which has an editorial playlist reach on Spotify of over 462K. 

The following year, Bryson Tiller teamed up with Justin Bieber and Poo Bear for R&B-pop croonathon “lonely christmas,” and Sabrina Carpenter’s 2023 offering “santa doesn’t know you like i do” (CM track score 93.8) — currently featured on 18 Spotify editorial playlists — eschews gift giving for authentic human love, turning in a slow-tempo holiday pop ballad with real meaning. 

Last year, hit-maker Ed Sheeran likewise unwrapped a gloss-free display of emotion about lost love, "Under the Tree,” which has drawn more than 3.8M new views on YouTube this November alone. The track, which was co-written and produced by Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid and charted all over the world, was used to soundtrack a heart-wrenching scene in the 2024 animated movie That Christmas, where a character is forced to spend the holidays alone because their father is unable to return home.

“It’s the one thing I’ve wanted to write,” Sheeran told Variety of “Under the Tree.” “I’d never seen the need [to write] a sad Christmas song until writing this one … this is quite a lot of people’s realities at Christmas.”

Anti-party playlists

Various other prominent pop voices have chimed in with their less-than-merry missives of late. Released in 2024, Charlie Puth’s top-scoring Wham-coded weepie “December 25th” reflects the theme of pining for a loved one or getting dumped at Christmas, while Jennifer Hudson leans into a sombre spiritual dimension for her November 2025 contemplative cover of "Mary Did You Know.” 

Many of these songs have found a comfortable home in the spread of alternative festive playlists that now populate the major streaming platforms. A quick glance brings up Spotify’s ‘Folksy Christmas’ — which has risen substantially from 4,252 followers in 2019 to 127,7K today — ‘Mellow Christmas’ — whose follower count has also been on an upward climb — and the platform’s aforementioned ‘sad Christmas’, which has risen from 5,121 followers in 2021 to over 28,8K in November 2025. 

Apple Music’s recently updated ‘Bummer Holiday’ playlist covers a range of eras and styles, including woozy indie-rock (Bleachers’ “Merry Christmas, Please Don’t Call”), finger-snapping R&B (Khalid’s “Last Christmas”), and heart-on-its-sleeve singer-songwriting (Cian Ducrot’s “I’ll Be Waiting (Sad At Christmas).” 46 out of the playlist’s 100 tracks date from the 2020s.

Soundtracking the sad mood trajectory 

If there is any kind of growing demand for unjolly festive fare, it can reasonably be seen as a reaction to the ubiquity of jolly Christmas culture. Too much Mariah can be bad for your mental health, after all. There’s a psychological explanation for why certain songs grate, too. It’s called source sensitivity; namely the context in which a piece of music was created. “… If you feel like the music is written to kind of try to force you to be really happy and, you know, that is annoying to you, and you're resistant to it, then that capacity for source sensitivity is going to be the foundation of how you get really irritated,” offers Dr. Elizabeth Margulis, a professor at Princeton University, where she directs the Music Cognition Lab. 

Margulis, whose research has covered the role of repetition in music, posits that the repetition of festive music provides a baseline shared reference that people can work against. “So you can't really have the anti-festive in as coherent a way, perhaps, if you don't have this kind of robust shared tradition of festive music. So I think that what is sort of inherent within the anti-festive, maybe, movement is the ubiquity of the actual festive music,” she suggests.

Spotify’s 90-track ‘Christmas Hits’ playlist (7.2M followers) features many of these ubiquitous favourites. Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock”, Michael Bublé’s “Holly Jolly Christmas”, and Andy Williams’s “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” all shine as gaudily as baubles on a Christmas tree. 

Save for Laufey’s “Winter Wonderland”, these top ten tracks are bound by an underlying upbeat vibe: “celebratory” or “cheerful”. A “celebratory” mood tag also applies to a chunk of Spotify’s other editorial Christmas playlists: ‘Christmas Pop’, ‘Christmas is Coming’ ‘Spotify Singles: Holiday Collection,’ and ‘Happy Holidays.’

Looking at the five new tracks added to Spotify’s ‘Christmas Hits’ so far in 2025, the picture shifts ever so slightly: “mournful,” “mourning,” and “melancholic” on Bleachers’ “Merry Christmas, Please Don't Call” and “blue” on Jordan Davis’ “O Come All Ye Faithful - Spotify Singles Holiday.” In 2024, “I’ll Be Home” by Meghan Trainor brought “longing,” Laufey’s “Santa Baby” was classed as “longing” and “painful,” while “Do You Hear What I Hear” was tagged as “contemplative” and Dolly Parton’s “Hard Candy Christmas” is considered “melancholic.” Out of the 33 “happy,” “heartwarming,” or “fun” tracks added that year, these gloomier moods barely skate the surface. What they do have in common, however, is that they were all released in the past five years (apart from Dolly and Whitney). 

It’s a slightly different story for 2023, where seven out of the 22 new tracks are tagged with unfestive moods like “contemplative,” “mournful,” “melancholic,” or “lonely.” 

The tragedy paradox

It’s not hard to see how an alternative festive playlist or soundtrack may resonate: the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) found in 2018 that 64% of people report being affected by the holiday blues. 

According to a 2024 analysis by University College London (UCL), sad Christmas songs help listeners cope with “festive blues,” loneliness or stress around the holidays. This paradox is why researchers have found many people intentionally seek out sad music when they’re feeling sad. “... One of the ideas about what's going on there is that you kind of have this sense, number one, of validation of what you're feeling. And number two, that it's a shared thing that other people experience, too. And you're not the only one having that experience,” offers Margulis.

This emotional function can help to explain why sad festive songs continue to find an audience, even as mainstream charts and major playlists still appear to favor the classic happy holiday hits. However, within the indie Christmas ecosystem, sad, moody music continues to thrive and shine.

Rawls paints a picture of an “alternative world” inhabited by noisy takes on “Last Christmas” and Lynchian ethereality. “… But really, I think the better way to think about it in a lot of cases is that they've made Christmas just a subject of their everyday music … They've integrated Christmas into the world they're talking about.”