I'll Be Home For Christmas - She & Him
I’ll Be Home For Christmas was first released in October 1943. The song became popular among American soldiers overseas, but was censored on British airwaves. You see, at the time, a rather sanctimonious Dance Music Policy Committee decided which songs were permitted on BBC broadcasts. The previous year, they had issued the following directive:
I’ll Be Home For Christmas was first released in October 1943. The song became popular among American soldiers overseas, but was censored on British airwaves. You see, at the time, a rather sanctimonious Dance Music Policy Committee decided which songs were permitted on BBC broadcasts. The previous year, they had issued the following directive:
We have recently adopted a policy of excluding sickly sentimentality which, particularly when sung by certain vocalists, can become nauseating and not at all in keeping with what we feel to be the need of the public in this country in the fourth year of war.
I’ll grant that this song is sickly sentimental, but so are people, no?
Case in point:
53 years and a day ago, on December 18, 1965, the Gemini 7 spacecraft had set the record for NASA’s longest flight. The radio transcripts have a lot of back and forth about engines and trajectories and air pressure, so that one might almost miss this:
Imagine you're on board. There are a few minutes left until you fire the retrorockets, a few more checklists to cycle through, and then you'll start to spin deliriously down through the darkness, pink trails of heat arcing across the viewport, the wide blue earth turning impassively below. It will look a little like this, or like this:
You’ll fall towards the ocean for half an hour. For several minutes, the ionized air around the ship will silence the radio, and it will be only you and the command pilot, procedural and alone. For now, though, you can still hear voices from the ground, voices from down there in the blue with everyone else, and they want to play you a song.
It, uh, it doesn’t sound like much.
It’s sickly sentimental, sure, it's sort of a joke, when the radio operator sings:
But, still. The planet hangs beneath you, earth blurred by clouds and condensed air, and, as you prepare to fire off the rockets, it’s nice to remember that someone down there wanted you to hear the words:
It’s sickly sentimental, sure, it's sort of a joke, when the radio operator sings:But, still. The planet hangs beneath you, earth blurred by clouds and condensed air, and, as you prepare to fire off the rockets, it’s nice to remember that someone down there wanted you to hear the words:I’ll be home for Christmas, you can count on me.
They’re waiting for you.
I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.
"Very good," you reply.
- Tessa
- Tessa
P.S. The Library of Congress claims that a NASA transmitter asked if there was any music the astronauts wanted to hear, and that they requested I’ll Be Home For Christmas as they “hurtled back to earth aboard their Gemini 7 spacecraft” but I think this isn’t quite true. Shout out to Alex Altair for answering my space questions and making me sceptical of the original story.
P.P.S. if you want to know about the first song performed in space then, buddy, I have a second Christmas treat for you.