Things you didn't know about Donny Hathaway's THIS CHRISTMAS! Behind the Christmas Hits

Donny Hathaway recognized that the Black experience was underrepresented in Christmas music, so he decided to change that. This is the story behind…This Christmas.

The song Donny Hathaway would find was written 3 years before its release in the middle of a blizzard by a Chicago postal worker named Nadine McKinnor.  

Nadine would keep a notebook full of lyrics she’d jot down as they came to her. She told the Chicago Tribune that these lyrics were about her love affair with the season – the swirl of music, department store windows and the lights on the south side of the city. Nadine and her co-workers were sorting mail in the middle of a blizzard. 58 cm of snow had fallen in a 24 hour period. They were looking to pass the time, so Nadine started singing the lyrics to the song that would become This Christmas. 

Nadine has said she didn’t have civil rights in mind when she wrote the lyrics…and even hoped that one day an artist like Andy Williams would record it. But her boyfriend at the time would be the connection between her and Hathaway. He was doing some decorating at Donny’s home & office and overheard him and his manager talking about looking for new material. 

McKinnor recounted her first meeting with Hathaway for The New Yorker – she went to that same office that was being redecorated a few days later and started to sing from her notebook.  The same notebook she sang from for her co-workers at the post office. She said she sang four or five songs for Donny, but This Christmas was the one that instantly got his attention. Quote: “I tore the page out to give him and I never got it back.”

Nadine had envisioned the song to be sung in a style similar to Nat King Cole’s The Christmas Song – it was Hathaway who, as Nadine puts it, gave it its magic and infused it with his gospel roots. That’s entirely where the improvised line “shake a hand, shake a hand” comes from. While so many Christmas songs of the previous 25 years had been about nostalgic feelings of home, there’s nothing nostalgic about This Christmas. It doesn’t look back at all. It’s upbeat and now. “This Christmas. Will Be. A very special Christmas. For me!”

Recorded in Chicago in the fall of 1970 and released that November, This Christmas was not a hit.  

Donny Hathaway was never as famous as Marvin Gaye or Stevie Wonder, but his work was respected and inspired future generations of songwriters like Alicia Keys, Lauryn Hill and Justin Timberlake.  

However, the impact of This Christmas wasn’t really felt it was included in a re-release of a compilation album from Atco Records in 1991 called Soul Christmas. And then the covers started coming. Destiny’s Child, Chris Brown, Usher, Mary J Blige, even Donny’s daughter, Lalah Hathaway has recorded it.  

Lawrence Ware – the co-director of the Centre for Africana Studies at Oklahoma State University once said it’s almost like a rite of passage for black singers to record This Christmas.

Sadly, Donny Hathaway didn’t live long enough to see This Christmas become the Black Christmas anthem it did. He died under mysterious circumstances after having dinner at Roberta Flack’s house in January 1979. Hathaway fell 15 stories from his Central Park hotel room in what was ruled a suicide, despite no note being left and many people close to him swearing that he wouldn’t have killed himself. 

For Nadine McKinnor, the song’s success has provided her with a good place in life. After years of hard work in several different offices, she was successful in her legal challenge to become the song’s co-publisher. Nadine is now retired and earns over $70,000 a year in royalties.  

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