Things you didn't know about Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas! Behind the Christmas Hits

It was a Christmas hit that literally had to be rescued from the trash! This is the story behind…Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.

It was written for Judy Garland’s 1944 movie Meet Me in St. Louis. The film was notable for a couple of reasons: the song and for being where Judy and the film’s director, Vincent Minnelli, met and fell in love. They married in 1945 and then Liza Minnelli was born the next year.
 
The movie tells a year in the life of the Smith family beginning in 1903 and leading up to the World’s Fair the following year. Meet Me in St. Louis became the second-highest grossing film of 1944 and had a hugely successful soundtrack with three hit songs – hey, that’s just like Flashdance!

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas is heard after Garland’s character, Esther, becomes engaged to the handsome boy next door, John Truitt, at a fancy Christmas Eve ball – however, their engagement means, they have to move from St. Louis to New York – something that doesn’t sit well with Esther’s 5-year-old sister, Tootie.  
 
Songwriter Hugh Martin wrote a melody for the song but threw it away after being unable to figure out what to do with it. When I say threw it away, I mean, in the trash to be taken out by custodial staff. After telling his writing partner, Ralph Blane, what he had done the next day, Blane insisted they start going through trash cans because that melody was too good to throw out. Blaine once told NPR “thank the lord we found it.”
 
That said, Judy Garland had some major problems with the original lyrics and refused to sing them. She thought they were far too sad and gloomy and needed some hope & optimism. Hugh Martin wrote in his biography, The Boy Next Door, he refused to rewrite it and stood by the song as it was. That’s when Garland’s co-star, Tom Drake, came to Martin and said “I’ll think you’ll be sorry if you don’t do this.” So Martin went home and wrote the version heard in the movie.

How sad were those original lyrics? Well, the line "Let your heart be light / Next year all our troubles will be out of sight" was originally written as "It may be your last / Next year we may all be living in the past.”  
 
There was a lot of pain in those original lyrics – something that wasn’t often expressed in Christmas music back then. But Judy Garland wasn’t alone in her feelings that it was too sad. In 1957, Frank Sinatra tweaked the line “Next year all our troubles will be miles away” to the now more commonly heard “From now on our troubles will be miles away.” Suddenly, a wish for a better tomorrow became more of a celebration of the present day.  Depending on how the music is arranged, you can still get those melancholy feels…but any hint of the pain in Martin and Blaine’s original lyrics…was now gone.  
 
Ralph Blane passed away in 1995. Martin lived until he was 96 in 2011…and he liked to keep up with who was recording new versions of their song every year. He told Entertainment Weekly he enjoyed Sarah McLachlan and James Taylor’s…and called Twisted Sister’s version “a hoot.”

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