The Christmas season isn’t complete without singing a few Christmas carols but do you know the history behind any of the songs you may be belting out to neighbors?<\/b>
\nHere\u2019s a closer look at the stories behind some of your favorite holiday tunes. Inspiration can strike you anywhere, even on a subway. While traveling to a music publisher\u2019s office in 1933, the tune\u2019s songwriters John Frederick Coots and Haven Gillespie sat in a subway car and penned the song on the back of an envelope. It started off with Donald Gardner asking a group of second-graders to complete the sentence, \u201cAll I want for Christmas is\u2026 \u201d No, no one really said they wanted their two front teeth for Christmas. But when Gardner listened to their wishes, some of the students\u2019 lisps gave him the inspiration for his 1948 hit. He went home that night and wrote the song in 30 minutes. When songwriters Hugh Martin and Ralph Blaine originally wrote the holiday classic for the 1944 movie, \u201cMeet Me in St. Louis,\u201d Judy Garland didn\u2019t like it. The actress said it was so sad it would make her co-star Margaret O\u2019Brien cry and leave herself looking like a monster. After some debate, the songwriters changed the song to the version that is in the movie. A plea for peace, maybe? Songwriters and then-married couple Noel Regney and Gloria Shayne Baker wrote the song during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. The song later went on to sell more than a quarter-million copies during that Christmas season. Walter Kent and James Gannon\u2019s song captured the mood of homesick Americans in 1943, especially the soldiers who were in the depths of World War II. It was the most requested song at Christmas U.S.O. shows in Europe as well as the Pacific. It\u2019s actually an 18th-century memory game intended to help young Catholics learn the tenants of their faith. Over the centuries, some said the song\u2019s gifts have hidden meanings, including the \u201ctrue love\u201d symbolizing God and \u201cthe partridge in a pear tree\u201d as Jesus Christ. That\u2019s probably what composer Jule Styne and lyricist Sammy Cahn desperately wanted in July of 1945. That\u2019s when they wrote this song, in the middle of a heatwave in Hollywood.<\/p>\n