Songfacts (Carl Wiser): When you came up with the title "Christmas Wrapping," were you inspired by the Kurtis Blow song of almost the same name? ["Christmas Rappin'"]

Chris Butler: It was a joke on it, of course. I was aware of it, and I thought it'd be a pun on a pun, because he was punning on it and I thought I would pun it around. Plus, I liked the idea of the word "wrap," like a wraparound, because the story is circular. It wraps up backward at the end. So I was double-punning, but it was kind of appropriate.

Songfacts: You've talked about how that song came real quickly to you. It seems like this is the kind of thing that doesn't come just in one session. This seems like something that you would have to really craft the story and think about.

Chris: Well, it was quick because it was done under duress. The idea of a Christmas record was the brainchild of our label owner, Michael Zilkha. He had ZE Records. Listen to this roster: he had Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Suicide, Was (Not Was), Allen Vega, and Lizzy Mercier Descloux, a French experimental chanteuse, since his theatrical girlfriend-at-the-time, Christina, was a fan. He had this eclectic, bizarre stable.

He comes up with an idea: Let's make a Christmas record of all these oddball bands. We nodded and said, "Yeah, sure," and hoped that he would forget about it. But he didn't.

We were very, very busy. We were on the road and touring and I was writing like a maniac, because you never have enough songs. I needed this like a hole in the head. It was July when he came up with this, and by August we were supposed to get it done. And you're not exactly in the Christmas spirit in July, other than the wonderful Preston Sturges movie, which I love, Christmas in July. But this is the last thing I needed.

And this is key: At the time, I was Scrooge. Some friends who knew me well had a T-shirt made for me that says, "Jump, George Bailey, jump." I still have it. I am the most unbelievable Scrooge. So here, the irony of ironies, I'm supposed to write a Christmas song.

So I took a little bit of this half-done thing and a little bit of that half-done thing, and cobbled something together. It was coming from a place of being the absolute Grinch, not having any time, feeling pressured, thinking this was a silly idea but I had to do it because our label got asked for it. And out of that came this... I'm almost ready to say "amazing song," but that's not humble. I'm much more humbled by it to the point where I am absolutely gobsmacked that every year I get such warm fuzzies from people saying, "It's not Christmas unless I hear this."

And I am genuinely, genuinely touched by the fact that the song has stuck to the culture. It was done quickly and we had fun doing it, but it was such an afterthought that we thought, Okay, done, forget it. And it is literally true that in November of '81, I call my girlfriend from Rochester, New York, and check in, and she says, "Made it, it's all over the radio." I go, "Finally, all this effort that we put into humping 'I Know What Boys Like' finally broke through." And she goes, "No, no, it's a Christmas song." I remember just being stunned. At the soundcheck we all kind of relearned the song and played it that night in Rochester, and it took off from there.

But you could do those things in those days. Rock and roll was fun.

Songfacts: How did you come up with the story for that song?

Chris: I had to keep writing and I was thinking about the O. Henry twist. I was thinking, What would affect a grump like me? And also, I had to avoid Jesus, because it had to be nonsectarian. In New York, you're surrounded by every major religion in the world, Judaism to Islam. All right. So how could I make it universal?

But what does happen, and it is true, there is a New York magical Christmas thing. There just really is. All those Christmas in New York songs and Miracle on 34th Street had a lot to do with it in terms of my mindset of there being a wonderful twist at the end where it all works out. There is a feeling in New York that there is something in the background cooking around that time of year. It does make things work out OK. And yes, everybody that I know - and myself - were super, super pressured. Most of the writers and artists I knew were feeling it, because their phones started ringing around December 1st, because everybody else had turned down all the jobs and they were way down on the Rolodex.

So instead of having a holiday, everybody I knew worked through it, because as a freelancer, you couldn't say no. If you say no to anything and you're a freelancer, they don't call again, and suddenly you're out of work. So everybody I knew had 10 or 12 projects going on over Christmas, and everyone was feeling stupid pressure. But there is something about New York City. A sense of magic and wonder.

And in terms of the story, I think my subconscious wanted something to cure me of my Grinch-hood, to fabricate this story where I'm in touch with some kind of force in the background that is working for good, even though the ending is on purpose, sappy. It's ironically sappy, and not to be taken seriously, but, Aw, gee, it does kind of work out sometimes like this. And it's what people want. A lot of songwriting for me was fulfilling fantasies of how I wish the world was. I wish the world was a certain way, and I wish that there really was something wonderful in the background working, especially around that time, that made everything turn out okay.

Songfacts: Have you ever spent a Christmas alone before?

Chris: Yeah.

Songfacts: And you had before you wrote the song?

Chris: Sure. Oh, of course. I wasn't going to go back to Ohio [just like Chrissie Hynde - also from Akron]. I never got along with my parents, and my brother isn't here much. I moved to New York in '79, so I had at least two Christmases under my belt in New York to know that you could just walk around and there's snow and it's pretty and it's quieter because the snow absorbs all the sound. There are the horse carriages in Central Park and the windows in Macy's, and you see the Christmas Tree in Rockefeller Center and go ice skating. It's fabulous. Yeah, New York was great at Christmas.

Songfacts: Well, I can tell you that the song has tremendous appeal to folks who don't have the traditional Christmas, where every year you go back to your family. If you are on your own for Christmas for whatever reason, this is a song for you. You have to do things to create your own Christmas.

Chris: Yes. It's DIY Christmas, right? It's scaled down: You light a little candle, you put up your one stocking.

I could have kept going. I had a lot of notes when I was trying to write this thing. I had six pages of words.

Songfacts: It's very dense.

Chris: Yeah. I had a lot of words.

But I did have to create my own Christmas. I put up my one stocking in my nonfunctional studio apartment in my fireplace that had been bricked up.

And in New York, the Korean stores sell these truncated Christmas trees. Half the state of Vermont, the tops of the pine trees must be lopped off, because these wonderful Korean fresh food bodegas always have these little trees for the tiny apartments, nailed to a slab of wood or something. They're about a foot-and-a-half high, two feet high. But they're real little pine trees.

So yeah, everything is scaled down for the working girl or the working guy who is maybe two or three years in the city and in a middle-level job without enough money to go home. And all their friends are either gone or they're busy. So you have to Christmas-ize yourself. You do get a tiny turkey or put up the one stocking, or get one of these tiny Christmas trees, which are charming and pitiful at the same time.

Songfacts: Not only that, but New York is about the only place where you could find a grocery store that's open on Christmas.

Chris: That's right. There was a chain called Smiler's. 24 hours, we never close. It was a New York version of 7-Eleven. There were a lot of them.

Songfacts: Which you changed to A&P?

Chris: Yeah, the A&P.

Songfacts: Smiler's wouldn't scan very well, so you changed it.

Chris: Yeah. Taking license. Smiler's wouldn't work, so it became A&P. And it wasn't product placement. I'm really shocked that A&P hasn't used that line in their commercials.

Songfacts: The song is filled with so many little wonderful moments like that. You may have written it quickly, but I think if you sat down to try to refine it, you wouldn't be able to do any better.

Chris: That is true. There's that myth of "I finished the lyrics in a taxicab." Honest to God, I did. We did it at Electric Lady. I lived in the East Village, and Michael Zilkha had booked it for three days. It was certainly walkable from where I was, but I took a cab, because I had a guitar. I said, "Please, take the long road, I need a little time here. I've got to be late."

I swear, I'm scribbling on a legal pad and then copying it all over in caps so Patty could read it. We had no time to put this together.

Songfacts: With a Christmas song, especially in the '80s, its life depends on whether or not it gets played the next year, and then the year after that. And if it builds enough momentum, which yours did, it becomes a Christmas classic.

It's one of the few contemporary Christmas songs that is still played today. Tell me about how it felt and what impact it had on you when the song recurred every Christmas and kept getting played?

Chris: Okay. Really good question. And I'll be really honest. Now, I remember when we were extant, it had a two-year lifetime. We were signed to ZE, so they owned the master and put it out on one compilation. And then Polygram wangled and finagled at least a co-release for the next Christmas. And then after that our band collapsed.

There were three to five years where it was not played. It kind of died, and I think it was college radio that began to pull it back up, along with the radio format folks who began to program urban stations with rock Christmas music. I'm sure that the pointed edge that began that was Springsteen's "Santa Claus is Coming To Town." Then they said, "What else can we play like that?" It was definitely a slow build.

Except for one thing: In England, the song never died out, and it didn't go through that dip. In America it did, but in England, where they don't have an A&P, and where they don't eat cranberry compote with turkey, it became unbelievably popular. It kind of kept me going for a while, because it would be used in TV shows to set the tone. The BBC would play it. It was more popular in the UK than in America and I think even continues to be so. There are some Christmas rock songs that somehow appeal to the British market, but that's pretty limited, so I'm even more amazed by that.

So the song dipped in America, and little by little began to find its way back into radio play to the point where friends would call from Boston and say, "Man, I just heard your song on the radio."

Full disclosure: I went through a very long depression when The Waitresses broke up. And it was more miserable at Christmastime, because I had nothing going on and not much of a family left. It was a pretty low time. A few of the New York stations would play it, and I got the same effect off the song. Enough time had passed that I didn't feel any connection to it either as a writer or a player. But I swear, I kind of inadvertently paid this forward to pull me out of my funk. Because when I hear it on the radio, and I usually do at least once a year, it's when I least expect it. It's when I've got my head down and I'm grumbling my way through. Then I hear it coming out of a shoe store or something, and I go, "All right. Lighten up. Come on, man, it's Christmas." I swear. I get blindsided by it every time.

It's continued to pick up momentum. We were a Jeopardy! question one year, and I can think of no finer accolade or proof that I've arrived than to be a Jeopardy! question. That's pretty cool. I kind of felt the same way when Devo was in the New York Times crossword puzzle: Four down, four-letter rock band.

Songfacts: What also must be pretty cool are the checks you must get once a year.

Chris: Well, I do. And it definitely has prolonged my adolescence. There is no doubt about that. But a sense of proportion here: Every year I read about how Noddy Holder from Slade gets his £400,000 for whatever Christmas songs they have ["Merry Christmas Everybody" was the big one]. I am not living any kind of limousine life. I will say that I'm able to keep the wolf away. And as I joke to my kid, "Thanks to that song, and thanks to the Spice Girls version, you will be able to go to the best two-year associate's degree college."

Songfacts: When I was a disc jockey, nobody would know how to ask for that song, because they didn't know the title, and they certainly didn't know the artist. So they would call up and try to describe it or sing it. And as soon as they started to explain - "the girl goes to the store to get a turkey..." - I knew exactly what they were talking about.

I can tell you that your song was easily one of the top five or six requested for at least a decade and probably still is. And I certainly hear it on all the Pandora Christmas mixes and everything like that. It is never going away.

Chris: That is flabbergasting to me. It's just astounding.

And then there's About A Boy, by Nick Hornby. It's a book based on the son whose father wrote a Christmas song - a vapid Christmas song that gets played every year - that funds him. So I tease my kid: "As you get your associate's degree and cook up another bowl of ramen, thank your old man for paying your way." And also Love Actually, which was a pretty amazing movie, with Bill Nighy being the tacit rock star trying to have a Christmas #1, and how a song made it all better. Not Jesus. Not anything to do with religion. But how a song pulled everything together. And I thought, Oh, that's great. How about that. I'm as goofily grateful and surprised to hear as maybe you are. Holy mackerel.

In terms of checks it's not a gazillion bucks, but It's okay. It's a comfortable middle-class return, and that's about it.

December 8, 2014. The prequel to this story, which takes us through the Kent State shootings and into Jeffrey Dahmer's house, is told in our previous interview with Chris. Much more is also available at his Future Fossil Music site.

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