Christmas Is Interesting/Jonathan Coulton

Jonathan Coulton's Christmas Is Interesting, from his 2003 album Smoking Monkey, overflows with references to Christmas as it is depicted in popular culture; here we'll focus on the literary ones. The song's second line--It's time for a long winter's nap--is a quick nod to Clement C. Moore's 1823 poem A Visit from St. Nicholas (aka The Night Before Christmas), but that is followed by a meatier reference to O. Henry's 1906 short story The Gift of the Magi: He takes your watch and he gives you a hairbrush/Your wife gets a wig on a chain. Near the end of the song we are present for the visit by Marley's ghost from Charles Dickens' 1843 novel A Christmas Carol: You go to bed and wait for Jacob Marley/He comes to make you feel brave/But under his cloak he is nothing but smoke/And a finger that points at your grave. Other references include the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV special, Citizen Kane, and It's a Wonderful Life. Penning lines that compare Christmas to a knife in the heart or a stick in the eye, Coulton clearly has some issues with the season; but his song still makes us want to put on our feety pajamas.

Jacob Marley's Chain/Aimee Mann

Most of us are all familiar enough with Charles Dickens' 1843 classic A Christmas Carol to know that Scrooge's deceased partner, Jacob Marley, carries the weight of his selfish, wicked deeds into the afterlife in the form of an enormous chain. "I wear the chain I forged in life" Marley's ghost tells Scrooge. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it." Aimee Mann adapted the image of Marley's burden a bit for her song Jacob Marley's Chain, from her 1993 album Whatever. "I felt that was a really apt metaphor for the way that you can feel weighted down by events that have happened to you or things that you've done in the past," Mann said when she performed the song on the BBC's "Words and Music: American Stories 2." But it's not like life's such a vale of tears/It's just full of thoughts that act as souvenirs/For those tiny blunders made in yesteryear/That comprise Jacob Marley's chain.

Great Expectations/The Gaslight Anthem

Great Expectations, from The Gaslight Anthem's 2008 album The '59 Sound, takes its title from Charles Dickens' 1861 novel Great Expectations, and makes a specific reference to it in the lyrics: I sat by my bedside/With papers and poetry about Estella/With Great Expectations/We had the greatest expectations. The hero of the novel, Pip, frequently visits the home of Miss Havisham, an embittered spinster who was jilted on her wedding day and now haunts her rundown house wearing a faded wedding gown. There Pip meets Estella, Miss Havisham's beautiful adopted daughter, and falls in love with her. But Estella has been raised to be cold and heartless, to inspire love in men that will never be returned, so that Miss Havisham can have her vicarious revenge. Judging from the women in the singer's life (Licking young boys' blood from her claws/And I learned about the blues from this kitten that I knew/Her hair was raven and her heart was like a tomb), the reference seems entirely appropriate.

Jenny Wren/Paul McCartney

Jenny Wren is a character from Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens' last completed novel. She is a young girl, physically impaired, who earns a meager living making dresses for dolls while caring for her alcoholic father. Paul McCartney's song, from his 2005 album Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, begins with the lines Like so many girls/Jenny Wren could sing. Jenny does sing at different points in the novel and is complimented on it by the character Sloppy, who says, "I've heerd tell that you can sing most beautiful." Despite her difficult circumstances (She saw poverty/breaking up a home), Jenny remains upbeat and positive, in the best tradition of saintly, precocious Dickensian children.

He Do the Police in Different Voices/The Loud Family

Singer/songwriter Scott Miller has long cited T.S. Eliot as his "primary literary influence," and this is evident in the title of this song, from The Loud Family's 1993 album Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things. "He Do the Police in Different Voices" was Eliot's working title for a long poem that would ultimately be known to the world as The Waste Land. Eliot, in turn, seemed to be referencing Charles Dickens's novel Our Mutual Friend , in which the elderly widow Betty Higden brags about her adopted son Sloppy's ability to read aloud: "You mightn't think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices."

Submitted by Matthew Budman