Twelve warm-weather Christmas songs that swap the snow for what is really there

In July 1945, in a Los Angeles heatwave, the lyricist Robert Wells sat in Toluca Lake trying to cool down by writing about winter. His friend Mel Tormé dropped by, read the lines on the notepad, and the two finished the song in well under an hour. Chestnuts, Jack Frost, folks dressed up like Eskimos. Nat King Cole made "The Christmas Song" famous, and the Christmas of pop radio has been a cold one ever since.

It is worth remembering where that snow came from: a sweaty afternoon in California. The Christmas soundtrack the world now hears in malls from Dubai to Jakarta was, at its heart, a fantasy written by people who were hot.

Hundreds of millions of the people who celebrate Christmas spend it in the tropics or in the southern summer. And the best Christmas songs from those places have a habit in common. They do not pretend. Where the snow would go, they put the things the season is actually made of in their own town: the rum, the pork, the gravy, the band at your door at 2am, the cousin coming home. That is the idea behind these twelve picks, all ours, in order of release. This week the holiday records started landing, from Alanis Morissette's new album to Elton John and CMAT's "Step Into Christmas". Here is the other half of the shelf.

Exports and their afterlives (1950 to 1970)

1. Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters, "Mele Kalikimaka" (1950)

Start with the song that shows how it usually went. R. Alex Anderson, a Honolulu songwriter, wrote it in 1949 after a colleague at work remarked that Hawaii had no Christmas song of its own. The title is "Merry Christmas" bent to fit Hawaiian sounds. Crosby, a golf partner of Anderson's, cut it in 1950, and in his voice the islands became a postcard: green and bright, sun to shine by day. It is lovely, and it is a tourist's Christmas. The warm-weather songs that follow mostly sing from inside.

2. Lord Kitchener, "Drink a Rum" (early 1950s)

Aldwyn Roberts, the calypsonian called Lord Kitchener, came to Britain on the Empire Windrush in 1948 and stayed until 1962. "Drink a Rum", cut in London in the early 1950s, puts its narrator in the grey city at Christmas and has him rebuild a Trinidad morning anyway: rum first, then ponche de crème, the island's rum-and-cream punch. No snow, no sleigh. It is a migrant's Christmas, and it is the template for this list: when the season is far from home, you make it out of what you drink and eat. In Trinidad it still plays every December.

3. Harry Belafonte, "Mary's Boy Child" (1956)

The American choral arranger Jester Hairston wrote it in 1956, setting new words to a calypso rhythm he remembered from an older song of his. Belafonte, Harlem-born to Jamaican and Martinican parents, recorded it that July. In Britain it went to No. 1 for Christmas 1957, and again in 1978 in the version by Boney M., a group put together in Germany around singers from Jamaica, Montserrat and Aruba. Two British Christmas No. 1s, Bethlehem, a manger, a lilting island beat, and not one word about the weather.

4. José Feliciano, "Feliz Navidad" (1970)

When the producer Rick Jarrard asked Feliciano for a new Christmas song for his 1970 album, the Puerto Rican singer thought it impractical, then started thinking about childhood Christmases in Puerto Rico and the family far away. The result was recorded at RCA's studio on Sunset Boulevard and released in November 1970. One line in Spanish, one in English, round and round. It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2010. It works everywhere because it asks for nothing but a greeting, and that greeting was written by a homesick man in Los Angeles, the same city as the chestnuts.

The Caribbean answers back (1971 to 1990)

5. Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe, "Asalto Navideño" (1971)

In Puerto Rico a Christmas asalto, or parranda, is a friendly ambush: a crowd of musicians turns up at your door late at night, sings until you let them in, eats your food and drags you along to the next house. Colón, Lavoe and the cuatro player Yomo Toro made a whole Fania album of that idea in New York in 1971, salsa with the cuatro, Puerto Rico's ten-string guitar, out front where the brass usually sits. A second volume followed in 1973. New York winter outside, an island porch on the record.

6. Jacob Miller and Ray I, "Natty No Santa Claus" (1978)

Jacob Miller, the Inner Circle singer who died in a car crash in 1980 at 27, made a whole Christmas album for Kingston's Top Ranking label in 1978. The sleeve shows him in a Santa hat. Much of Natty Christmas is carols bent to reggae, but this original's title says the quiet part out loud: in a Rasta yard, there is no Santa Claus. It is a joke, and a sharp one about whose Christmas got sold to whom.

7. Daisy Voisin and La Divina Pastora Serenaders, "Alegría, Alegría"

Parang is Trinidad's Christmas music, sung in Spanish, with cuatro, maracas and box bass, brought over from Venezuela. Like the Puerto Rican parranda, it travels: groups go house to house through the season. Daisy Voisin (1924 to 1991), a midwife from Siparia in the south of Trinidad who is said to have delivered more than 300 babies there, led La Divina Pastora Serenaders and became known as the Queen of Parang. "Alegría, Alegría" (joy, joy) is her best-loved song, Christmas joy in Spanish from the south of Trinidad, sung by a woman who had brought hundreds of the area's children into the world.

8. Scrunter, "Piece ah Pork" (1990)

In 1990 the calypsonian Scrunter decided to try parang and wrote this the same day, sitting under a mango tree at Scrunter's Forest, his bar in Sangre Grande. He has said he was thinking of the communal feeling Daisy Voisin brought to the season. The song is one long craving for pork, which in Trinidad marks the start of Christmas, when pigs become ham, pastelles and stew. It became one of the best-selling local Christmas songs and helped turn soca parang, the faster, English-language cousin, into its own December genre.

Christmas in the heat (1990 to 2020)

9. Jose Mari Chan and Liza Chan, "Christmas in Our Hearts" (1990)

The Philippines has a famously long Christmas: it begins on 1 September, the first of the "ber" months, when malls start playing carols. And every year the same memes appear of Jose Mari Chan peeking round a corner, because his 1990 album Christmas in Our Hearts, sung here with his daughter Liza, is how Filipinos know the season has begun. The album is still cited as the best-selling record by a Filipino artist, and Chan has said the memes flatter him and make him feel young. A tropical country that starts Christmas in the heat of September has no use for snow.

10. Simone, "Então é Natal" (1995)

Brazil's Christmas song is a translation. Cláudio Rabello put Portuguese words to John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)", and the Bahian singer Simone released it on her 1995 album 25 de Dezembro, which sold more than a million copies. It is unavoidable each December, and it is now her most-streamed song. The choice is telling. Of all the American Christmas hits, Brazil took the one with no snow in it, a song about the year ending and who is still suffering.

11. Paul Kelly, "How to Make Gravy" (1996)

An Australian Christmas falls in high summer, and the country's best Christmas song is a letter from prison. Joe writes to his brother Dan on 21 December, missing the family lunch, and passes on his recipe for gravy. Kelly wrote it in 1996 for a charity Christmas record; it was nominated for Song of the Year at the 1997 ARIA Awards. Fans now mark 21 December as Gravy Day. The song is crowded with family names and lunch-table detail, and its real subject is the one seat left empty.

12. Okello Max featuring Ywayaa, "Amezaliwa" (2020)

Released on Christmas Day 2020 and later collected on the Christmas Kolor EP, this is the nativity as a Kenyan afro-pop song. "Amezaliwa" means "he is born" in Swahili, and the Kenyan singer mixes Swahili with Dholuo, the Luo language of western Kenya, over lines about meat on the fire and shout-outs to local radio. Christmas in Kenya is a season of going home to family upcountry and eating together, and the song sounds like the yard after church, not a sleigh ride.

The snow was always the fantasy

Line these twelve up and the pattern is plain. Hawaii sounds like a postcard when an American sings it. Everywhere else, the song is made of what is actually in front of the singer: Kitchener's rum, Scrunter's pork, Kelly's gravy, Lavoe's crowd at the door, Chan's September malls. The cold-weather canon is not wrong. It is just one place's dream, written in someone else's heat. By the time the next batch of snowy holiday singles reaches radio, it is worth remembering how much of the Christmas-keeping world spends the day in shorts, and how many better songs it has written about that than about anyone's chestnuts.