The 12 Songs of Christmas: 2. Mele Kalikimaka - Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters (2024)

“Mele Kalikimaka”

Mele Kalikimaka is the thing to say
On a bright Hawaiian Christmas day
That's the island greeting that we send to you
From the land where palm trees sway

Here we know that Christmas will be green and bright
The sun to shine by day and all the stars at night
Mele Kalikimaka is Hawaii's way
To say Merry Christmas to you

Mele Kalikimaka is the thing to say
On a bright Hawaiian Christmas day
That's the island greeting that we send to you
From the land where palm trees sway

Here we know that Christmas will be green and bright
The sun to shine by day and all the stars at night
Mele Kalikimaka is Hawaii's way
To say Merry Christmas to you

Here we know that Christmas will be green and bright
The sun to shine by day and all the stars at night
Mele Kalikimaka is Hawaii's way
To say Merry Christmas to you

Mele Kalikimaka is the thing to say
On a bright Hawaiian Christmas day
That's the island greeting that we send to you
From the land where palm trees sway

Here we know that Christmas will be green and bright
The sun to shine by day and all the stars at night
Mele Kalikimaka is Hawaii's way
To say Merry Christmas
A very Merry Christmas
A very, very, Merry, Merry Christmas to you

Written by: R. Alex Anderson

Robert Alexander Anderson’s wartime feats were legendary. So much so, in fact, thay his story was made into a movie, 1939’s The Dawn Patrol, starring Errol Flynn.

Anderson had enlisted after the United States’ entry to the First World War in 1917, and he was posted to the No.40 Squadron RAF in France.

In late August of 1918, his S.E.5a was shot at by a German Fokker from behind during a dogfight. He was struck by bullets behind his knee, and in his back.

Anderson managed to bring his plane down behind enemy lines but, given his injuries, was unable to evade his would-be captors on foot.

He was taken to a prisoner of war hospital in Mons, before being locked up in Fresnes-sur-Escaut in occupied Northern France.

Around the evening of the 25th or the 26th of September, Anderson along with four other POWs escaped. Making their way through a hole in a roof courtesy of a few loose tiles, they hung on the eaves before dropping outside the perimeter fences.

Travelling mostly by night, the group crossed into Belgium. Two of the party broke off for Brussels, where an acquaintance was ready to assist, but they didn’t return.

The other three eventually found their way into Holland. They were soon in possession of emergency passports having been taken by train through to Rotterdam.

Presumed Missing In Action, their returns stunned the Allies who greeted them first in Holland and then London.

Anderson was in Scotland, the homeland of his mother’s father, when Armistice Day rolled around. He would be back in the USA by Christmas.

He lived a long life and died in 1995, a matter of days before his 101st birthday.

In the meantime, R. Alex Anderson wrote Mele Kalikimaka.

Bing Crosby is the King of Christmas, no matter Michael Bublé’s pretensions to the throne. If you had to name a Crosby number, you’d surely pick White Christmas. If you had to pick another, you’d name Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy, his duet with David Bowie, delivered as a Christmas gift mere days before he died on a Spanish golf course in 1977.

I think Crosby’s best Christmas song is Mele Kalikimaka. It’s not like other Christmas songs. Where there’s usually snow, you get sunshine. Where you’d expect cold, there’s warmth. No fir trees; palm trees instead. It conjures imagery of a Christmas Day in the land of beaming sunshine rather than the usual winter fare we are accustomed to in Northern Europe. It’s a beautiful little record, with sway-inducing strumming and a pleasant beat.

R. Alex Anderson’s maternal grandfather was a Scottish mechanical engineer who was contracted to build a sawmill on Vancouver Island. From there, in the 1860s, he and his wife left to travel over the ocean to Australia. On the way they docked at Hilo, Hawaii, for supplies where Anderson's grandfather suspected his bride had had enough of life at sea. And so Hawaii is where they made their home.

Anderson’s grandfather developed an ironworks there to make improvements in the cultivation of sugarcane and, it must be said, did quite well for himself.

And it was in Hawaii where Anderson was born and raised, a generation after his mother was born there too.

After his discharge from service, Anderson went back home to Hawaii, carved out a career in business and began again writing music, which he had done as a High School student and in Cornell University.

But he didn’t write songs in the traditional sense, instead he plucked out Hawaiian rhythms from his head and composed informally.

He spread the music of Hawaii like a gospel, and one of his most revered tunes was Mele Kalikimaka.

On a certain day while leaving work, one of Anderson’s colleagues asked him how come there were no Hawaiian Christmas songs. He didn’t have an answer, so he set about writing one.

The phrase, Mele Kalikimaka, simply means “Merry Christmas.” The Hawaiian language uses a different phonological system where every consonant is followed by a vowel. And there are no “r” or “s” sounds. You can read more about it in the American Songwriter.

It was a song particularly liked by Crosby, a frequent visitor to Hawaii and, luckily, a golf partner of Anderson.

Crosby surprised the songwriter with a recording of his own version of Mele Kalikimaka as a gift in 1950, sung in his own inimitable style with The Andrews Sisters, America’s preeminent female vocal group of the time.

The song was then included on Crosby’s 1955 Christmas album and has become a standard at this time of year ever since, especially in the US.

I never heard of this song until just a few Christmases ago.

My daughter Erin was singing it as part of a Christmas concert with her classmates in a local church. There were some seasonal standards on the list but one unfamiliar song title in the programme stood out to me. Mele Kalikimaka.

It went on the Christmas playlist after the kids performed it, and it has remained there since.

To me that concert will always be bittersweet. It was the last significant, communal event that the children were permitted pre-lockdown, pre-school closures, pre-”new normal”.

It was taken for granted back then that children could sing and learn together, that families could interact, that communities could solidify themselves in person.

Too much time after that was used up where the children didn’t get to do what their childhoods deserved.

What’s another year for a grown-up, whose life, in all honesty, might change very little between the passage of one year to the next?

It’s very different for a young child, whose development is so rapid, and so profound, that sometimes you can feel them growing up before your eyes.

First, a term passes, then a school year, then a year solid. I don’t think I’ll ever shake off that sense of mourning for the loss they endured, the suppression of the what-ifs that make up a life, however brief it all might seem now.

I think of R. Alex Anderson’s incredible life as a sequence of what-ifs. What if his grandfather didn’t get a contract in Canada? What if his grandparents hadn’t decided to set sail for Australia? What if they hadn’t decided to stop in Hawaii along the way? What if the child R. Alex Anderson hadn’t lived through the same appendicitis when he was 10 years old that killed his brother five years later? What if he hadn’t survived the German gun attack? What if his plane crashed? What if he had succumbed to his injuries in hospital? What if his escape failed?

We wouldn’t have Mele Kalikimaka, for one thing.

For our children’s lost years, what have we missed?