The 1970s File Feature
If We Make It Through December
If We Make It Through December: Merle Haggard's Cross-Format Holiday Classic Merle Haggard occupies a singular position in American music history as one of t…
01 The Story
If We Make It Through December: Merle Haggard's Cross-Format Holiday Classic
Merle Haggard occupies a singular position in American music history as one of the defining figures of the Bakersfield sound and a songwriter of extraordinary range and emotional depth. Born in 1937 in Oildale, California, Haggard had overcome a turbulent early life that included juvenile delinquency and imprisonment at San Quentin State Prison to become one of country music's most consistently creative and commercially successful artists of the 1960s and 1970s. By the time he recorded "If We Make It Through December" in 1973, he had already established a body of work that included numerous number-one country singles and albums that would come to be recognized as classics of the American country canon.
The song was written by Haggard himself, and it reflected the kind of first-person narrative songwriting that was his greatest strength as a composer. His ability to inhabit working-class perspectives and to articulate the concerns, anxieties, and hopes of ordinary American lives with precision and empathy was arguably unmatched in country music of the period. "If We Make It Through December" drew on this strength, presenting the voice of a man who has recently lost his job and who faces the holiday season with financial anxiety and concern for his family's wellbeing.
The song was released on Capitol Records, the label with which Haggard had been associated since the mid-1960s. The production was characteristically clean and country, featuring the kind of understated arrangement that allowed Haggard's voice and the song's lyrical content to dominate the listener's attention without excessive sonic elaboration. Ken Nelson, who had served as Haggard's producer through much of his career at Capitol, contributed the production sensibility that had become one of the defining characteristics of the Bakersfield sound: direct, unadorned, and focused on the material rather than on production sophistication for its own sake.
The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on November 24, 1973, entering at position 97. Its timing was deliberate, positioned to reach its commercial peak during the holiday season it described. The song climbed steadily over the following eleven weeks, reaching its Hot 100 peak of number 28 during the week of January 19, 1974. That performance was remarkable for a country single of the period, as crossover to the pop charts from country was not automatic and required music that connected with audiences beyond the core country radio listener. On the Billboard country singles chart, "If We Make It Through December" reached number one, confirming its status as one of Haggard's major commercial achievements.
The crossover success of the single reflected the song's universal thematic content. While Haggard's recordings were primarily directed at country audiences and his persona was deeply associated with the Bakersfield sound and its working-class California roots, "If We Make It Through December" addressed economic anxiety and family concern in terms that resonated with listeners across format boundaries. The timing of the record, arriving during the first major energy crisis in American history and a period of significant economic uncertainty, gave the song's subject matter an immediate relevance that amplified its emotional impact.
The song has become one of the most enduring holiday-adjacent country recordings in American music. While it does not celebrate Christmas in the conventional sense but rather presents the season as a period of material difficulty and uncertainty, it has been embraced as a seasonal classic that speaks to the experiences of those for whom the holiday season is not a time of abundance but of anxiety and determination. This honest engagement with the less celebratory dimensions of the holiday season has given the song a distinctive place in the seasonal music landscape.
Numerous artists have recorded the song in the decades since its original release, including versions by artists in country, bluegrass, and pop contexts. Haggard's original recording remains the definitive version, but the song's adoption into the broader repertoire of seasonal American music confirms its status as a genuine standard. Merle Haggard died in April 2016, on his seventy-ninth birthday, leaving behind a catalog of recorded work that is widely considered one of the most important in American country music history. "If We Make It Through December" is a central document in that legacy.
The song's appearance on the Hot 100 with a chart run of eleven weeks demonstrated Haggard's consistent ability to reach beyond his core country audience and to communicate with the broader American public through his songwriting. His placement in the pop chart alongside artists from very different generic traditions confirmed that emotional truth and lyrical specificity, delivered with his characteristic directness and sincerity, could transcend the format boundaries that otherwise segmented the American music market.
02 Song Meaning
Working-Class Dignity and the Economic Reality Beneath the Holiday Season
"If We Make It Through December" by Merle Haggard belongs to a small but significant category of American popular songs that treat the Christmas season not as a period of joy and abundance but as a time of economic strain and familial anxiety. The song's narrator has lost his job in the winter, faces the prospect of disappointing his daughter during the holiday season, and articulates his hope for survival through the cold months as an act of determined, undecorated dignity. This honest engagement with the material conditions of working-class life is characteristic of Haggard's songwriting at its best.
The song participates in the tradition of American working-class music that takes seriously the economic dimensions of everyday life rather than aestheticizing or romanticizing poverty. Haggard's own biography, which included periods of genuine hardship, gave him both the right and the authority to write from this perspective without sentimentality. The narrator of "If We Make It Through December" is not asking for sympathy or celebrating his poverty but simply stating his situation with clarity and expressing his determination to endure. This emotional restraint in the face of difficulty is itself a form of dignity that the song communicates effectively.
The holiday setting of the song is thematically essential rather than incidental. Christmas in American culture carries enormous expectations of abundance, gift-giving, and family celebration, and the gap between these cultural expectations and the narrator's actual circumstances gives the song its emotional poignancy. The daughter who expects a gift, the father who cannot provide it: this scenario crystallizes the experience of economic inadequacy at precisely the cultural moment when that inadequacy is most visible and most painful.
Haggard's songwriting also engages with the geography of American working-class life in ways that are specific and grounded. The song's California setting, implied by its Bakersfield origins and Haggard's consistent rootedness in that region's working-class culture, gives it a specificity that prevents it from becoming a generic portrait of poverty. The winter in California is not the brutal cold of the upper Midwest or the Northeast, but it is cold enough to matter, and the seasonal discomfort is another element of the material difficulty the narrator is navigating.
The song's title and refrain, "if we make it through December," transforms survival into a conditional, tentative aspiration rather than a certainty. This grammatical construction is itself meaningful: the use of "if" rather than "when" acknowledges genuine uncertainty about the outcome while maintaining the narrator's determination to try. This honest acknowledgment of the possibility of failure is unusual in popular music's treatment of hardship, which more typically frames difficulty as something that will be overcome. Haggard's willingness to leave the outcome uncertain gives the song a realism that is central to its emotional power.
In the broader context of American country music, "If We Make It Through December" represents the tradition of the genre's engagement with working-class experience as serious and legitimate subject matter for artistic treatment. The song's crossover success on the pop charts demonstrated that this engagement could reach beyond country's core audience to speak to the broader American public. That success was itself a form of recognition that the experiences the song described were not marginal or genre-specific but widely shared, and that Haggard's voice giving them expression had value that transcended format boundaries.
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