Sharon Jones and the Dap‐Kings / It's a Holiday Soul Party / 2015
Please Come Home for Christmas
melancholic yearning shot through with stubborn hope
A soul rendering of the Charles Brown blues-ballad classic, this version lets Sharon Jones mine the gap between Christmas's communal cheer and one woman's private loneliness. The song is built on a plea rather than a celebration, with the holiday imagery working as a backdrop against which absence is measured.
loneliness during the holidays longing and reunion blues within celebration hope deferred
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses an absent lover directly, asking them to return; she is emotionally transparent and not at all unreliable, though her optimism in the closing lines is clearly provisional rather than assured.
What happens
The song opens with the external trappings of Christmas (bells, carols, greetings) immediately undercut by the narrator's isolation. It moves into direct address and pleading for the lover's return, broadens briefly to generic holiday sentiment about loved ones gathering, then circles back to a conditional vision of future happiness contingent on the lover coming home.
How it's built
The song follows a loose verse structure built around a repeated plea that functions as the hook, flanked by verses that alternate between observing communal Christmas imagery and voicing private absence. There's no true bridge-as-contrast; instead the song repeats and intensifies its central request, closing on a near-identical restatement of the hope for sorrow to end, which gives it a circular, pleading shape rather than a resolved one.
Section by section
Opening verse
“what a Christmas to have the blues”
The verse sets up the song's core irony immediately: the season's joy is acknowledged only to be inverted into personal misery, establishing blues as the emotional key despite the Christmas trappings.
Central plea
The repeated request for the partner to return, with the fallback allowance of New Year's night, shows a narrator negotiating with her own hope, lowering the bar for reunion rather than giving up on it entirely.
Generic holiday verse
This section steps back from the personal plea into broader commentary on family and tradition, which functions less as new information and more as a reminder of the normative Christmas experience the narrator is excluded from.
Closing verses
The ending imagines a resolution that hasn't actually happened yet; the repetition of this promise of restored happiness reads as aspirational rather than achieved, leaving the song suspended between hope and uncertainty.
Craft
- irony/contrast
- Images of bells, carols, and candlelight are placed directly against statements of isolation, so the festive imagery intensifies rather than soothes the narrator's grief.
- direct address
- The repeated plea is spoken straight to the absent partner, turning the song into an intimate appeal rather than a general holiday reflection.
- anaphora
- The repetition of the central plea and the later repetition of the promise of no more sorrow create an incantatory, almost prayer-like insistence, as if repetition itself might summon the desired return.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a blues song wearing Christmas clothing: the holiday setting sharpens an ordinary story of romantic absence by surrounding it with images of communal warmth the narrator can't access. An alternative reading could frame it more literally as a seasonal novelty song meant to evoke bittersweet nostalgia for radio listeners, with the emotional stakes lower than a strict lyrical reading suggests -- but Jones's soul-inflected delivery (inherited from the song's blues origins) tends to support the more aching reading.
Context
This is a cover of a song written by Charles Brown, Gene Redd, and Hal Webman, first recorded by Brown in 1960 and since covered by many artists as a holiday blues standard. Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings recorded it for their 2015 holiday album, bringing their retro soul-funk sensibility to a song already decades old; I don't have specific details about this particular recording session or arrangement choices beyond what's audible in the genre's general style.
Listen for
- the tension between the brightness of the horn-and-rhythm arrangement typical of the Dap-Kings and the lyric's sadness
- how Jones's phrasing leans into the blues inflection of the melody, especially on the word repetitions
- the way the plea is repeated with slight variation, building urgency rather than simple repetition
- the shift in tone between the verses about communal Christmas tradition and the verses of direct personal address
About Sharon Jones and the Dap‐Kings
Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings were an American funk and soul band signed to Daptone Records. They were part of a revival movement of mid-1960s to mid-1970s style funk and soul music.
1996 - 2018 / United States
Full biography and catalogue