'Don't Waste Your Wishes'

For when the vibe is nostalgic, rangy, and indulgent.

'Don't Waste Your Wishes' -- The Vibe Triangulation

All of the best Christmas music was made before the 1960s, with very few exceptions. Last Christmas is one. All I Want for Christmas is You is not. Christmas music is now, for all intents and purposes, dead. What I mean to say is nobody is making good, new Christmas music anymore. When artists release Christmas albums they are largely filled with soulless remakes of old classics and padded with empty, forgettable Christmas-adjacent tunes. The numbers back me up on this – 15 of the top 20 songs on the 2025 Holiday 100 were made before 1960. This phenomenon doesn’t happen with any other musical genre.

There are a few reasons for this. The first, and I think most obvious reason is that people aren’t as Christian as they used to be. This doesn’t mean that all the best Christmas music is Christ-centric. Jingle Bell Rock and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer are two of the all-time greats and they don’t even hint at the birth of Christ. However, all of the joy and beauty of Christmas does follow the birth of Christ. If musicians don’t understand the reason for the season, they won’t be able to make fitting music. The same people who write pop songs about their sex lives turn around and make Christmas music, which is supposed to be nostalgic and wholesome, and the effect is that it’s just not believable and therefore bad.

Second, life is a lot easier now than it was in the 50s and before. At that time, most men in America had gone to or returned from war. The country was facing hardships at home, like rationing, and new threats from abroad, like a nuclear-armed Soviet Union. There’s something in hardship like that which clarifies the true joys of life. If Christmas cookies are some of the only sweets you’ll have all year, you will savor them. If a wife is able to celebrate a Christmas with her husband knowing there’s a chance that next Christmas he will be away at war or worse, she will cherish that time all the more. Feast days have always been a touchstone for people to practice gratitude and find the good in an otherwise difficult life. Now everything is the same all the time. We aren’t really faced with famine or disease or war on the same scale that we have been in the past. On top of that, we’re given to kind of rampant materialism that we’ve never had before, so presents are more about quantity than quality. Where once a gift might have been a poem or a favorite book or one new toy, now it is 15 $15 presents poorly constructed and shipped in from China that will be quickly broken or discarded. And when you can have anything you want delivered right to your door at any time, what makes the presents at Christmas special? When every day is a feast day, what makes the feast days special? And if feast days are no longer special, how can the music about feast days be special?

Third, people today work very hard to avoid feeling anything. The realities of death are farther away than they have ever been, and consumption of mental health medications is at an all-time high. More than that, people disassociate with phones and television in a way we never were able to before. Music, more than any other medium, is about feeling. If people are actively trying not to feel, then of course any new music made will lack feeling. The big problem here is that the Christmas season is all about reflecting and connecting and feeling things, good and bad. That fact is, in part, what made such a wide variety of older Christmas songs so good. Christmas music now is antiseptic and sugary, and Christmas music devoid of feeling is worse than regular music devoid of feeling because it contradicts the ethos of the holiday.

Lastly, in America today childhood is not valued and children are not prioritized. Never mind that Christmas celebrates the birth of a child, all of the magic in the holiday comes from children. The best Christmas music reflects this. The awe of presents appearing under the tree can only be felt by children. The endless energy given to sledding and snowball fights is reserved only for children. Having fun without feeling the cares of the world is something only children can do. The way that adults can recapture some of this magic is by sharing it with their children, and only parents can truly understand how fleeting and precious that magic really is. But birth rates are declining, abortion rates are high, and people are trying to push children out of common spaces. The soulless Christmas music coming out now directly reflects the rejection of children and the tragic loss of communal magic.

All of this to say, Don’t Waste Your Wishes from The Killers is the last great Christmas album. All of the songs on it are original except for the final track, I’ll Be Home For Christmas. But even their rendition of this classic is completely novel and very moving. Half of the song is a narration from Brandon Flowers about a challenging family move in his youth and a teacher who sang the song in front of his whole class. Flowers speaks of the bravery that this man had as not only a veteran, but also in singing a song in front of a bunch of elementary-age boys. He talks about the emotional history of the song, and about how it touched him on a personal level and made him realize the power in music. In it, there is a genuine respect from a young man for an old man that you rarely see today. It’s not hollow or infantilizing, but sincere and almost reverent. The track concludes with the 80-something year old man singing first a cappella and then backed by The Killers.

You might think that’s the most moving song on the album, but you’d be wrong. In Joseph, Better You Than Me, The Killers explore the birth of Christ in conversation with Joseph. When most nativity discussions revolve around Mary and her faith, the Wise Men, the shepherds and their gifts, and the manger, it’s rare to hear such a deep dive into the very human emotions Joseph the man must have been feeling about the whole thing, and the true strength of character that it took to stand by Mary and Jesus through all of that. It’s a reminder that God chose Joseph to be Jesus’ father just as much as He chose Mary to be Jesus’ mother. It’s also just a beautiful sounding song.

The rest of the album captures the magic of the season in creative and delightful ways. There are songs about fun with friends and family (The Cowboys’ Christmas Ball, ¡Happy Birthday Guadalupe!), and then there’s a song about wanting to have fun with friends and family (Christmas In L.A.), there is the desire to recapture the magic of childhood (A Great Big Sled, Boots). Most imaginatively, the album recasts Santa Claus as a crazed vigilante obsessed with punishing the naughty. The band runs from him (Don’t Shoot Me Santa), pleads with him (I Feel It In My Bones), and in the end, a lump of coal emerges as a triumphant hero (Joel The Lump Of Coal). It all works because it all feels like an honest, earnest interpretation of the holiday from what would otherwise seem like an unexpected source.

Listen to the Album