Mele Kalikimaka - Things You Didn't Know About This Christmas Hit!

Pack Your Bags - We're going to the South Pacific to explore the sunniest Christmas Standard ever.

This is the story of Mele Kalikimaka.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Pack your bags. We're going to the South Pacific to
explore the sunniest Christmas standard ever. I'm Drew Savage, and
this is the story behind the Christmas hits Meli Kaliki Maka.
Behind the Christmas hits with Drew Savage. Meli Kaliki Maka
was written in 1949 by Robert Alex Anderson. Anderson was

(00:21):
a Hawaiian composer who worked in the Hapa Haley tradition,
essentially Hawaiian themed melodies or subjects using English lyrics or
bilingual elements.
Anderson was born in Honolulu in 1894. He started writing
song lyrics at a very young age. He even wrote
his high school football team's spirit song in his junior year.

(00:41):
He would later attend Cornell University for electrical and mechanical engineering,
and while he was a member of the Cornell Glee Club,
Anderson never received any formal training as a composer. He
just loved to write music.
His ambitions were sidetracked though, while serving as a naval
aviator in World War One. He trained in France and
flew with the US Navy. His firsthand knowledge of World

(01:03):
War One aviation helped him land a gig as a
technical advisor for the 1930 Howard Hawks film, The Dawn Patrol,
starring Douglas Fairbanks. But Anderson didn't want to make movies,
he wanted to make music, and indirectly, he would get there.
Anderson spent most of his professional career working at Von
Ham Young, a Honolulu company that dealt with everything from

(01:25):
machines and cars to textiles and insurance. Anderson worked his
way up in the company's advertising department and became vice president,
writing plenty of commercial jingles along the way.
It was just before 5 o'clock one day at the office,
just a few days before Christmas. A stenographer asked him
why he thought there were no original Hawaiian Christmas songs.

(01:45):
According to a 1994 interview with Anderson shortly before his passing,
she asked him, quote, they take all the old hymns
and they put Hawaiian words to them, but there's no
original melody.
That got Anderson thinking, what a brilliant idea. His natural
starting point was to translate the greeting, Merry Christmas into Hawaiian,
or at least its closest approximation, Mele Kaliki Maka, a

(02:09):
phrase that originally appeared in print in Kaupepa Kuokoa, a
Hawaiian language newspaper in 2004. In the version most of
us know, the song begins with its title. In Anderson's
original lyrics though, it started a little differently.
Jingle bells upon a steel guitar. Through the palms we
see the same bright star, and then the song picks

(02:30):
up from there as we know it now. I'm not
exactly sure why these opening lines were dropped, but it's
hard to imagine the song starting any other way now
than with its title. The man who first made the
song a hit may have had something to do with
that choice. He was a singer with quite a track record,
especially with Christmas music, Bing Crosby.
As we've discussed in other episodes, after White Christmas became

(02:52):
a hit so big that it literally helped change the
music business, Bing Crosby was always looking for a new
holiday song to record. But in this case, it wasn't
his record company pitching him a song cold, his connection
to this music and its meaning was personal. Crosby loved
visiting Hawaii. Who doesn't? And through shared social circles, would

(03:12):
often play golf with Anderson.
In addition to his job in advertising, Anderson had written
several songs that became local hits, songs like Lovely Hula
Hands and Hala Hula. So he wasn't shy about sharing
his Hawaiian Christmas song with Bing when they connected in 1950. Crosby,
always the perfect mix of artist and businessman, saw the
potential immediately and recorded the song later that year for

(03:35):
Decca Records with frequent collaborators.
The Andrews Sisters. Mele Kaliki Maka was released as a
standalone single for Christmas 1950. Its B-side was another Bing
Crosby Christmas original called Papa Santa Claus. It was much
more of a straightforward mainstream Christmas song that Bing thought
made a good companion piece. Side A were the sounds

(03:56):
of a tropical Christmas fantasy, and side B was your
typical Santa song.
I don't expect you ever heard Papa Santa Claus before.
It's pretty forgettable, and was never included in future Bing
Crosby Christmas albums. And while the A-side became the classic,
it did take a while. It made for a fun
novelty holiday song that first year, but Melikaliki Maka failed

(04:18):
to make the Billboard charts. Its place in Bing Crosby's
Christmas catalog really took hold in 1955 when Decca Records
re-released Bing's classic Merry Christmas album.
Merry Christmas first hit stores in 1945, 3 years after
White Christmas. In 1947, Decca reissued the album with some changes.

(04:39):
Danny Boy and Let's Start the New Year Right were removed,
and a new recording of White Christmas was added. Another
release of the album came in 1949 with the song
Faith of Our Fathers.
Added and then in 1955 a third, the one that
would become the definitive version of the album with four
more songs added Silver Bells, It's Beginning to look a

(05:00):
lot like Christmas, Christmas in Killarney, and Mele Kaliki Maka.
This version also saw the debut of the now iconic
artwork for the album cover, Bing Crosby.
In a Santa hat wearing a bow tie made of holly.
Since then, Merry Christmas has sold 15 million copies and
spent a total of 39 non-consecutive weeks at number one

(05:21):
on the Billboard album chart. Over time, millions of people
would be exposed to this little Hawaiian Christmas song and
fall in love with its charm and images of sunshine
and palm trees.
It's really one of one. Even Jose Feliciano's Feliz Navidad
doesn't overtly invoke the kind of visuals that Mele Kaliki
Maca does in its lyrics. You could argue the song

(05:41):
took another leap forward in popularity after being included in
the John Hughes movie National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Clark Griswold
has the song playing in his head as he fantasizes
about a big pool party in his backyard.
You can check out a previous episode of the pod
with the music supervisor of that movie, Ron Payne. Robert
Alex Alexander died in 1994 at the age of 100,

(06:06):
and was posthumously inducted into the Hawaiian Music Hall of
Fame in 1998. I kind of love that Anderson was
55 when he wrote his biggest hit.
It's never too late to chase your dreams. And hey,
a special shout out to the nameless stenographer who asked
Anderson the question about why there aren't any Hawaiian Christmas songs.
Thank you for asking. You never know what the answer

(06:27):
to a question is going to lead to.
I'm Drew Savage. Thank you so much for listening. As always,
you can find me on Instagram at Drew Savage on Air.
If you enjoyed the story of Meli Kaliki Maka, please
leave us a rating and review. It helps other people
who love Christmas music find the show, and there are
lots more stories to tell, so make sure you subscribe
so you never miss a story behind the Christmas hits.