I didn’t intend to write again so soon, but I woke up to rain this Christmas morning and this song came to mind, so here you go. 

He supposedly said he didn’t intend it as a Christmas song but of course that’s what it is, released in the fall of 1975, when the dreamscape of onward and upward forever and ever amen was beginning to pixelate, and evidence that we’d been sold a fairy tale of grand proportion had become rather difficult to ignore.

A Wiki page tells us Greg Lake wanted his composition – lyrics by poet Peter Sinfield of the prog rock band King Crimson – to be understood as a protest against a commercialized Christmas, while Sinfield says the words are about a loss of innocence. I hear both/and. Yes, “I Believe” is a protest. It’s a protest against disillusionment. The title, after all, is not “I Believed” but “I Believe.” It’s a protest wrapped in a yearning and tied with a ribbon scrap of nostalgia. And that’s what makes it a Christmas song. 

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*Not really. It’s just a song.