The Spotify playlist “sad christmas” had 5,121 followers in 2021. By November 2025, that number hit 28,800. Not a typo. Not a glitch. A 462% increase in people actively choosing melancholy over mistletoe.
People turn to sad songs at Christmas for the same reason they turn to them any other time of year, except December amplifies everything.
The psychology isn’t complicated. When you feel sad, you listen to music that matches that feeling. Researchers call it mood-congruent listening, and it works better than forcing fake cheer ever could.
Here’s what the streaming data actually tells us: people aren’t rejecting Christmas. They’re rejecting the performance of it. And sad songs at Christmas offer something the cheerful ones can’t. Permission to feel what you’re actually feeling.
The Tragedy Paradox Lives in December
Psychologists have a name for why sad music feels good: the tragedy paradox. Your brain releases prolactin when you listen to sad music, the same hormone that gets released when you cry or experience grief.
But here’s the thing. When you’re listening to Phoebe Bridgers cover “If We Make It Through December” instead of actually experiencing loss, prolactin acts differently. It comforts without the real-world consequences.
Research published in Music Perception found that sad music produces a range of positive aesthetic emotions, not just sadness. Nostalgia. Peacefulness. Wonder. The complicated mix that December demands but the standard Christmas playlist refuses to acknowledge.
Ed Sheeran said it best when discussing his 2024 track “Under the Tree”: “I’d never seen the need to write a sad Christmas song until writing this one. This is quite a lot of people’s realities at Christmas.”
The song pulled 3.8 million YouTube views in November alone, and it wasn’t because people wanted more sleigh bells.
Mood-Congruent Listening Isn’t Self-Sabotage
When you’re feeling low and you queue up something sad, you’re not making it worse. You’re doing exactly what psychology says works.
Mood-congruent listening means matching your music to your current emotional state, and research shows it actually helps people process negative emotions more effectively than trying to force a mood shift with upbeat music.
The mechanism is simple. When your brain hears music that reflects what you’re feeling, it validates that emotion. You’re not alone in this feeling.
Someone else felt it enough to write a song about it. That validation matters more than you’d think, especially during a season that insists everyone should be merry.
Studies on music and emotional regulation consistently show that people with healthy coping strategies use sad music adaptively. They’re not wallowing. They’re processing.
There’s a difference between choosing to sit with sadness and being consumed by it, and sad songs at Christmas thread that line better than therapy sometimes does.
Kacey Musgraves understood this when she wrote “Christmas Makes Me Cry” in 2016. “It feels like we’re supposed to be happy during the holidays, but sometimes they just make you really sad,” she said. “So I wrote this song for anybody who might be feeling a little bit lonely.”
The track resonates not because it’s depressing, but because it’s honest.
Why Nostalgia Peaks in December
December doesn’t just bring cold weather. It brings memory overload. Every song triggers something. Every tradition connects to someone. Every ritual pulls you backwards before you realise it’s happening.
Music-evoked nostalgia activates specific parts of the brain, particularly the default mode and reward networks.
When you hear a song tied to a meaningful memory, your brain doesn’t just recall the event. It recreates the emotional texture of it. The people. The place. The feeling of being there.
Winter naturally drives people towards reflective behavior and introspection compared to brighter seasons.
Research on seasonal music preferences shows that people gravitate towards more contemplative, complex music during winter months.
It’s not seasonal depression. It’s your brain responding to environmental cues that say: slow down, look inward, feel everything.
Sabrina Carpenter’s “santa doesn’t know you like i do” sits on 18 Spotify editorial playlists. Charlie Puth’s “December 25th” charts consistently year after year. These aren’t novelty tracks.
They’re documents of what December actually feels like when you strip away the commercial gloss.
The streaming numbers don’t lie. Spotify’s “Folksy Christmas” playlist grew from 4,252 followers in 2019 to 127,700 by 2025.
“Christmas Hits,” with its 7.2 million followers, now features 40% melancholic tracks in 2025. Four years ago? Zero. The shift isn’t subtle. It’s seismic.
The Autobiographical Memory Trigger
Recent research from University College London found that sad Christmas songs help listeners cope with loneliness and stress through what they call autobiographical salience.
When a song connects to a specific memory, it becomes more than background noise. It becomes a portal.
You hear the opening notes of a song your ex loved, and suddenly you’re back in that apartment, that December, that version of yourself who didn’t know what was coming.
The memory isn’t pleasant, but accessing it serves a purpose. It helps you understand how you got from there to here. It offers perspective when the present feels impossible to navigate.
Bleachers’ “Merry Christmas, Please Don’t Call” captures this perfectly. The title alone tells you everything about December’s emotional minefield.
It’s not about hating Christmas. It’s about surviving it when someone who used to matter still has your number.
Around 76% of people report experiencing nostalgia when listening to sad music, according to research in Frontiers in Psychology.
That number jumps in December when everything from window displays to radio stations conspires to remind you of other Decembers. Better ones. Worse ones. The ones where everything felt different than it does now.
You might also like:
- Zach Bryan’s I Remember Everything: A Deep Dive into Lyrics and Meaning
- The Soothing Melancholy: A Deep Dive into the Best Sad Songs
- 30 Songs About Loneliness That Will Make You Feel Less Alone
- The 40 Sad Country Songs of All Time: A Heartbreaking Journey
- Healing Heartache: A Comprehensive Guide to 135 Unforgettable Songs for Mending Unrequited Love
- Songs About Growing Up: Lyrics That Capture the Rollercoaster of Life
Streaming Data as Emotional Barometer
The numbers tell a story that surveys can’t quite capture. Between 2021 and 2025, tracks tagged with moods like “lonely,” “heartbroken,” “melancholic,” and “longing” grew consistently across major holiday playlists. Not in spite of mainstream Christmas music’s dominance, but alongside it.
People aren’t abandoning Mariah Carey. They’re supplementing her with Phoebe Bridgers doing spectral covers of seasonal standards.
“7 O’Clock News/Silent Night” picked up 10 points on its Chartmetric track score in November 2024 alone. Her version of “If We Make It Through December” adds an average of 20,000 daily streams every November.
This isn’t a niche. It’s a movement. Spotify and Apple Music both expanded editorial playlists for moody holiday tracks, recognising what the data already showed.
The “Bummer Holiday” playlist features 46% of tracks from the 2020s. These aren’t rediscovered classics. They’re new songs for new emotional landscapes.
What’s driving this shift? Post-pandemic processing plays a role. Economic anxiety amid inflation creates real financial stress that Christmas amplifies.
Social media’s performative happiness pressure builds year-round but explodes in December. Increased mental health awareness reduces the stigma around admitting you’re struggling.
All of it converges in streaming behaviour that says: we need music that acknowledges what’s actually happening.
The Emotional Gym Theory
One theory suggests sad music functions as an emotional gym. You’re not experiencing real loss when you listen to Tom Walker’s “For Those Who Can’t Be Here.”
You’re simulating it in a controlled environment. Like Neo sparring with Morpheus in the Matrix, except the stakes are your ability to process grief without falling apart.
This theory suggests repeated exposure to sad music enhances empathy and helps people develop coping strategies for real emotional challenges.
You hear someone else articulate what you couldn’t put into words, and suddenly you have language for what you’re feeling. That matters.
Brandi Carlile’s “The Heartache Can Wait” from 2017 still circulates every December because it captures something specific about choosing to delay processing grief until after the holidays. Except the heartache never really waits. It just sits there, patient, knowing you’ll come back to it eventually.
Why Happy Music Can Feel Like Violence
When you’re genuinely struggling and “All I Want For Christmas Is You” comes on for the 47th time, it doesn’t lift your mood. It makes you feel more isolated.
The relentless cheer becomes a reminder that your emotional reality doesn’t match what you’re supposed to be feeling.
This isn’t about hating joy. It’s about the gap between external expectation and internal experience. Sad Christmas songs close that gap.
They say: you’re allowed to feel this way. December is complicated. Love is messy. Loss doesn’t take a holiday just because the calendar says it should.
The ultra-cheerful Christmas music is inescapable, looping endlessly in stores, adverts, and public spaces.
Against that backdrop, sad or understated holiday songs feel more human and more believable.
You can’t push back against Christmas unless Christmas is everywhere, and right now, it very much is.
What This Means for How We Listen
The rise of melancholic Christmas music isn’t about becoming more depressed as a society. It’s about demanding emotional range in a season that traditionally offered none.
The marshmallows and mistletoe aren’t going anywhere. But increasingly, neither is the ache.
For indie artists especially, Christmas has stopped being a novelty subject and started becoming just another topic folded into the same emotional palettes they explore year-round. The result isn’t a Christmas without joy. It’s a Christmas with honesty.
The data shows what anecdotal experience already suggested. People use music for emotional regulation, and during the holidays, that need intensifies.
Whether it’s nostalgia for a time that felt simpler, validation that this season is hard, or just company in the loneliness, sad Christmas songs serve a function that forced cheer can’t replicate.
Next time you find yourself skipping past “Jingle Bell Rock” to queue up something sadder, you’re not being a cynic. You’re being human. And the psychology backs you up.