Mele Kalikimaka

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Mele Kalikimaka
Written by R. Alex Anderson, 1949

Of all the songs we sing at Christmastime, this is the one that trades snowdrifts for sunshine and sleigh bells for a steel guitar. “Mele Kalikimaka” is simply the Hawaiian way of saying Merry Christmas. The Hawaiian language has no r or s sounds, and it doesn’t allow two consonants side by side, so when the English greeting arrived in the islands it softened into these gentle, rolling syllables. The phrase was already appearing in print in a Hawaiian-language newspaper as early as 1904.

The man who turned that greeting into a song was Robert Alexander Anderson, known professionally as R. Alex Anderson and to his close friends as Andy. He was born in Honolulu in 1894, and his early life reads like an adventure story. During World War I he flew combat missions in France, was shot down and taken prisoner by the Germans, and then pulled off a daring escape. Back home in Hawaii, he built a career in business while writing music on the side, and he became one of the best-loved writers of hapa haole songs, the breezy English-language tunes with an island flavor. His “Lovely Hula Hands,” from 1940, was an instant hit.

In 1949, Anderson was working at the von Hamm-Young Company in Honolulu. Just before Christmas, as everyone was leaving the office at five o’clock, a stenographer walking beside him asked why there were no Hawaiian Christmas songs. People in the islands, she said, took the familiar hymns and carols and put Hawaiian words to them, but no one had ever written an original melody. Anderson thought that was a wonderful idea. He turned it over in his mind for a few days, the song came to him, and he wrote it down. As he told an interviewer many years later, he’d been singing it ever since.

Bing Crosby was a frequent visitor to the islands and one of Anderson’s golfing partners. When Anderson played him the new song, Crosby liked it so much that he recorded it, much to Anderson’s surprise. On September 7, 1950, in Los Angeles, Crosby sang it with the Andrews Sisters for Decca Records, backed by Vic Schoen and his orchestra. In 1955 the song was added to a reissue of Crosby’s beloved Merry Christmas album, and from then on it came out of the record cabinet every December right alongside the old favorites.

Hollywood has kept the song in circulation, too. It turns up in L.A. Confidential, Catch Me If You Can, and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. And in the age of streaming, Crosby and the Andrews Sisters found a whole new audience. Their recording has climbed as high as No. 36 on the Billboard Hot 100, some seventy years after it was made, and has appeared on the charts in Canada, Britain, Australia, and well beyond.

Anderson lived to see his little Christmas song travel the world. He died in Honolulu in 1995, a week short of his 101st birthday, and was inducted into the Hawaiian Music Hall of Fame in 1998. His family still receives royalties for it from all over the globe every year. Not bad for a song that began with a coworker’s question on the way out the door.