Did you know a Christmas song you’ve been singing for years is actually about … the Cuban Missile Crisis and the threat of nuclear war?
Flashback to October 1962, tensions were soaring as the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a political and military standoff. The Soviets had deployed missiles in Cuba, right on America’s doorstep. And 13 days of nail-biting anxiety followed with the entire world on the edge of nuclear war.
Then something magical happened. In the midst of this chaos, a husband-and-wife team, Nöel Regney and Gloria Shayne, created the classic holiday song “Do You Hear What I Hear?” It was a plea for peace, during a time of worldwide tension.
“Noel wrote a beautiful song,” Shayne said later, according to franciscan media. She added: “and I wrote the music. We couldn’t sing it through; it broke us up. We cried. Our little song broke us up. You must realize there was a threat of nuclear war at that time.“
They were never asked to write about the threat of a nuclear war though. So, why did they?
The Shocking Origin of ‘Do You Hear What I Hear?‘
It was the fall of 1962 and Noel Regney had been asked by a record producer to write a song to promote the joy of the upcoming holiday season.
“I had thought I’d never write a Christmas song, ” he later said in an interview. “Christmas had become so commercial. But this was the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the studio, the producer was listening to the radio to see if we had been obliterated.”
RELATED POST: The Top 5 Latino Holiday Songs of All Time
Naturally, he couldn’t focus on the words for a Christmas song, so he wrote something else.
“The events taking place made him fearful that the world was on the verge of WWIII, a threat to the safe and secure life he had built for himself in the United States,” FellOffMyUnicornMusic writes.
In an interview years later, Regney said found inspiration while walking through New York City, watching babies “Enroute to my home, I saw two mothers with their babies in strollers … The little angels were looking at each other and smiling.”
He said the babies looked “like newborn lambs,” he said. That’s how the song begins:
“Said the night wind to the little lamb…”
And the star “dancing in the sky”? It wasn’t a Christmas star — it symbolized a nuclear bomb, a silent message of fear and hope wrapped in holiday cheer.
The Cuban Missile Crisis Inspired One of the Most Iconic Holiday Songs Ever
In an odd twist of events, the original deal for the song fell through, according to Smithsonian magazine. “… but the couple’s producer arranged to have the Harry Simeone Chorale record it.”
“Do You Hear What I Hear?” was an instant hit, selling 250,000 copies in a week. “In 1963, crooner Bing Crosby recorded ‘Do You Hear What I Hear?’ and it became an instant holiday classic, selling more than a million copies the first year,” Smithsonian magazine explains.
In an interview, the couple’s daughter talked about the irony of her parents’ writing a Christmas classic. “My parents were not religious at all,” Gabrielle Regney told WGBH. “… It really always blows my mind to think about how the two of them wrote a very Christian song.”
While Crosby’s recording is the one most people remember, it was not. According to the New York Times, Noël Regney’s favorite version of his song was by Robert Goulet, “who sang the line ‘Pray for peace, people, everywhere’ with purposeful power.”
And so, what started as a reflection of fear during one of history’s most tense moments became a timeless holiday anthem. “Do You Hear What I Hear?” is a reminder of the power of art. Plus, it’s a reminder that, if a plea for peace can rise from the shadow of possible nuclear war, maybe there’s hope for us yet.
