I took way too long to learn how to drive. I got my license months after everyone else (which, if you remember from high school, felt like eons). I mastered the slow brake, the three-point turn and the lane change: after I passed my driving test, I made sure to only drive on desolate roads, lest I be met with any challenge.

As I was stopped at a red light driving home from my retail job one early January, I saw across the way, on the street I usually take, the dreaded orange diamond sign signifying a blocked road. My usual route home was now closed off, and I’d need to make a right onto Route 44. With my adrenaline pumping and the stiffest posture you can imagine, I made the turn, stayed in my lane, checked my mirror every few seconds, and did not pay any attention to what was playing on the radio.

After a perilous four minutes of driving, I emptied onto a familiar road and was able to calm down. Usually, I have a habit of changing between the preset radio channels when I get bored, but the one that usually keeps my attention is 107.5, the local FM station that strictly plays 1970s music. But this time of year, it is different: 107.5 carries on the annual practice of playing Christmas music from Thanksgiving into mid-January. Now, since it was nearly two weeks after the holiday, I was simply not in the mood to hear any more children discovering the magic of Christmas or Santa’s most recent caper. So, when I came back from crisis mode and began hearing the somber piano chords and string section of one such holiday song, I was ready to turn it off. I had heard the song before, but I had not listened to the lyrics and didn’t like the repeated melody. But today, I decided to listen. 

In case you’ve never heard “Same Old Lang Syne” by Dan Fogelberg, here’s the story: A man walks into a grocery store on Christmas Eve and, to his surprise, his former girlfriend is also shopping there. They greet each other and offer to visit a bar to catch up, but since the locations are all closed on Christmas Eve, they buy a pack of beer and drink it in her car. They congratulate each other on the success of their lives, but it becomes clear that neither of them is very happy in their current state—him in his career, and her in her marriage. He gets out of the car and watches her leave, and the tale ends there as the song breaks into a minute-long saxophone solo – it’s an instrumental that feels sorrowful, forgiving, romantic and regretful all at once.

What stayed with me most on that first listen in the car were the final lines: “And as I turned to make my way back home / The snow turned into rain.” There is both a transformation of weather and emotion: from indifference to hurt, from the snow of repressed emotion to the rain of tears. But, of course, this line, along with many others in the song, has multiple interpretations that fans have debated since it was released.

A great Christmas song needs to achieve a few things: to have a great hook, be memorable and be a little cheesy. In every aspect, Dan Fogelberg is the songwriter to create a Christmas song fitting these qualities. He became famous in the early 1970s due to a string of easy-listening, country-pop hits that fit him right in with other artists of his time. However, this also led to the unfortunate paradox of his work being revered by fans and reviled by critics. Fogelberg, to be fair, wears his earnestness and inspirations on his sleeve: the main melody of the verses is borrowed from Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” and that final saxophone solo is an interpolation of the New Year’s standard “Auld Lang Syne.” 

For listeners like me wondering about the variety of the lyrics, a quick Google search reveals that nearly everything that occurred in the song also happened in real life. Dan did meet his old lover at the grocery store, in Peoria, Illinois, in 1975. Jill Anderson, the subject of the song, did not reveal her identity until after he died in 2007. 

“Same Old Lang Syne” is a great Christmas song because it acknowledges that the holidays come with their own complex set of feelings: happiness, yes, but also great melancholy, longing, grief, trauma, anger, confusion and fear.  It leaves me with something to think about every time I listen, and it’s that storm of emotions I’ll be reminded of the next time I roll down the road and hear those piano chords start up again.