“My Favorite Things” was not originally a Christmas song, and John Coltrane proves it.

Back in 1961, Jazz legend (and canonized saint in the African Orthodox Church) John Coltrane, who had just recently escaped Miles Davis‘s towering shadow via 1960’s Giant Steps, decided he wanted to show off his latest soloing techniques to a wider audience, so he wisely recorded a covers-album of some then-recent popular hits. The result was My Favorite Things, oft-cited as one of Coltrane’s greatest records (and that’s really saying something), what Coltrane himself once called his favorite thing he’d ever recorded, and which, yes, leads off with an extended, ecstatic riff on the song of the same name from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music–a tune that still gets regular play on Holiday radio today.

But not back then—not because the track wasn’t popular yet (it was popular immediately), but because it wasn’t yet considered a Christmas song. For it is worth here emphasizing that while the title-track to My Favorite Things takes up the majority of Side A (and even became a surprise crossover hit in ‘61), Side B is dominated by “Summertime” from Porgy & Bess. This album could have just as easily been classified as a summer jam. That is, in the early-1960s, the same era when so much of our current Holiday pop canon was already becoming consolidated—when “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and “White Christmas” and “Blue Christmas” and “The Christmas Song” and “Christmas in New Orleans” and etc. were all getting finalized into our annual rotation—there was clearly no consensus yet that “My Favorite Things” was a Christmas song at all, or even pertained to any particular season; it could be enjoyed just as much in the high heat of summer as around the Yuletide log, since it belonged to neither. It wasn’t till decades later that Oprah Winfrey single-handedly dragged the tune into the realm of Holiday standards via her annual “My Favorite Things” Christmas wish-list/product-placement campaign.

Not that the fate of “My Favorite Things” is unique in this regard: the 19th-century folk-song “Jingle Bells” for example famously does not contain the slightest hint of the Christ child anywhere in its lyrics either, and could at least theoretically be sung happily all throughout the long winter months of January and February and even early March; yet nowadays, the moment December ends, it feels terribly anachronistic and melancholic to keep on singing it, even though the winter has technically only begun. Likewise, Fleet Foxes‘ biggest hit “White Winter Hymnal” from 2008 has become the most recent song canonized into the Holiday season–this, despite the fact that it also makes not the slightest lyrical allusion to the Christmas season either, and could have just as easily applied to any part of the winter months as well.

One could complain, I suppose (my parents sure did) that all of these patently non-Christmasy songs getting absorbed into the Christmas season does both a disservice, since it is symptomatic of our larger culture’s secularization of the Christmas season in general, to the point that the latter has been nearly drained of all its religious significance entirely. (When one has to constantly remind others of “the reason for the season,” the fight has arguably already been lost.)

However, there is a more charitable interpretation of this phenomenon too, one rooted in Brigham Young’s old dictum that “all truth belongs to the Gospel.” For if even non-Christmas songs can be co-opted into the Christmas canon, such implies that even the grossly material, the quotidian and the ordinary, can all be sanctified into the body of Christ as well. Do not all things derive from Christ to begin with anyways, even that same light of Christ “which is in all things, which giveth life to all things, which is the law by which all things are governed”, per D&C 88? Moreover, is not all Spirit just refined matter per D&C 131—which also declares that there is no such thing as immaterial matter? Such would seem to indicate that our ultimate goal in mortality is not to transcend this material world of mere “things” (as the Neo-Platonists who infiltrated the early Christian Church during the Great Apostasy averred), but redeem it.

If the Lord God Almighty calls upon us to cast off the things of this life and seek the things of a better, to even sacrifice all that we have for the Kingdom of God, it is not because these material things are inherently sinful and must be destroyed, but because God wishes to sanctify them into something better. This material world we inhabit is to be raised up with us—even a New Heavens and a New Earth—not abandoned nor denigrated. We forsake all things specifically so that we can inherit all things. Like John Coltrane, we are to transform our favorite things into something greater, larger, more ecstatic, and more spiritual than they were before.