Haggard's 1973 Christmas single "If We Make It Through December" proved to be so popular that it became the title track for this February 1974 release. The song explores the feelings of an unemployed father struggling to make ends meet and provide a happy Christmas for his daughter. As Daniel Cooper observes in the liner notes to the 1994 Haggard box set Down Every Road, "That it's one of the most heartbreaking Christmas songs ever recorded didn't matter to people who prefer honestly rendered pain to false merriment."[3] In his book Merle Haggard: The Running Kind, David Cantwell notes that "If We Make It Through December" is a Christmas song, but "it feels like an anti-Christmas song. The character he plays isn't just feeling blue this holiday season like we've seen in hundreds of other Christmas numbers. He hates Christmas, hates the whole idea of it, at least this year."[4] The song reached number one on the country singles chart and crossed over to number 28 on the pop charts, becoming Haggard's biggest hit.
Although Haggard had been writing the majority of the songs on his LPs for years, outside contributions dominate this album. As he later recalled in his 1981 autobiography Sing Me Back Home, Haggard and wife Bonnie Owens were splitting up at the time.[5]
Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic writes, "Usually, Merle Haggard's musical eclecticism is a virtue, but on If We Make It Through December it hurts the overall impact of the album. Many of the individual tracks—particularly the gentle, yearning title track and good versions of Lefty Frizzell's 'I'm An Old, Old Man (Tryin' To Live While I Can)' and the country standard 'To Each His Own'- work well on their own, but often the straight-up country, western swing, Dixieland experiments and pop-tinged ballads seem at odds with each other."[6] Music critic Robert Christgau wrote "Last time it was good to hear him go contemporary again. This time one of the two contemporary standouts sounds mysteriously like Bob Wills. The Lefty Frizzell and Floyd Tillman remakes come across fresh and clean. The Ink Spots remake doesn't."[7]
