First Noel", instrumental "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, 1944, performed by Judy Garland. The song's lyrics were originally different. Lyricist Hugh Martin's opening lyrics were deemed too depressing by Judy Garland, Tom Drake, and Vincente Minnelli, and Martin changed them. The lyrics originally were: "Have yourself a merry little Christmas / It may be your last / Next year we may all be living in the past." Years after the film's release, additional lyric changes were made for Frank Sinatra, who objected to the song's generally downbeat tone. Deleted song Garland's prerecording of "Boys and Girls Like You and Me" survives, but the cut film footage has been lost. This song was originally composed by Rodgers and Hammerstein for their Broadway musical Oklahoma!, but was cut prior to its opening. Reception Upon its 1944 release, Meet Me in St. Louis was a gigantic critical and commercial success. During its initial theatrical release, it earned a then-massive $5,016,000 in the US and Canada and $1,550,000 elsewhere, resulting in a profit of $2,359,000. In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther called the film "warm and beguiling" and wrote: "Let those who would savor their enjoyment of innocent family merriment with the fragrance of dried-rose petals and who would revel in girlish rhapsodies make a bee-line right down to the Astor. For there's honey to be had inside. ... In the words of one of the gentlemen, it is a ginger-peachy show." Time called Meet Me in St. Louis "one of the year's prettiest pictures" and noted: "Technicolor has seldom been more affectionately used than in its registrations of the sober mahoganies and tender muslins and benign gaslights of the period. Now & then, too, the film gets well beyond the charm of mere tableau for short flights in the empyrean of genuine domestic poetry. These triumphs are creditable mainly to the intensity and grace of Margaret O'Brien and to the ability of director Minnelli & Co. to get the best out of her." O'Brien drew further praise from Time: "[Her] song and her cakewalk done in a nightgown at a grown-up party, are entrancing acts. Her self-terrified Halloween adventures richly set against firelight, dark streets, and the rusty confabulations of fallen leaves, bring this section of the film very near the first-rate." Writing in The New Yorker, Wolcott Gibbs praised the