Jeremy Lorton won the Christmas song competition for his original song, "Christmas Is All About Love."

Photos by Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times

About Jeremy Lorton

• Winner, 666 votes: Jeremy Lorton, “Christmas is All About Love”
• Age: 29
• Hometown: Originally from Cerro Gordo, Ill. Family moved to Buchanan when he was 9.
• Family: Lorton now lives in Roanoke with his wife, Mary, and their children — 3-year-old daughter Jaiden and 11/2-year-old son Landon.

Jeremy's song

"Christmas is All About Love"

Video of Jeremy Lorton

Watch a video of Jeremy performing his winning song, "Christmas Is All About Love."

Meet the runners up

• Second place: Jon Weems, "Heaven's Gift"
• Third place: Chris Henson, “Bah Humbug Blues”

Listen to all the songs we received

Mom power is responsible for the winning entry in The Roanoke Times Christmas song contest.

Jeremy Lorton wrote the song, “Christmas Is All About Love,” a couple of years ago. He played it for family members, and got a good reaction. When Extra announced the contest in late October, Lorton’s mother, Nancy Lorton, made sure he knew about it.

“I really only entered this contest to make my mom happy,” he said.

Now, she’s even happier. Lorton won, garnering 666 of the 4,350 votes cast over a two-week period.

Jonathan Weems’ song, “Heaven’s Gift,” featuring Heather Armstrong, was second with 353 votes. Chris Henson came in third with “Bah Humbug Blues,” which received 308 votes.

It’s a rare return to music for Lorton, who lives in Roanoke. He’s married, with two young children. He has a job installing office furniture and is a full-time student at Virginia Western Community College, studying communication design.

“That takes a lot of time,” he said.

But back in his high school and college days, he was a singer with a band called Phonology — later called Pork Rinds. He played nightspots including the old Iroquois Club on Salem Avenue, and numerous college parties in the mid- to late-1990s, he said. He and his mates wrote original songs, influenced by acts such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots and Alice in Chains.

Though he left that part of his life behind, he still gets to pick up the guitar occasionally. More rarely, he tries to write a song, he said.

“Christmas Is All About Love” took root in conversations he was having among friends about the meaning of Christmas. He heard a lot of opinions, which led him to his own answer.

“Out of all the things they were saying … the real, underlying theme was love,” Lorton said.

His song opens with these lines:

“Merry Christmas means, I love you neighbor/Merry Christmas means, I love you friend/Merry Christmas means, I love you stranger/In the name of the baby, laying in a manger on the very first Christmas night.”

He wrote it for himself, and played it just for family members, but once his Mom told him about the contest, he had an excuse to record it. So Lorton pulled out his guitar, opened up his laptop computer, and laid down his tune.

“Christmas Is All About Love” is thematically distant from the grunge-era music he came up on. Raising his own family has changed his perspective, he said.

“Now that I’m older, I realize all the blessings I’ve been given,” Lorton, 29, wrote in an e-mail recently. “I have a great family (I always have) … They make me so truly happy, I just can’t write that kind of dark song anymore.”