If We Make It Through December is the sixteenth studio album by American country music singer Merle Haggard and The Strangers, released in 1974.

[2] 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.

[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.