Every year (and ever earlier it seems) we are treated (there's a misnomer if ever there was one!) to Christmas music and Christmas muzak (there is a difference) for weeks on end. When I was a boy, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the songs started on the day after Thanksgiving which we now know as "Black Friday", a term that previously had been reserved for describing the two worst stock market crashes in United States history. Today that Friday post Thanksgiving is defined by lunatic bargain hunters trampling and fighting one another for "hot items" which are laid out in retail stores in a planned, artificial scarcity. And as the consumers commit mayhem on one another lovely music plays about them to put them in the "true Christmas spirit®". Since we are actually still in the Christmas season, the 12 days that begin with Christmas Day, December 25th, and end on the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6th, I want to take up the subject of that music/muzak for a final curmudgeonly shot at the season.
The following are a more than Baker's dozen songs that are those of which I've heard far more than enough for any lifetime. For a more comprehensive and, as if that were possible, more curmudgeonly view of Christmas music/muzak I suggest that you run through Washington Post columnist, Alexandra Petri's dish on the songs. Here beginneth my list from moderately offensive to AaaaRRRRRGGGG!...
12d. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer: As a very young boy I had Gene Autry's recording of this classic. It was always too cute by half and over the last 70 odd years it's been done to death. The song is the fantasy of every child who's a little bit different and is, therefore, bullied and excluded from every "reindeer game" and social activity under the sun. So Rudolph gets his moment of glory but we know how this goes. A day or two after Rudolph goes down in history the other reindeer start with things like, "Isn't red the color of TAIL lights?" "Yeah! I wonder how fast Rudolph the TAIL light could go if we lit one of his farts?" "Yeah! Rudolph the 'jet pack' TAIL light!" Rudolph with your nose so bright, I'm sorry, kid, but we're done.
12c. Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer: Keeping with a reindeer theme, I am one of the last people to criticize satire and black humor but after 1 single hearing this song deserves the trash bin. If it weren't for the reindeer this song would be much higher on the list of horribles.
12b. Up on the Housetop: More damned reindeer! Enough already!
12a. It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas: This song come to us from Meredith Wilson's final Broadway venture and only flop, a stage musical version of Miracle on 34th Street. It actually looks a lot like Christmas as early as Halloween these days and for all the modest charm of the song, stuff it!
12. We Need a Little Christmas: This song comes from the Broadway musical Mame and the film version that starred a nearly embalmed Lucille Ball. It figures in the story as a plea in summer to brush away depression by getting out the Christmas decorations 6 months early. Since the day after Thanksgiving is already too early we have far too much of Christmas so we'll need none of this song.
11. I'm Gettin' Nuttin' for Christmas: a nascent sociopath complains that he's not getting any Christmas presents because he's been a jerk all year. If there were justice in the world he would get juvenile detention and never be elected the 45th President of the United States. Tough shit kid and shut up about it.
10. Do You Hear What I Hear?: How could you not? Bing Crosby gave it his best shot but this song has lousy lyrics and a faux religiosity that is beyond the faux inherent in religiosity. I never want to hear it again.
9. Santa Baby: This is no reflection on Ertha Kitt who, as Eddie Murphy wisely pointed out, was hot and sexy will into old age, but it's been done to death. This song is a vibrator with dead batteries.
8. Rockin' 'Round the Christmas Tree: the day someone makes a truly plausible explanation of what "the good, old fashioned way" is, I will move this song up a couple of notches but it still sucks.
7. Blue Christmas: O. k. I will bring down some real wrath upon my head by saying that I never thought much of Elvis. He was a poor white boy who could sing and made it viable for white kids to like the blues and rock that had been segregated into the black ghettos for decades. Can you say, "cultural appropriation"? This isn't good blues and it's not a good Christmas song.
6. The Little Drummer Boy: after 1 verse, let alone the whole interminable treacly, religiose song I want to take his drum sticks and ram them up his pa-rum-pa-pum-pum so hard he'll walk funny for the rest of his life. This song makes it to 6 simply because there a 5 worse, not because it has anything to recommend it.
5. Holly, Jolly Christmas: when I was a very little boy one of my favorite records was of Burl Ives singing about that "Little Green Frog, sittin' in the water". I liked Burl Ives. It wasn't until much later that I learned that to save his own career he'd thrown Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert and Lee Hays under the HUAC bus. That tarnished Ives for me forever. However, apart from that this is just an awful song.
4. The Hawaiian Christmas Song: this song deserves to be stuffed and stuffed hard up your Mele Kalikimaka and never removed.
3. Silver Bells: It was Christmas, 1975. I had 1 single day in which to do all of my shopping, food, presents, everything. In addition I had to drive, in a sleet storm, from Waterbury, Connecticut to New Haven (good toy store) to Windsor Locks (meaning from the extreme south of the state to the extreme north) for work on what was supposed to be my day off and back to Waterbury again. The moment I entered any store, building, bathroom or phone booth this song began playing. It became the theme for a hectic and fraught Christmas and a trigger for a very mild case of PTSD from that day. I absolutely HATE this song.
2. The Chipmunks Christmas Song: this song makes me want to torture small woodland creatures because it is utter torture to hear and I generally like small woodland creatures. Call the taxidermist because I want Alvin's little head mounted on my wall encircled by a tiny hula-hoop.
1. The Most Wonderful Time of the Year: it isn't. There is little more to say. This song with its relentless, pell-mell rush and thumping, strained positivity just calls for strangulation of anyone who sings or plays a recording of it. That it can beat out the Chipmunks for worst Christmas song of all time is a superlative that beggars the imagination. Or as that great philosopher to whom Berkeley Breathed introduced me long ago, Bill the Cat would say, "Gack!"
Let's be honest here. The birth of Jesus of Nazareth was not "in the bleak mid-winter". Christmas is the Christianized Roman Saturnalia. It is a celebration of the slow but inexorable return of the light so nearly extinguished at the winter solstice. It is the faint but growing sense that spring and new life will conquer the deadly cold and white of winter. That alone, without any saviors' births, is worthy of feasting and celebration yet it is further made sublime by the addition of a birth. I do not believe in anything supernatural but I do believe in the sublime, that in the presence of which Vladimir Nabokov wrote, makes the small hairs at the back of our necks stand up. I attended the birth of my 3 daughters and can say unequivocally that there are few things as sublime as a newborn child, small, wrinkled, crying and a manifest piece of all the power and potential of the entire universe. The birth of any child, every child and, as the ancients would have it, the birth of the sun link together in what we call Christmas. That, in itself, is great cause for celebration and feasting and for raising our voices in song.
Lest I be claimed as a soldier in the phony "War on Christmas" let me say that I adore some Christmas songs. Good King Wenceslaus, God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen, and the 3 World War II Christmas songs that have made it into the canon, I'll be Home for Christmas, White Christmas and (only as Judy Garland sang it in Meet Me in St. Louis) Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.
I eschew all shining stars upon the highest boughs but wish you all to have or have had a merry little Christmas now.
