Poll: Holiday (Music) in Hell

The Onion kindly provided this Patton Oswalt demolition of the “Christmas Shoes” song. while it’s funny, it is a reminder that we have reached the time of year when radio stations across the country will begin inflicting holiday “cheer” on their listeners. which seems like an excellent subject for a poll:

This is thrown together very quickly between steps in the food preparation for tomorrow’s Thanksgiving dinner, so I’m sure I’ve forgotten several horrible songs that belong on the list. Please feel free to offer your own least favorite tunes in the comments.

32 comments

  1. No contest: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”. I’ll grant that there are worse Christmas songs out there, but none that have gotten the sheer overexposure of this one. In my case, what really put Rudolph over the top, so to speak, was having to play a bad marching band arrangement of the song repeatedly when I was in high school.

    BTW, I consider Rudolph to be a modern Christmas song. Wikipedia gives the song’s history: the story was created in 1939 as a commercial promotion for the Montgomery Ward department store, later set to music, and first recorded in 1949 by Gene Autry (whose version is one of the few of this song I can stand).

  4. That damned Paul McCartney one, with the repetitive “simply having a wonderful christmas time”. As repetitive as “Feliz Navidad”, but Sir Paul gets the nod for the horrible bouncy accompanying music.

  8. The Elvis Presley song where the background singers sing “do doo doo DOO doo” over and over and over… Blue Christmas? GAH HATE.

  9. I have never heard “Christmas Shoes”, and with luck I’ll keep right on never hearing it.

    Had I been forced to pick only one I’d have voted for “Drummer Boy”, as virtually every rendition is soul-crushingly drab and monotone; it’s a Christmas carol decorated in institutional green and old-bloodstain red, and about as joyful as a necropsy. However, I didn’t have to choose.

    (And I refuse to acknowledge the presence of Christmas carols before Dec. 1… indeed, I refuse to decorate until the first weekend of December. Let stores pay for their own advertising.)

    — Steve

  10. Had I been forced to pick only one I’d have voted for “Drummer Boy”, as virtually every rendition is soul-crushingly drab and monotone; it’s a Christmas carol decorated in institutional green and old-bloodstain red, and about as joyful as a necropsy.

    As a pathologist, I can tell you that “Drummer Boy” is far less joyful than any necropsy. At least with a necropsy, you have questions to which you are seeking answers. With “Drummer Boy”, the only question is where the hell did you put those knitting needles so that you can ram them down your ear canals ASAP.

  14. #12

    Agreed. Everytime they ask, “Do they know it’s Chrstmastime again?” I want to answer, “No, and they don’t fucking care.”

  15. I object to this poll because I had never heard of the “Christmas Shoes” song until now. You have ruined my holiday. The only thing that can fix it is hearing dogs barking “Jingle Bells” (only once, please) or Elvin and the Chipmunks singing one of their insipid Christmas songs.

    “I’ll be Home for Christmas” is pretty disturbing once you learn it was released in 1943 … at a time when many were going overseas and would never go home again.

  16. “Do they know it’s Christmas” is a good choice. I went into these comments thinking that “All I want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth” was the most annoying, but Sturgeon’s Law applies to Xmas music as much as anything else.

  18. That’s why when I’m out and about I have the FM transmitter for my iPod Touch 2G (I want a 3G or actually 4G since the 3G has the FM transmitter built in, the 4G has that and the camera!)

    Also have a pair of Motorola S9 bluetooth earphones.

    That way I can hear what *I* want to hear.

  19. The only thing worse than Grandma Got Run Over… is that I saw a commercial the other day that was written to the tune of that song.

    Both McCartney and Lennon wrote a pretty bad Christmas song. (Simply Having… and Happy Xmax (War is Over)).

  20. Some relatively modern song that I will name in a comment:

    “The Christmas Song” by Mel Tormé. You know, “Chess nuts, roasting in an open foyer”…*

    If there’s a major U.S. recording artist who hasn’t recorded this song, I don’t know about him/her/them.

    I will stipulate that it is not, intrinsically, a worse song than “Christmas Shoes” or “Grown-Up Christmas List” <shudder>, but it is far more overdone. At least for now.

    – – – – – –

    * It took me a long time to know why that pun was supposed to be funny, because I never heard it, I only ever read it, in forwarded emails, and here in Canada, we pronounce that last word “foy-ay” (or “Foy, eh?”, if you like), and “in an open foy-ay” just doesn’t have the same punch, you know?

  21. In general, I loathe any Christmas/holiday music written after about 1900. Although I do think the Adam Sandler Hannukah song is funny. (Probably because it is generally NOT play ad nauseum in malls, grocery stores, etc., so I only hear it a few times each year.)

  22. Then there is the secret final verse for “The Little Drummer Boy”:

    Mary snarled at me, parumpapumpum
    “I had the kid asleep”, parumpapumpum
    “You woke him up you creep”, parumpapumpum, rumpapumpum, rumpapumpum
    “You and your drum”.

  23. There are so many bad ones! Feliz Navidad. Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer. The Little Drummer Boy. Do They Know It’s Christmas. The list goes on and on.

    I reach a point every December where there are only two Christmas songs I can stand – The Carol of the Bells as performed by the handbell group Campanile, and Tom Lehrer’s satirical Christmas medley. (“Angels we have heard on high, tell us to go out and buy.”)

    I have a musical clock which I love. I do switch it to Christmas Music Mode the day after Thanksgiving, which is inexplicable behavior, since the first song on the list is Feliz Navidad.

    Oh well, no law says I have to be consistent.

  25. I once spent a holiday season working at a record store which played pretty much nothing but the Mannheim Steamroller Christmas Album for a solid month (we had ordered a sh*t-ton, for some reason that’s still unclear). By New Year’s, I was ready to drive over all the CDs, plus the band, with a steamroller of my own.

  26. As a veteran of the holidays in retail, I say, passionately: ALL OF THEM.

    And yet.

    There is a special place in hell for the ones that think they are funny, of which Grandma Got Ran Over By A Reindeer is only one. And probably not even the worst.

  27. I’m casting my vote for Santa, Baby. Ew ew ew!!!!

    MKK–Grandma Got Run Over, by the way is my favorite Xmas song ever! I giggle and giggle and giggle.

  28. If we are including modern songs then there are really far too many, so how about we suggest the artists that have produced the worst string of Christmas singles? My vote goes for Cliff Richard and the worst of the bunch has to be “Mistletoe and Wine” just because it got so much airplay at the time. I hope you managed to avoid hearing most of these songs over in the US.

  29. I agree with #12 – “Do They Know It’s Christmas” is a flaming pile of paternalistic crap. But at least it’s kind of sincere crap. You could see a pack of clueless famous people singing it at an aid concert, and meaning well.

    By contrast, “Christmas Shoes” is breathtakingly cynical. And it’s buried under piles of saccharine – a manipulative mystery tour through childhood, family, love, death, and every other emotional hot button the songwriters can think of. I’m surprised they didn’t work a lost puppy in there somewhere.

    This would be bad enough, but then it goes into special bonus rounds: the narrator cheerfully assumes that God, in His infinite love and concern, made some poor kid’s life miserable and then plopped him in the narrator’s path to provide a teachable moment. Wasn’t that nice of Him!

    Basically, if the “Christmas Shoes” song were a cat, then my faith in humanity would be its litterbox.

  30. ‘Christmas Shoes’ is easily the worst because it’s so horribly, nakedly morbid and manipulative. For Christmas.

    It has a plot. A bad, awful, treacly maudlin one. A boy is begging a store-owner to let him by a pair of shoes for his mother, for a Christmas present.

    So far, so normal. It gets worse.

    He really needs to get Mommy these shoes, because she needs to look pretty tonight. It’s Christmas, and she needs to look her best.

    And the sucker-punch.

    She needs to look pretty because she is in the hospital and she’s dying and she needs to look her best when she meets Jesus. When she dies. On Christmas.

    It’s the Christmas carol equivalent to all those 9/11 memorial tchotkes showing angels and FDNY firemen and Jesus cradling souls against the burning Twin Towers.

    Gack.

  32. I actually rather like most of the songs on Chad’s list. Including “Little Drummer Boy” (although I don’t play it over and over again as I did when I was a kid).

    “Christmas Shoes”, though, I really can’t stand. Basically for reasons explained very well in 29 and 30 just above.

    Not sure whether I’ve ever heard the “Adam Sandler Hanukkah thing” so I don’t have an opinion about that.

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