A new joke surrounding the song is that one sign of the Christmas season coming earlier and earlier every year is that "Mariah Carey gets thawed out sooner." The idea being that, now past her hitmaking days, she only appears at Christmas to sing this song.
But that's because streaming services have led to the song being "bought" more as Christmas approaches. In its December 21, 2019 issue, Billboard listed "All I Want for Christmas Is You" as Number 1 on its Hot 100, setting a new record for longest time from original release to chart-top: 25 years. It got there again in 2020, 2021, and, now, again in 2022.
And, if it was a Hallmark Christmas movie, the guy wouldn't have shaved for four days, and he'd meet the mom, whose husband, the kid's father, ran off long ago; and, once the mom recovered, they'd get married.
Real life tends to not work that way, but "Christmas miracles" do. Why not sing about that? After all, NewSong, are you Christian in just name, or in deed?
The Christmas Song – better known by its opening line: "Chestnuts Roasting On an Open Fire." Mel Tormé wrote it, and Nat King Cole is its best-known performer. "And so, I'm offering this simple phrase, to kids from 1 to 92... " So, for everyone age 93 and up, you're out of luck? Sorry, Dick Van Dyke. Tough cookies, Old Man Periwinkle.
Deck the Halls. "Don we now our gay apparel." Once, this meant, "Let's all put on some bright clothing to commemorate this festive season." Now, it means, "Sweetheart, even Nicki Minaj wouldn't be caught dead wearing that!"
I've gone on social media and asked a few people with rainbow flag icons in their bio if it's okay to still use the line. So far, all have said it is.
And I'm guessing "Troll the ancient Yuletide carol" means "Please sing an old Christmas song." It could be worse, I suppose: You could be calling a woman "Carol the ancient Yuletide troll!"
Fairytale of New York. Shane MacGowan of The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl sang this duet in 1987, and it is not a song whose lyrics are fit for this post. The short, clean version is that, for the couple in the song, the fairy tale did not come true. Kirsty was killed in a maritime accident in 2000; while Shane, born on Christmas Day 1957, finally had his excesses catch up with him last month.
Feliz Navidad. The only problem I have with this one is that it's incredibly repetitive. It was good of José Feliciano to write a Christmas song that kids whose first language was Spanish can sing, but couldn't he have written a second verse?
He could have made it "Joyeux Noël," for French-speakers, including people in Quebec. He could have dovetailed the Spanish "Prospero año y felicidad" (A prosperous year and felicity/happiness) with the French, "Prosperité en l'an nouvelle" (Prosperity in the new year), which would have rhymed with "Joyeux Noël."
Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer. What a terrible thing to have to think about at Christmastime! As B.J. Hunnicutt taught us on M*A*S*H, "A family's Christmas wreaths ought to be green, not black." On top of that, lemme tell ya somethin': If any reindeer had ever tried to run over my Grandma, she'd have popped him one, and then you'd know how he got the red nose!
The original performers from 1979, Elmo and Patsy Shropshire (then married to each other) dropped a seemingly innocent couplet: "We're so very proud of Grandpa. He's been taking it so well. See him in there, watching football, drinking beer and playing cards with Cousin Mel." Then, in 1985, came the video, and "Cousin Mel" is revealed to be a considerably younger woman, probably named Melissa, Melanie, or Melody. And she might not be a real cousin. Could they have conspired to bump Grandma off for the chance to be together -- and for the insurance money?
Then, in 2000, came an animated TV special based on it. As it turned out, while the evidence suggested that something awful happened to Grandma, she recovered from her incident, but with amnesia, and wandered off. To his credit, Santa finds her, takes her to the North Pole, and takes care of her until her memory comes back. And, yes, Cousin Mel is the villain of this version of the story.
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. "Make the Yuletide gay." Yeah, another one of those. Made even more problematic by the fact that the song was introduced by Judy Garland. (In the 1944 film Meet Me In St. Louis.)
Holly Jolly Christmas. The song was written by Johnny Marks, and introduced by Burl Ives in the 1964 TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (which was based on another song that Marks wrote). It certainly seems jolly and innocuous enough -- until you get to the line, "Somebody waits for you. Kiss her once for me."
Bump that! If she's waiting for me, I'm kissing her for nobody but myself! It reminds me of George Carlin's rant about the line, "Give her my best." (Said rant is too risqué to discuss in a Christmas-themed post.)
I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus. Dumb Dora is so dumb! (How dumb is she?) She's so dumb, she appears to be unaware that the guy she sees in the Santa suit is actually her father! Or, worse, she appears to be not particularly troubled by the fact that her mother is kissing a man who (she thinks) is not her father. Either way, this is not a very bright kid.
Please, save the "Santa only comes once a year" joke. That, too, is too risqué.
To make matters worse, there's a version of this song sung by... the Jackson 5, back when they were first big. So, that explains Michael Jackson... I wonder if he ever asked a child to sit on his lap.
I'll Be Home For Christmas. "You can count on me," the singer says. But he closes by saying, "I'll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams." So, can she count on you, or not?
It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas. "Take a look in the five-and-ten." Sadly, there are now very few five-and-ten-cent (or "five-and-dime") stores -- many of which were in chains. Woolworth's, J.J. Newberry's and McCrory's all closed in 2001. Now we have "dollar stores" -- or, as they're known in Britain, "poundshops."
Another line: "There's a tree in the grand hotel, one in the park as well." Well, I should hope there's a lot more than one tree in the park! I know, I know, Perry Como meant that one of the trees in the park was a Christmas tree.
It gets worse: "A pair of hopalong boots and a pistol that shoots is the wish of Barney and Ben. Dolls that will talk and will go for a walk is the hope of Janice and Jen." The gender stereotypes are troubling enough. But putting a gun in a kid's hand is completely irresponsible, especially now, with the Newtown Massacre happening so close to Christmas a few of years ago.
Before Peter Billingsley starred in the 2022 sequel A Christmas Story Christmas, I wondered if I would one day see a version of A Christmas Carol where the Ghost of Christmas Past is a grown-up Ralphie Parker with an eye patch, saying, "See? I actually did shoot my eye out!"
I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day. Oh, no you don't. Look at all the places that are closed on Christmas. If you need to buy something, you'll have to get it at 7-Eleven or Wawa or someplace like that. And you will have to get things. You think it's easy to shop for everyone you love for one day a year? Multiply that by 365!
It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year. "There'll be scary ghost stories... " Uh, excuse me, Andy Williams, but I think you're getting your holidays mixed up!
True, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol has ghosts in it, but how old were you when you stopped being scared of those ghosts? Even when I saw my 1st version of it -- the 1962 Mr. Magoo version, when I was about 6 or so, in the 1970s -- I wasn't scared of them.
Last Christmas. First of all, it's by Wham! Second of all... Do I even need a "second of all"? The lyrics certainly suggest that it's the first gay Christmas song: "A face on a lover with a fire in his heart, a man under cover but you tore me apart."
There are "blue Christmas" songs -- "blue" as in sad, not "blue" as in "blue language" -- but this one, even if the "man under cover" is the narrator, not his target, is lame as heck. And did I mention it's by Wham?
I'm definitely not the only ones who don't like it: Tomas and Hannah Mazzetti, a couple who, in spite of the surname, live in Sweden, hate the song so much, they're raising money to buy the rights to it, so they can prevent it from being played on the radio. According to George Michael's estate, the price is at least $15 million. Sounds like we're stuck with it.
Little Saint Nick. The Beach Boys' contribution to Christmas songs is a guilty pleasure of mine: I'm not a "car guy," but I love how they make Santa's sleigh sound like a hot rod. But they have a little problem with counting: "Haulin' through the snow at a frightenin' speed, with a half a dozen deer, with Rudy to lead." Half a dozen is 6. There's supposed to be 8 -- 9, counting Rudolph. In this song, Big Red is 2 reindeer short.
My Favorite Things. Written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for the 1959 Broadway musical The Sound of Music, this song wouldn't appear to have anything to do with Christmas. But it's been included on Christmas albums since Jack Jones did it in 1964, a year before the film version starring Julie Andrews as Maria von Trapp. Mary Martin was the first to play the role and sing the song onstage.
The lyrics do make mention of "brown paper packages tied up with strings." That suggests presents, but not necessarily Christmas presents. There's mentions of "sleigh bells" and "snowflakes," which suggests Winter, though not Christmas. And then there's "silver-white Winters that melt into Springs." Again, we're getting away from Christmas, in more ways than one.
Blame Andrews. No, not for the film. In 1961, she sang the song in a Christmas special for The Garry Moore Show on CBS. This was a few months after the avant-garde instrumental version by The John Coltrane Quartet debuted.
Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree. In 1958, Johnny Marks, author of the original "Rudolph" song, tried his hand at writing Christmas songs for the first generation of rock and roll fans. That year, he wrote this song, which became Brenda Lee's 1st hit, at age 13. She became a bigger star, having 2 Number 1 hits in 1960, leading to this song's re-release, and it hit Number 3.
In 2023, this song was brought back, and Billboard has it listed at Number 1 -- setting new records: 65 years from introduction to chart-top, breaking Mariah's record; 63 years between Number 1s for Lee, breaking Cher's record of 24; and, still alive and performing at age 78, she breaks the record for oldest performer with a Number 1 hit, set by Louis Armstrong in 1964, with "Hello, Dolly!" at 62. Musically speaking, this was a Christmas miracle.
But is the song "problematic"? Not really. Marks throws as many seasonal clichés as possible into the lyrics, and includes the first line of "Deck the Halls," which was, of course, already in the public domain in 1958.
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. First, "All of the other reindeer used to laugh and call him names." Reindeer bullies at the North Pole. "Then one foggy Christmas Eve," Rudolph's prominent proboscis saves Christmas. "Then how the reindeer loved him." What a lousy bunch of fur-covered front-runners. I wonder if any of them ever said, "I'm sorry."
Someone who was once a friend and a fellow Yankee-themed blogger (no longer either, both by their choice) liked to once point out that, in the 1964 TV special based on the song, the story gets worse before it gets better: Even Santa himself gets on Rudolph's case – and on that of Donner, who in the story is the lead reindeer on the sleigh and Rudolph's father, for essentially passing on a genetic mutation (of which Donner himself appears to be only a carrier).
This is not one of Santa's better pop-culture representations. But, remember, this story isn't about Santa, it's about Rudolph. And Sam the Snowman (voice of Burl Ives) is giving you his perception of what happened. Sam might be an unreliable narrator.
Also, if you ever hear Dean Martin's version, you might note that both the singer and the subject are known for having a red nose, albeit with very different causes.
Run, Rudolph, Run. (That's the title, while the lyrics say, "Run, run, Rudolph.") The same year that Marks wrote "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree," he cranked out "Run, Rudolph, Run," and gave it to Chuck Berry.
Elvis Presley may have been the 1st rocker to record a Christmas song, with "Blue Christmas" the year before; but it was written in 1948, and was first a hit the next year for country singer Ernest Tubb. Even Elvis' 1957 version hardly sounds like a rock and roll song. In contrast, the Chucker went out of his way to make "Run, Run, Rudolph" sound like a Chuck Berry song, and it works great. That's the (Johnny B.) good news.
The bad news is that the lyrics reinforce gender stereotypes. First, we have Santa asking a boy what he wants for Christmas, and he wants a guitar. No problem there. Then they have Santa asking a girl what she wants, and she wants a doll. In the Ike Age, this didn't raise too many hackles; now, it does.
In 2006, Whitney Wolanin, then just 16 years old, recorded a new version, with the genders reversed: The girl wants the guitar, and the boy wants the doll.
Santa Baby. Ah, the joy of Christmas, where everybody wants something. Usually several somethings. As Kanye West would have said, back when he said nothing more offensive than this, "Now, I ain't sayin' she's a gold digger... "
But this song is also problematic on a practical level. A '54 convertible? Cars were huge in the Fifties. A yacht? A duplex? The ring could fit, the deed to the platinum mine could be folded up, but how exactly is Santa gonna get all that expensive loot into her stocking?
He’s magic,
the stocking is not! Okay, she does ask Santa to "slip a sable under the tree for me." I just got carried away, thinking Santa is only responsible for the stuff in the stockings.
Then again, considering the 1953 original was by Eartha Kitt, maybe it's a long, slinky nylon stocking. As Bill Maher (on whose former show
Politically Incorrect she guested a few times) would say, "Easy, Catwoman!"
To make matters worse, Eartha ended up dying on a Christmas Day, in 2008. James Brown, who recorded an album called
Funky Christmas, also died on December 25, 2 years earlier. And the aforementioned Dean Martin died on December 25, 1994.
Santa Claus Is Coming to Town. This is probably the most oft-cited problematic Christmas song, because of the line, "He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you're awake." Uh-oh, this makes Santa sound like something out of a George Orwell novel: "Big Brother is watching you."
Silver Bells. Nothing wrong with this one, as far as I can tell. In fact, it's my favorite secular Christmas song. But there's one version of it that's not... quite... right. I'm sorry, but Wilson Pickett? The Wicked Pickett should not have been recording Christmas songs! It would have been like asking Karen Carpenter to sing "In the Midnight Hour"! (Then again, she did cover "Please Mr. Postman.")
And how neat -- and weird -- was it in December 2010, on
Saturday Night Live, to hear Jeff Bridges, not known as a singer (though he and brother Beau did play pianists in
The Fabulous Baker Boys), duet on this song with Cookie Monster of
Sesame Street?
Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime. How is it that former Beatle John Lennon, who dared to "Imagine there's no heaven... and no religion, too" – not that he was saying there was
no God or Heaven, just asking us to imagine a world where people had "nothing to kill or die for" – wrote such a fantastic Christmas song, "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)"? While his former musical partner, Paul McCartney, one of the world's greatest songwriters and one of its greatest sentimentalists, facing that most sentimental of holidays, wrote such a weak one?
(There's No Place Like) Home for the Holidays. Every place in this country has people trying to get back there for Christmas, because it's "home" to them. I have no issue with that. This song, first done in 1954 by Perry Como, first mentions that the man trying to get home to Pennsylvania (Como's home State), is starting out (or, perhaps, stopping along the way) in Tennessee. No problem there, either.
But then he mentions people going "to Dixie's sunny shore." Even if you're not bothered by this glorification of the South (and I am), it doesn't fit with the whole "Christmas as Winter Wonderland" idea.
Also, when he sings, "From Atlantic to Pacific, gee, the traffic is terrific," whether he realizes it or not, he's using "terrific" in the original sense: Inspiring terror. If you've ever done Christmas shopping in Bergen County, New Jersey, where stores aren't permitted to open on Sundays, on the last Saturday before Christmas, you will understand. Christmas-shopping traffic and Christmas-travel traffic are not "terrific" as in "wonderful" or "jolly."
The Twelve Days of Christmas. The earliest known version of this one was published in 1780. As someone pointed out to me, this is the "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" of Christmas songs.
First of all, where did your true love
get all that stuff? Second of all, where are you going to put it all? I mentioned George Carlin before, but I wonder if he ever incorporated this song into his bit "A Place For My Stuff."
A partridge, 2 doves, 3 hens, 4 calling birds, 6 geese, 7 swans? That's a lot of birds. Think of the mess! Five golden rings? I can see getting one, but 5? One for each finger on the hand? That doesn't make any sense, unless the singer is Elvis, Liberace, or Elton John. Or maybe Pink, or Pauley Perrette in character as Dr. Abby Sciuto of
NCIS.
Six geese a-laying? Who uses goose eggs? Maybe one of the geese is "the goose that lays the golden egg." Eight maids a-milking? Maybe she already has 8 cows, but this is not specified in the song. Without cows, the milkmaids will have nothing to do.
Nine ladies dancing, ten lords a-leaping, eleven pipers piping, twelve drummers drumming? I hope they're all rented, because I can't imagine having them around every day, especially if none of them does anything else. Maybe one of the dancing ladies is also one of the milkmaids, and one of the leaping lords is also a piper or a drummer.
Also, what's so special about a partridge, in that it's the centerpiece of the song? I looked it up: In Greek mythology, in a fit of jealous rage, Daedalus threw his nephew Perdix off a hill, and the gods turned him into the bird in question. Hence, a partridge makes his nest in a tree that's not too high off the ground, like a pear tree. In French, the bird is a "perdrix," pronounced "pair-DREE," which may have confused an Englishman.
But that still doesn't explain what any of these varieties of bird has to do with Christmas. The only explanation I can think of for any of them is that a goose is the traditional bird to serve as Christmas dinner in England. After all, you don't need all 6 geese still alive to lay the eggs.
There's also a theory that "five gold rings," which became "five golden rings" in America, was originally "five goldspinks," another name for a five-ringed pheasant. If true, it would explain why 6 of the 1st 7 were game birds common to England, but 1 wasn't: Actually, all 7 were game birds, usable as food; while the 8th gift was the maids a-milking, also providing food; and the last 4 were all entertainers. Also, the "calling birds" may originally have been "colly birds," meaning "coal black."
Up On the House Top. "First comes the stocking of little Will. Oh, just see, what a glorious fill. Give him a hammer and lots of tacks. Also a ball, and a whip that cracks."
Huh? Either the songwriter, Benjamin Hanby in 1864, just threw together a few words that rhyme, without thinking about how they would sound; or Santa has his priorities way out of whack; or little Will is into, uh, things that are too risqué to mention on Christmas. Maybe he's not so little.
We Wish You a Merry Christmas. The 2nd verse begins, "Now, bring us some figgy pudding." Have you ever eaten figgy pudding? Have you ever even seen figgy pudding? Until November 23, 2016, neither had I.
But, that day, on the way down to our Thanksgiving weekend getaway in Ocean City, Maryland, we stopped off in the Philadelphia suburb of Haddonfield, New Jersey. Across the street from the British Chip Shop, producer of fabulous pub food, there is a store owned by the same people, the English Gardener Gift Shop, which sells British- (English, Scottish and Welsh) and Irish-themed items, including products normally available only over there, like Walker's crisps (what we, not they, would call "chips"), Branston pickle (a chutney), and Irn Bru (a Scottish variation on orange soda).
Among the British delicacies they sell is, yes, figgy pudding -- which, like Yorkshire pudding, black pudding, white pudding, plum pudding and even blood pudding, is basically what the British call a fruitcake. None of them resemble what we might call chocolate, rice or tapioca pudding.
The 4th and final verse says, "We won't go until we get some." Where is a family that doesn't have any figgy pudding gonna go to get some on Christmas Eve (or Day)? If there's a Jewish deli open (which once saved my mother when she needed wild rice for Christmas dinner), something tells me they're not going to have figgy pudding, either. Is it even Kosher?
What's more, the person being sung to could easily say, "This is my house, and when I say you go, you go. Don't make me break out my Ralphie Red Ryder BB gun."
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Even the songs that are about the original Christmas – the Christ Mass – don't always make sense. Again, I'll do these in alphabetical order.
Do You Hear What I Hear? Ignore for a moment that "Do you hear what I hear?" is from the 2nd verse, thus the title should be "Do You See What I See?" Ignore also, as previously stated, the likelihood (based on Scripture itself) that Jesus was not born in Winter, on December 25 or otherwise.
In the 3rd verse, the shepherd boy says, "In your palace warm, mighty king, do you know what I know? A child, a child shivers in the cold. Let us bring him silver and gold." This is the Christmas song that gets my mother upset: She points out that, if the child is shivering in the cold, forget the precious metals, bring him (and his parents) something more precious: Blankets. One would think that the shepherd boy, himself almost certainly poor, would figure that out.
And how did the boy get into the king's palace, anyway? Not that I want to take the king's side against a poor shepherd boy, but I would like to know. Maybe, like King David started out as, the boy was a crafty little shepherd who found a way around a seemingly impossible situation.
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and...
Good Christian Men, Rejoice. Should these songs be gender-neutral? It's hard to do it for the former, unless you (or, should I say, "ye") want to make it, in the song's rhythm, "God rest ye merry gentlefolk" or "God rest ye merry Chris-ti-ans."
As for the latter, some have tried to make it "Good Christian Friends, Rejoice." It's fairer, but it just... doesn't... sound right. A similar effort is occasionally made to change a lyric in the Canadian national anthem, "O Canada": "True patriot love in all thy sons command" becomes "...in all of us command."
Good King Wenceslas. This song, while certainly telling of genuine Christian behavior on the part of its subject, has nothing to do with Christmas. In fact, it takes place the next day: December 26, in addition to Boxing Day in the British Commonwealth, is St. Stephen's Day, the anniversary of the death of an early Christian martyr, and thus his "feast day" -- hence, "Good King Wenceslas looked out on the feast of Stephen."
There was a real Wenceslas, not quite a king, but Duke of Bohemia, born 907, died 935, assassinated by his brother (and, judging by his nickname, his total opposite), Boleslav the Cruel. And Wenceslas, too, has been declared a Saint, and is the patron saint of Bohemia, which is now in the Czech Republic.
Joy to the World. With a melody written by George Frideric Handel, there isn't much wrong with this one. But it shares a title with a song that country singer Hoyt Axton wrote, and which the band Three Dog Night took to Number 1 in 1971. Axton has died, but just about everybody from 3DN is still alive. I'd like to hear them sing the carol of the same title, just for the novelty.
The Little Drummer Boy. "The ox and ass kept time." Sometimes it's sung as, "The ox and lamb kept time," in case you don’t want to use the word "ass" around kids, even to mean "donkey."
You know, call me a relic, call me what you will, say I'm old-fashioned, say I’m over the hill... but the drummer is the one who's supposed to keep time! Why does the little drummer boy need the ox and ass (or lamb) to do it for him? I know, he's just a kid, and he's certainly not responsible for the lyric, he's just telling the story. But this is another dumb one.
O Little Town of Bethlehem. "The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight." Oh, really? Doesn't the Gospel have the angel saying to the shepherds, "Fear not"? Maybe the fears of all the years are dispelled in Bethlehem, but the point (or part of it) was that, with the birth of this child, there was less to fear.
Silent Night. The entire song suggests that it was quiet and peaceful. But the Gospels make no mention of whether Mary screamed over labor pains, or whether baby Jesus cried. The Rosary Prayer, the "Hail Mary," states, "Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb" -- suggesting that both "yon virgin mother and child" may have been granted holy exemptions to the usual pains each would suffer at birth.
We Three Kings. "Star of wonder, star of night." Great phrase, but there are no "stars of day." Yes, there is such a thing as "the morning star," but that's usually the planet Venus. There are people who believe that the Star of Bethlehem could only have been a "conjunction" of at least two planets (probably Venus and either Mars or Jupiter), looking like one big, very bright star. And, at the time of the birth of Christ, it might not have been known that these planets which looked like stars weren't actually stars. Even a king might not have known that. It's also been suggested that it was a particularly bright comet.
Ah, but the "three kings" were never actually called kings in the Gospels. They were, however, called "wise men" in The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 2. But even their number isn't divulged: It's presumed that there were 3, since there were 3 gifts that they presented: Gold, frankincense and myrrh. One man, one gift? That seems reasonable, but neither the Gospel nor the song specifically says that.
They have often been called scientists, astronomers or astrologers. If they were any of those things, and the Star of Bethlehem was a planetary conjunction, or a comet, then they would have known that. But, as far as modern humanity knows, none of them wrote their observations down. We don't even know their names, although modern retellings of the First Christmas story have assigned them names, which may or may not be historically plausible.
One of those modern retellings is Amahl and the Night Visitors, the 1st ever composed specifically for television, by Gian Carlo Menotti, airing on NBC on December 24, 1951. It was the premiere of the series Hallmark Hall of Fame -- and, at just 45 minutes, was the first "Hallmark Christmas Movie."
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Oh well. Regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, economic status, gender, your partner's gender, politics or even what teams you root for... for discrimination is the biggest humbug of them all...
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