A Holiday Tradition: Exposing the Annoying Nature of 20 Popular, Yet Terrible Christmas Songs
It’s that time of year once again where we here at Dubsism break out one of our holiday traditions. For the next month, you are going to be ear-raped by Christmas music. All of it is obnoxious, but some have ear-wormed a special place into our collective psyches for just how awful they really are. We won’t give you links to these songs; if you want to skull-rape yourself, we aren’t going to help you. But you won’t even need to do that; just walk into any place that pumps in that horseshit overhead music. You’ll hear them.
You need not look at a calendar to tell what time of year it is. All you have to do is walk into a store, where you will be bombarded with it. Every city in America has at least one radio station that will play this exclusively from now until after the damn holiday. By now, you know what I’m talking about; the scourge known as Christmas music. That’s why we here at Dubsism feel compelled to make the rare foray away from the world of sports to tackle an important issue nobody else seems to want to address when it comes to Christmas music.
We all know them; we’ve all heard them. But it isn’t very often we stop to consider the facts behind why some of these songs, especially the popular ones, are so patently annoying that using them to celebrate the biggest holiday in all of Christianity should really be questioned.
20) “The Christmas Shoes”
If you do a web search on “worst Christmas songs,” this fat little turd tops many lists, and I certainly understand why. First of all, it’s just a terrible song. But that isn’t why it is so universally hated. the actual reason why everybody else tops their lists with it are the same reason I almost want to defend it.
Almost.
It is such a shitty song that even I, an avowed hater of Christmas, can’t embrace the fact that this song calls 1-800-BULLSHIT on all the phony “Joy of the Season” crap we get shovel-fed every year. Nobody ever wants to remember that while most of you are “fa-la-la-la-la-ing” all over the fucking place, more suicides happen during the holidays than any other time of the year. The beauty of this song is that it capitalizes on a real “rips-your-heart-out” reason why all this Christmas cheer is so much zoo cage sweepings. Nobody feels sorry for the drunk who alienated his family and decided to greet the holiday by putting his head in the oven. But when you make a song about a kid buying a last-minute gift for his dying mother, you get more water-works than a Brooklyn fire hydrant on a hot summer day.
Merry Christmas from your local gas company.
The big problem is this song tries to take a message too far, and in doing so, goes to a place even worse than the place it is bitching about. It wouldn’t even be on this list had it stopped at conveying a message that Christmas is a time to be together as a family. You’ve got to follow the premise of the song to understand how misguided this shit gets. In a nutshell, the song is about a boy whose mother is literally on her deathbed and he decides to buy her some Christmas shoes on what we are led to believe is the night she is going to die. Where it ends up is this weird moral about materialism and the clerk at the store thinking that God had sent that little boy to remind him what Christmas is all about.
If Christmas is about a boy with misplaced priorities (Hey kid, I bet your dying mother would rather spend her last moments with her son rather than to have him at the mall buying shoes that some asshole at the funeral home will steal anyway), and if the moral of the story is that some woman has to die so that some dipshit at Payless Shoes can make a potentially-touching story all about him, then we really are fucked as a nation.
19) Anything Involving Brenda Lee
If you are under the age of 60, and you are not a country music fan, you probably have no idea who Brenda Lee is. Consider that the greatest gift of all. Even country music fans couldn’t tell you anything she did other than these two Christmas atrocities. Even if you don’t know who she is, all you have to do to hear her is set foot in any retail establish in this country right now, and you will hear two abominations that sound as if they were sung by an inbred Oompa-Loompa.
One would be “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree,” which despite it’s ridiculous premise…raise your hand if you’ve even gotten your grandmother to head-bang to Megadeth at Christmas time…sounds as if it was sung in a register just north of the Alvin and the fucking Chipmunks. The second is “Jingle Bell Rock,” which is such a horrible song that has been covered by so many people that if Brenda Lee is still alive, she should be taken to the World Court at The Hague and tried for Crimes Against Humanity.
18) “The First Noel”
There’s just no way a song that gets butchered by church choirs at least a bazillion times every December which also happens to be a tacit cry for a holy war isn’t going to make this list. First of all, this song is nothing but a never-ending wail; it barely has any words, it just sounds like somebody taught a dog how to enunciate the occasional consonant…”noooooooeaaaaeeeeeeiiiiiiooooel.” Barf.
Second of all, just the mere mention of the word “Israel” is guaranteed to get you trouble from a bunch of guys who live 600 years behind the rest of the world, look like they shave with forks and wear their laundry on their heads. I’m sure a song which mentions the baby Jesus as the “the King of Israel” isn’t going to go over well with guys who put on a vest made out of TNT because somebody over-cooked the falafel.
17) “Santa Baby”
What else can you say about a song that was clearly meant for bad singers? Recording a version of this song announces your vocal abilities to the world in much the same way as wearing a Swastika armband pretty clearly tips people off to your thoughts on racial tolerance. Think about it…Eartha Kitt, Madonna, and those little ass-wipes from “Glee.” Need I say more?
16) “The Little Drummer Boy”
Who the hell thought this was a good idea? Here’s a song about some kid who had he lived today who obviously would be riding to school on the short bus. Not to mention, who the hell thinks banging on a drum could possibly be a gift? Worse yet, even if the drummer in this song was Neil Peart, how many newborn babies do you know that love ear-splitting noise? It is the dumbest song ever, and it completely fucks the premise of the next two on this list.
15) “Silent Night”
Silent Night, eh? Not with our little waterhead banging his drum like it was a roofied Lindsay Lohan. Let’s cut through the bullshit here. Whether it’s Bethlehem or Buffalo, this song is all about being stuck in a cheap-shit hotel with a screaming baby. Then or now, traveling sucks. Get used to it.
14) “Do You Hear What I Hear?”
Am I supposed to be hearing something other than some little asshole with his drum? I didn’t think so.
13) “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”
There’s only three possible scenarios that would explain a situation like this, and none of them are good.
- Mommy is actually being sexually assaulted by a dude in a Santa suit.
- Mommy is cheating on Daddy, and somebody is getting a divorce for Christmas.
- Mommy and Daddy are “spicing things up” by introducing a stranger to “adult time.” If the kid writing this song had entered the room five minutes later, this could easily have been titled “I saw Daddy getting it from Santa with a Strap-On.”
12) “The Twelve Days of Christmas”
Perfect. Christmas music from the same people brought you “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” Quick (and without looking), name any three gifts from after the “five gold rings.” Yeah, I didn’t think so.
11) “Silver Bells”
The part that gets me about this song is the reference to an implied connection between bells and Christmas in the city. Do you know what I think of when I think bells, Christmas, and the city? Those unwashed, piss-stinking assholes the Salvation Army parks in front of every store. Nothing could put me in less of a festive mood than being within lice-leaping distance of a guy with a bell and an advanced case of scabies.
10) “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”
While this isn’t the only song on this list that has nothing to do with Christmas, and while this song isn’t the only one on this list that falsely equates climate with the holiday season, it is the only one about date-rape. This song gets played all the fucking time as if it were a Christmas song, but it is really all about a guy trying to get some girl drunk and spend the night at his place. “Here, let me make you a drink, and when you wake up in the morning, your asshole will look like a bleeding wreath. Merry Christmas!”
9) “Winter Wonderland”
8) “Sleigh Ride”
These are the two most-sterling representatives of the “Cold = Christmas” genre, which as I will demonstrate is complete bullshit.
First of all, just look at a globe, and look at the parts of the world where Christianity is the dominant faith. Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Philippines are all hugely Catholic. As the typical American, right now you are thinking who cares about those people?
OK, let’s stick with Christians who look more like the typical American. There are vast stretches of Southern and Western Europe where snow is unheard of. How about Australia, where Christmas occurs in the middle of a usually ball-broiling summer?
Better yet, let’s stick to the places where typical Americans live. I don’t think there will be a lot of people trying to drag a sleigh through the piss-rain puddles of the Pacific Northwest. You think you can get a winter wonderland in fucking Texas? Put a guy in a Santa suit on a street corner in Miami and tell me how long it takes to roast his ass like a Christmas goose.
7) “Feliz Navidad”
Maybe it isn’t such a bad thing that we keep the “Cold = Christmas” rule. After all, look at what Jose Feliciano did. He proved shitty Christmas songs can cross language barriers. There’s progress.
6) “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”
Back in the day, there was a fun bit of belief in thinking that Santa had some sort of omniscient power, which is how he knew who was naughty or nice. Now, anybody who has an “all-inclusive Naughty or Nice” list either has a National Security Administration wiretap or a Predator drone. If that’s true, then the “naughty” kids can forget about a lump of coal in their stocking. Now the naughty kids can expect to get sent to Guantanamo or blown away outright with a Hellfire missile.
5) “Happy Christmas (War Is Over)”
As much as I loved the Beatles, I think Mark David Chapman belongs on a postage stamp for saving us all from would have been at least 30 more years of John Lennon’s overly-pretentious bullshit. There’s no better example of that than this song. Let’s face it, of all people, I understand hating Christmas for the two-month long exercise in blatant consumerism it has become, but even the most ardent Grinch amongst us really doesn’t need to get all preachy and judgmental about it. You don’t even have to go past the first line to hear it, and you don’t have to go any farther than that to understand why listening to a multi-millionaire lecturing about the plight of the poor is like having a vegan Maitre D’ tell you how good the steak is.
Not to mention, put this song on, and at the 40-second mark when Yoko comes in and starts her caterwauling, crank the volume and watch every cat in your neighborhood go absolutely out of their fucking mind.
4) “All I Want For Christmas Is You”
Mariah Carey could have easily kept this song off the list, then she decided to remake it with Justin Bieber. What it boils down to is we now have a woman deep into her 40’s singing a sex-tinged duet with a kid half her age. It makes you think she wants to suck the Bieb’s dick so hard she ends up with a mouthful of his hair gel.
3) “Do they Know It’s Christmas Time?”
When I think about people who really care about hunger in the third world, I think about a bunch of 1980’s British pop stars who couldn’t even spell Ethiopia. When this song first came out, I liked it because it had a killer Phil Collins drum line and I got sucked into the idea that these dickweeds really gave a shit about the Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s. They couldn’t have cared less.
Want proof of that? Stop to consider that the average Christian Ethiopian is Orthodox, and they don’t much care for the western idea of Christmas because they don’t give a shit about some Pope who arbitrarily moved the date of Christ’s birth two weeks ahead. So to answer the question…no, they don’t know it’s your Christmas Time because they stuck to the original one. If they weren’t pompous ass-loafs like Bono or Sting, they would have known that.
2) “Wonderful Christmas Time”
It boggles my mind every time I think the man who wrote “Yesterday” and “Hey Jude” is the same one who penned this absolute piece of shit. It is really an exercise in how to do everything wrong when it comes to producing music. It is monstrously over-produced; the delay in the chorus is not only completely inexplicable, it gives the song a feeling of being continuously one count off. There is an incessant, mind-numbing keyboard line which literally strangles the melody. Worse yet is the fact this Yuletide shit-burger gets played so much that McCartney makes nearly a half-million dollars a year from the royalties.
1) “Frosty the Snowman”
You may be asking self with all the terrible songs on this list, why is this one at the top? Because Frosty the Fucking Snowman combines both the bullshit themes that are far too present in Christmas music. This song is yet another example of the “Christmas = Cold” theory, and more importantly, this song has nothing to fucking do with Christmas. It’s about a snowman; a series of inanimate balls of frozen water rolled and stacked on each other in a configuration more reminiscent of a giant, upright, bleached-out turd than anything even remotely human. In other words, they are trying to get me to believe that an appropriate way to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior is to make a false icon out of snow which is usually filled with dog piss. I’ll pass.
About J-Dub
2 comments on “A Holiday Tradition: Exposing the Annoying Nature of 20 Popular, Yet Terrible Christmas Songs”
Drop Your Comments Here
The Man Behind Dubsism
Dubsism on Pinterest
Click On JoePa-Kenobi To Feel The Power Of The Jedi Photoshop Trick. Besides, you can get the best sports-related recipes ever. This is the sports-related content you are looking for.
Blog Directories
Dubsism 
Reblogged this on First Order Historians.
LikeLike
Pingback: Exposing the Annoying Nature of Another 20 Popular, Yet Terrible Christmas Songs | Dubsism