Exposing the Annoying Nature of Another 20 Popular, Yet Terrible Christmas Songs

Hello…my name is J-Dub, and I fucking hate Christmas.  I probably wouldn’t have such a violent reaction if it weren’t for all the awful Christmas music.  There’s a sleigh full of Alanis Morrissette-level irony in the fact that I love music; I’ve been a musician for almost all of my life.  But there’s something exceptionally torturous about the sounds of the season.

I’m not sure I can count all the reasons why I believe that if you could turn rectal cancer into sound waves, they would sound like Christmas music.  I know that at the top of the list is the “binge” factor.  Even if you could find a Christmas song I don’t hate, I will be emptying a pistol into my radio after I’ve heard it for the 75th time in one day.  Of course, you can thank those terrorist-run radio stations that does nothing but spew that holiday propaganda from Thanksgiving on for that.

I guess the best way to explain my disdain for Christmas music is on a song-by-song basis.  A while back, I did a list of 20 of the worst offenders, but as we find ourselves in the midst of the fucking season yet again, I’m quickly discovering that only one list simply isn’t enough.

That’s why once again, I’m here to shit all over your festive spirit.

20) “White Christmas”

In all honesty, this isn’t really a bad song, and it’s the biggest selling record of all time.  But it’s also the perfect example of the duplicitous nature of Christmas music.  Here you have the “Grand-Daddy” of the entire genre made into a holiday staple by Bing Crosby, a degenerate alcoholic who abused his children so badly that not one, but TWO of them shot themselves.

19) “Jingle Bells”

“Jingle Bells” is the most recognizable non-Religious Christmas song ever.  It might even be the single-most recognizable Christmas song, period.  There’s just one problem.  It’s not a Christmas song.  There is no mention of or reference to Christmas or any other holiday anywhere in it’s four verses.

It was written and published in the autumn of 1857 under the title “One Horse Open Sleigh,” and according to the author James Lord Pierpont, it was actually written and sung for Thanksgiving.

I just alluded to the other problem this song has. While I mentioned this song has four verses, pretty much everybody does the “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells” version, which isn’t funny to any non-retard past the third grade.

18 ) “Santa Looked a Lot Like Daddy”

If you hark back to my first list, you’ll see right away there’s a lot Christmas songs with some seriously creepy undertones.  If you listen to this song back-to-back with “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” it doesn’t take much imagination to picture some family’s Christmas as some horrible holiday incestuous quasi-consensual fuck-fest.  You know, like pretty much every family Christmas in the Ozarks.

17) “‘The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot”

I get this is a “deep cut” for Christmas songs, but I have a soft spot for those that point out the incredibly depressing flip-side of all that horse-shit “holiday spirit.” The best version of this belongs to classic crooner Nat King Cole, whose warm, mellifluous tomes really drive home how completely meaningless Christmas is to an orphan nobody cares about.

You can almost picture the human version of those awful ASPCA commercials where they show you some half-staved puppy in a shit-covered cage to the strains of a Sarah MacLachlan song that makes you want to go sit in the park and drink yourself to death.  In other words, this song explains why there are more suicides around the holidays than any other time of year.

16) “Please Daddy Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas”

Speaking of drinking… First of all, there’s no goddamn way I could get through the holidays without my version of the “Three Wise Men;” Jack Daniels, Jim Beam, and Johnnie Walker. Worse yet, this is a John Denver song.  Forget the exceptionally sappy nature of his noise; the problem here is his real name was Henry Deutschendorf, which is about as German as it gets.  If you recall, he made a movie back in the 1970’s called “Oh, God!”  The plot of this film revolves around about a grocery store manager (Denver/Deutschendorf) who is visited by God.  The Almighty is played by George Burns, whose real name was Nathan Birnbaum, which is about as Jewish as it gets.

In other words, this song is giving me a moral judgement on my alcoholism, and it’s coming from a guy whose antecedents spent the 1940’s trying to gas as many of God’s relatives as possible.

Fuck you…just fuck you.

15)  “Back Door Santa”

Not paying attention to the truly shitty Christmas music contributions given to us by grayed-out 80’s rockers was really not an option.  While there are really so many choices, the flagship here is the Bon Jovi remake of a Clarence Carter recording from 1968.  It’s pretty obvious why I had to pick this one. Don’t even try to tell me the FIRST place your mind went when you read that title wasn’t something like this…

Once you get past the idea that good ol’ St. Nick is some sort of twisted butt-freak, there’s still the matter of how dreadful the song actually is.  If you are a fan of godawful keyboarding, this song is for you; it’s like three minutes of somebody beating a cat with a baby.

14) “That’s Christmas To Me”

If you’re not familiar with the term a cappela, it’s really just a fancy way of saying a group  of people who sing in subway stations because they don’t have the money to buy instruments.  If you aren’t familiar with Pentatonix, they are an a cappella group made of animated department store mannequins so annoying Mother Theresa would have hit them all in the throat with a fire axe.

These little pukes proves why we’re fucked as a culture, because somehow these barely non-castrata little noise makers have almost 18 million views on YouTube.

13)  “It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas”

I never understood Perry Como.  He was one of the biggest stars of his era, and yet he was at least four of the most boring people ever.  This song proves that.

No…Como is not actually still alive.  But he can still live up to the original level of excitement provided by this snoozer.

11) “Oh Holy Night”

Here’s another standard of the season which has been butchered by everybody from your local church choir to platinum-level recording artists.  This song has been done more than Miley Cyrus in a truck-stop men’s room, and none of those renditions are non-gut wrenching.  But the version that makes my colon slam like a steel bear-trap is the one done by singer-turned-Rose Bowl Float Christina Aguilera.  This woman hits notes that will have every animal in the neighborhood covering their ears and every garage door going up and down faster than Louis C.K.’s jerk-off hand.

10) “Here Comes Santa Claus”

There’s so much wrong with this song it really could have a post all it’s own.  To make such a long story remotely tolerable, I’ll stick to the biggest problems I have with it.

For starters, this might be the best example of the most annoying characteristic shared by the majority of Christmas songs; repetition.  Taking a vapid lyric and repeating it until I feel like I’m being ear-raped with a sandpaper condom is the best way to red-line the Annoying-o-Meter.

More importantly, whenever I hear this song, I picture Santa’s Workshop.  Then, I think about how you only ever only see about a dozen or so elves.  Then, I wonder how such a small workforce is supposed to make all the toys for all the girls and boys.  That’s when I realize that fat cocksucker Santa is running a Communist Chinese-era forced labor camp, and the first elf who doesn’t make his quota gets parted out as an organ donor.  After all, it isn’t that far from Siberia to the North Pole.

Keep that in mind the next time you take your kids to see Santa at the mall.  Nothing spells the spirit of the season quite like knowing one of those elves isn’t going to make enough Fingerlings to keep his kidney from being shipped in a picnic cooler.

9) “Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays”

In order to tell you who did this song, I would need to know the difference between N’Sync and New Kids On The Block.  Which ever one didn’t have Marky Mark’s emo-bitch brother are the responsible parties for this bit eardrum assault.  The song itself isn’t nearly as remarkable as the fact the video for it features Gary “What-choo Talkin’ About, Willis?” Coleman.  The star of “Diff’rent Strokes” would still be alive today if just one of Santa’s elves wouldn’t have made his quota, thus giving Coleman the kidney he badly needed.

8) “Christmas Cookies”

Even though I’ve mentioned it twice, I’m wrong about the spirit of the season being defined by chopping up elves for their reusable parts. It’s actually about songs full of nauseating double-entendrés recorded by a seven-foot tall drag queen.  As long as we are talking about things I’ve already mentioned, this is another example of an improper use of the term “back door” which is only magnified coming out of the mouth of RuPaul.

It gets worse.  Not only does this neither-nor make your want to projectile vomit with the “back door” thing, but when you ice that bung cake with “finger-licking,” “piping hot,” and my personal favorite “Dutch oven,” it becomes clear we should replace Christmas trees as the cardinal symbol of the season with drag queens making fart jokes.

7) “Last Christmas”

Leave it to George Michael to remind us this is the season to revel in vindictive, dysfunctional relationships. This song begs a question: Who is a worse human being…one who dumps their significant other the day after Christmas or the one who is simply using some poor girl to make his ex-lover jealous?

It really doesn’t matter when you stop to consider this song was done by a guy who got arrested for dishing out blow-jobs in a public park restroom. I’ll let you decide what part of this you want to incorporate into your family’s holiday traditions.

6) “We Wish You A Merry Christmas”

To be honest, this isn’t a bad song…it’s fucking awful.  Worse yet, this might be the most pervasive of them all; this aural shit-pile is EVERYWHERE this time of year.  Go to any school concert, it’s there.  Open a crap Chistmas card from an asshole relative you don’t like, and you get some electronic chirping version of it.  There’s even a version of it done by the Muppets that will have you puncturing your eardrums with an ice-pick by the second verse.

5) “I’m Gonna Put Some Glue ‘Round the Christmas Tree (So Santa Claus Will Stick Around All Year)”

This is easily the creepiest Christmas song of all time.  To fully grasp how fucked-up this song really is, start with fact it being sung by this guy.

Once you see that, it’s pretty obvious this is all about some “Buffalo Bill meets Dr. Frankenfurter” psycho-sexual serial killer who wants to trap Santa Claus and do God knows what to him.  The worse part is I might never have made this connection had Joel Grey not been a grown man singing in little boy’s voice.

4) “All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth”

Did you ever have a song which will always have a specific memory associated with it?  If live to be 1,000 years old, every time I hear this song, I will always be taken back to a playground “pupp-love” triangle when I was in the fourth grade.  There were two girls, one of whom had a crush on me, and another for whom I had a “thing.”  Now, the one who was eager for my affections had a habit of “sneak-attacking” me, accostings during which she would run up on me, lock in a bear hug and start forcibly kissing me.  In today’s world, she would have been sent to a Turkish prison,  but in the 1970’s, I was on my own.

Then comes a day when I’m on a teeter-totter with the girl for whom I had the “hots.” Out of the corner of my eye, I spot the other girl executing one the aforementioned “sneak-attacks.” As she comes up behind me, I bail off the teeter-totter, at which point two things happened.  As the side I just abandoned rocketed into the air, it caught “sneak-attack” girl flush on the chin, opening a gash which required several stitches.  Meanwhile, since for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, the end of the teeter-totter slams into the ground, and the object of my affection’s has a meeting with the steel handle which cost her most of the teeth in the front half of her head.

To make a long story short, every holiday season I get reminded of the two little girls who because of me likely grew up to be members of a lesbian terrorist group.

3) “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” 

Back in the 1950’s, a 10-year old named Gayla Peevey got her “Fifteen Minutes” with this song which got her a stint on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” It’s all about her wanting an actual live hippopotamus for Christmas.  This song is so syrupy sweet that after you hear it, you’ll want to blow your nose with a pancake.  The trouble is the “sweet” aspect wears off faster than cheap chewing gum.  After that, this song quickly becomes so annoying that you hope the girl gets the hippo so she can watch the thing rip her family to shreds.  See, this girl is so stupid she doesn’t realize hippos are actually vicious animals with two-foot long tusks that can rip a crocodile in half, and that they are responsible for killing more people in Africa than any other animal.

2) “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer”

This is less a hacky novelty song and more a horrible case of elder abuse.  Think about it.  Nobody was paying attention to Grandma who obviously was not supposed to be left unattended.  We know that because once nobody was watching, she chased her prescription medication with good, old-fashioned booze, and as a result she gets trampled to death by a wild animal. The song even mentions she had “hoof prints on her forehead and incriminating claws marks on her back.”  It might be time the district attorney considers charges of negligent homicide against Grandma’s caretakers.

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