I Hate Christmas Music

(photo credit: acartoonchristmas.com)

Okay, before you accuse me of being a scrooge for writing a blog about how much I hate Christmas music (and I am totally about to write a blog about how much I hate Christmas music), let me preemptively gloss over a few exceptions to this pet peeve of mine. I love Carol of the Bells, for starters. Singing Handel’s Messiah under the direction of my high school chorus teacher, Pat Bonaker, is one of my fondest childhood memories, and joining with the congregation in Silent Night during the candlelight Christmas Eve service always makes me cry.

I don’t categorically hate Christmas music, but I hate most of what they play ad nauseam at shopping centers and on commercials during the last two months of the year. Perhaps most online shoppers make their purchases via computer to avoid lines and crowds, but I’m getting everyone’s gift from Etsy.com and Amazon.com because it is the best way to avoid the following songs:

I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus

I heard Reba McEntire’s cover of this song on the radio at work today and found myself contemplating the story with fresh annoyance. Just so that I’m clear, is the child in this song suppose to think he has caught his mother having a tryst with Santa? And do I hear correctly that he keeps quiet about it and even blows it off? What a laugh it would have been, if Daddy had only seen…

What ridiculousness. Do my kids love Santa? Of course they do. Do they love him more than their father? No way. Dad rules. They would never keep such an ugly secret from their old man. Not for a minute. If my kids caught me having an extramarital affair with Santa Claus, they would rat me out in two shakes. That jolly ol’ son-of-a-gun wouldn’t so much as have time to take his mitten-sheathed hand out of my blouse before those two screamed, called for their father, and snapped a few incriminating photos with the nearest cell phone.

Baby It’s Cold Outside

The woman is this song is obviously about to be date-raped. Bless her cold-natured heart. She keeps expressing concern for her anxious father back home and for her reputation. She says “no” to this jerk like three times, and at one point she even asks, Say, what’s in this drink?

And how does her date respond? He taunts her about the weather. He tells her she will never find a cab. That her lips look “delicious.” He says, Don’t hold out! Baby, it’s cold outside!

The only reason I can imagine a retailer would play this song for Christmas shoppers is to scare them into purchasing Hothands for their teenage daughters’ stockings. Or mace.

Dear Mr. Jesus

If you don’t know this Christmas song, I suggest you look it up on youtube. It came out in the mid-80s. This was around the time that Suzanne Vega’s My Name is Luka was in the top 40. Child abuse was the trending social ill of the year.

Dear Mr. Jesus is performed by a little girl. She is singing a prayer about a child she saw on the news that had been taken out of her parents custody following parental abuse. And just when you think it can’t be worse, she sings Please don’t tell my daddy, but my mommy hits me too.

This song tore me up as a 10 year old child. It was really the first time I’d ever heard about child abuse or parents losing custody, and boy, the surprise reveal at the end when she admits to being beaten – that came out of no where!

Jesus, Christmas and child abuse all woven in together. Too much. It goes without saying that I think child abuse is an atrocity, and I will delete this whole section of the blog if someone can tell me that any child anywhere in the entire world was spared even one blow because of this song, but as it stands, it is so over-the-top that I have to make fun of it to keep from throwing myself off a bridge.

Last Christmas

While we’re discussing 80s Christmas songs, let’s discuss this Wham tune. Last Christmas, I gave you my heart, but the very next day, you gave it away. This year, to save me from tears, I’ll give it to someone special.

It’s been a solid year since the poor girl in this song broke it off with this big cry baby, and he is still belaboring over the details of their separation. Last Christmas is the yuletide equivalent of “You’ll be sorry when I’m dead.” It is clear the singer is trying to make the ex-girlfriend feel guilty and contrite, but we all know his whiny song does little more than renew in her confidence that she made the right decision to drop him for someone better.

The 12 Days of Christmas

I just straight-up hate this song. I hate how long it takes to sing. I hate how frequently it is parodied. I think there are too many birds in it. The partridge. Geese. All those swans. I think the guy is coming on too strong in sending all these presents to his “true love.” It is damn-near two-weeks worth of daily presents. It makes him seem like an obsessive weirdo, and I have not ruled out the possibility that the guy in Wham’s Last Christmas (above) isn’t this very boyfriend. Maybe the girlfriend ended the relationship right in the middle of the holiday season because he kept sending over loud, messy birds.

Santa Baby

Women that like this song, and the female performers who choose to cover this song, are never as cute and they imagine themselves to be. We are so past this, ladies! If you want to baby-talk, please be holding an actual baby, and if you want a yacht, work hard in school, invest wisely, and then buy yourself a nice yacht.

In my observation, men who are successful and well-off tend to partner with women who are similarly bright and successful. The stripper/demented-geriatric-oil-tycoon match-ups are the exception and never end well.

Dominick the Christmas Donkey

Dominick helps Santa deliver presents to children in Italy. He is more suited for climbing the hills than the reindeer, you see. Because while it is totally believable that a single, immortal man could deliver presents to every child in the entire world in an 8 hour time period year after year, and while it is easy to imagine that a reindeer could fly and use it’s nose as a headlight, it is in all ways incomprehensible that reindeer could climb those steep Italian hills.

This song has the campiest, most over-the-top Italian-themed tune I have ever heard. I am pretty sure the phrase “pi-zzah-pie-uh” is used toward the end.

I’ll Be Home for Christmas

I picture the man singing this to be the classic, workaholic, blow-off-the-wife-and-kids sort of guy that always promises to be involved in family functions and then bails at the last minute. Please have snow and mistletoe, and presents under the tree. Go out of your way to make it a memorable Christmas, and I’ll come home. (But we both know there is a strong possibility that I will have to fly into the city or take a long conference call up in the office. But I’ll still be there. If only in my dreams. Love you, honey. You’re the best. And while I’ve got you on the horn, you didn’t happen to pick up my dry cleaning, did you?)

Thanks for reading. Good luck with your last-minute shopping, and if you see Mrs. Bonaker, please thank her for teaching us Handel’s Messiah.