Fighting the Good Fight Against Bad Christmas Songs

Everyone has a favorite holiday tradition.  Mine is making fun of bad Christmas songs.

Don't judge me.  Or go ahead and judge me, if you want, because I don't care.  I will still drive my wife crazy overanalyzing every song on the radio for the next two weeks regardless.

I will even bear the burden of being called a Scrooge if I must. I know the holidays are a happy time when no one wants to criticize anything, but I am sticking to my principles on this.

Just because a song is about the holidays doesn't give it the right to insult the collective intelligence of humanity.

I believe this firmly. 

It's not that I hate Christmas or the holiday season.  I actually think it's the most wonderful time of the year. (you see what I did there?)  Because I do, I feel justified in saving the holiday season from being corrupted by an endless avalanche of stupid holiday songs. 

My favorite example is a holiday song so bad it's actually sort of entertaining. With the song "Do they Know it's Christmastime," a collaboration of musicians known as Band Aid got together and decided to advance every negative stereotype of Africa they could think of in the hopes of benefiting the people there.  The melody is catchy and the song nobly attempts to raise awareness of hunger in Africa, but its actual lyrics couldn't insult the population more thoroughly if the musicians had flown to Africa and given every person there an atomic wedgie.

In the chorus, the song proclaims that the entire continent of Africa has no rain, rivers or plant life whatsoever, and the people there are too stupid and poor to own calendars.  What's more, it presents as tragic the fact that people there might not even "know it's Christmas time at all," when the majority of the continent are not Christians and wouldn't celebrate it anyway.  It never occurs to the well meaing but ethnocentric musicians that maybe the people there know about our Western holiday, but just don't care. 

Similarly, the song bemoans that "there won't be snow in Africa this Christmastime." Is this really a bad thing?  If the children are as barefoot and shirtless children and the song suggests, wouldn't they be thankful that it isn't going to snow?  They'd freeze their butts off!

But I digress.

Plenty of traditional Christmas songs are dumb as well.  "Away in a Manger" is a sweet, melodic and good-intentioned song, but the line stating "the little lord Jesus, no crying he makes" is flat-out heretical.  The Bible records Jesus crying as an adult when his friend Lazarus died.  So the song's suggestion that baby Jesus was free of human emotion is demonstrably offbase. More importantly, it runs counter to the central message of Christianity that God loved us enough to come to earth to live exactly like we do.

It's actually amazing how many religiously based Christmas songs get the details of the Christmas story completely wrong, considering the songs exist to celebrate the story. 

For instance, take "The First Noel."  According to the Bible, the shepards didn't "(look) up and see a great star, shining in the East beyond them far."  Actually, the shepards saw an angel; it was the wise men who saw the star.  And they came from the East, so the star would have had to appear them in the West.  They also didn't "come sailing in" on "three ships" on "Christmas Day," they walked through the desert from Babylon and arrived long after Jesus was born.

Also, while the little drummer boy (who is not recorded in the actual Christmas story) might be a poor boy, Jesus was not. He wasn't born in a manger because his parents were broke, it was because the inn was full.  In fact, by the time the wise men got to the scene, Mary and Joseph had already acquired their own house in Bethlehem, even though they didn't live there and didn't plan to stay.  (If you don't believe me, look it up).

Secular holiday songs don't have to worry about getting factual details right, but they don't fair much better in the logic department.  While "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" is one of my favorite holiday songs, I still don't understand why it references telling "scary ghost stories" along with tales of the glories of past Christmases.  Who tells ghost stories at Christmas?  And why? Is it to scare children into hiding in their rooms on Christmas Eve so the parents can play Santa? 

That particular line is curious, but at least the premise of that song is logical, which is more than one can say about "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus." The song is about a kid's confusion that his Mom and Santa are making out, as the unsuspecting doofus of a kid is unaware that his own Dad is the one in the Santa costume.   But here's my question: why exactly is Dad dressed as Santa? 

I can understand Dad dressing up as Santa while the kids are around.  But in this story, they are supposed to be asleep already.  So why is dad bothering to put on the costume?  Is this some kind of role-play fetish on Mom's part?

I feel gross even thinking about this.

But even this song isn't as bad as the "Christmas Shoes."  In fact, no song in the history of time is. 

In the song, a hapless boy leaves his mother on her deathbed in an attempt to buy her some shoes, for the totally logical purpose of giving them to his mom so she can impress God with her pinache in the afterlife. 

The boy is oblivious to the facts that he has no money to buy the shoes and that his mom can't take them with her anyway. It's never explained how the boy expected to pay for the shoes, and I can't help but think that maybe Mom would be in better health if she didn't have to worry about Junior roaming the streets and blowing what little money the family has on dumb, pointless crap. 

But ultimately, someone steps in and covers the charge for the shoes on the boy's behalf, notwithstanding his lack of forethought. In the end, Mom gets her shoes and dies.

Uplifting, no?

I'm not sure what the message of this song is supposed to be, but it offends on every level. It exalts materialism over relationships, as it applauds the boy's choice to spend his mother's last moments shopping for her instead of being with her.  It suggests that God cares more about how we look and what we acquire than how we live or what's in our hearts. 

The plot rewards the boy's failure to think ahead about his decisions.  Every time I hear it, I wonder how many kids are inspired by the song to take an expensive item to a department store counter in the hopes that someone will buy it for them if they look sufficiently downtrodden.

It's also an open question why the little boy's dad let him wander out of the house and into downtown while his mother is dying in the first place.

Whatever the message of the song is supposed to be, when I hear it, I mostly have grave concerns about this little boy's future.  His only living parent is his irresponsible enough to let him wander around the city alone, and the boy has come to believe that the world at large will cater to his wishes whether he can pay his fair share or not. 

In other words, this boy is the embodiment of Mitt Romney's 47 percent! 

Merry Christmas!

Maybe I'm thinking about all this too hard.  Christmas is supposed to be the time we stop analyzing things and enjoy the moment.  There's no real harm in any of the logical or factual errors noted above, except maybe some cultural insensitivity and a heaping dose of consumerism.

So maybe there's no real harm done, and we shouldn't complain.  After all, some people, even in this country, never get the opportunity to discuss in heated comfort the silliness of the songs they'll listen to as they enjoy an upcoming week of paid vacation.  Instead, they'll be delivering your mail, bagging your groceries, or policing your streets while you and me enjoy our eggnog. 

So instead of complaining, we should do something to show our appreciation. 

What to do?  Well, according to Band Aid, there's only one to express our gratitude at winning life's lottery and being free from the miserable burdens other people have to carry. I think we should do it now.

So tonight, thank God it's themmmmm insteaaaaaad of yooooooooooooou!

Merry Christmas, and enjoy whatever bad Christmas songs come your way!  If you're like me, you'll miss making fun of them come December 26th.