Each year in the city of Boston, the local oldies station changes their format the day after Thanksgiving, and plays strictly Christmas music for the next month. And each year I happily bump off the last station in my presets to make room for it on my car radio. It generally stays on that station throughout December, but there are several songs that send me scurrying for the sports talk channel as soon as I hear their opening notes. These are the five worst offenders of Christmas cheer.
Number 5: Feliz Navidad
Most Christmas songs have been covered multiple times by multiple artists, so you might hear "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" three times in an hour, but each version adds its own take so you don't really mind. Not so with this song. Jose Feliciano's version is the only one that ever seems to get played. You would be forgiven for thinking no one else had ever attempted to sing it, and it gets played ALL. THE. TIME.
Number 4 Wonderful Christmas Time
This song isn't so much awful as it is disappointing. Seemingly cut from the same creative swath that gave us "Silly Love Song", Sir Paul seems to be saying, I'm so popular I can record some half-assed lyrics, throw in some synthesizers and you idiots will make it a standard, and be happy to do so. And we were! This is made all the more shameful by the fact that his former writing partner John Lennon wrote the fantastic "Happy Xmas (War is Over)", and the two songs are always unfairly lumped together on Christmas compilations.
Number 3 Twelve Days of Christmas
Not much to say on this one, other than the fact that this song in interminable, and for some reason remains a staple at every child's Christmas pageant for the past sixty years.
Number 2 Any version of the Little Drummer Boy not sung by David Bowie and Bing Crosby
The Bing and Bowie version is a stone cold classic, and is one of only three Christmas songs I let stay on my iPod all year round (the other two are "Fairy Tale of New York, and the version of "Baby its Cold Outside" sung by Zooey Deschanel). Other takes on the song lean way too heavily on the parum pa pums, and end up working my last nerve.
Number 1 The Christmas Shoes
The mother fucking Christmas shoes! I'm not even going to include a link, that is how deep my disgust runs for "The Christmas Shoes." The hideously maudlin tale of some jerk buying a little kid a pair of shoes for his dying Mom to wear to heaven, it is an abomination against God and man, and it must be destroyed. Fortunately it seems to have made its way out of the rotation this year, but in the past it damn near inescapable.
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