Episode 54: Bad Christmas Songs

12/20/2017

Merry Christmas! And enjoy this funny and insightful critique of some truly Bad Christmas Songs. A super-sized panel (Jay Eldred, Jordan Poss, Carter Stepper, Megan Von Bergen, and Todd Pedlar) join Danny to discuss the following songs (and a few more):

“Wonderful Christmas Time”
“Last Christmas”
“Mary, Did You Know?”
“Christmas Shoes”
“Away in a Manger”
“Do They Know It’s Christmas?”

Our Criteria for judging bad Christmas songs:

Musical ineptness - bad melodies, production, performance
Hacky Nostalgia - making Christmas about happy memories of a time that never existed. The Thomas Kincade vision of the the good life.
Theology Armageddon - The “Mary did you Know debates”
Crass emotional manipulation - Using the holiday’s aesthetics as a weapon for gaining a cheap pathetic appeal.
Crass joke-making of the season - Grandma Got Run Over…
Perpetuation of Capitalism’s devouring of the sacred holiday - Chipmunk song? Santa Claus is Coming to Town.
Ear-Worminess

Plus, each host submits a recommendation for a GOOD Christmas song!

Links:

“Mary, Did You Know: A Mere Orthodoxy Symposium”
Patton Oswalt on “Christmas Shoes” (Explicit)

The Bad Songs:
Wonderful Christmas Time
Mary Did You Know?
Last Christmas
Christmas Shoes
Away in a Manger (by the despicable Pentatonix)
Do They Know It’s Christmas?

The Good Songs:
Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas (Original Version)
Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
Lo How a Rose E’er Blooming (English)
Lo How a Rose E’er Blooming (German)
Gaudete
O Come, O Come Emmanuel

1 Comment

Chris

12/22/2017 10:26:35 am

I really enjoyed this, as someone who has a love-hate relationship with Christmas tackiness.

To be fair, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church does celebrate Christmas according to a different calendar than both the Western and Eastern Orthodox Church. Perhaps, rather than calling for famine relief, the musicians involved were attempting to influence their Ethiopian brethren to celebrate the true, Roman Christmas, (a la the Venerable Bede's concern about the Celtic churches and the "true" Easter). There are always strings attached. "Do They Know Its Christmas?" may be a call for a kind of cultural crusade to remedy a liturgical famine, and not just a physical one.

"Do You Hear What I Hear" and "The Little Drummer Boy" have a special place in my heart as bad songs that take biblical imagery and motifs and then just kind of write a vague fanfic with them. "Said the King to the people everywhere, 'Listen to what I say. Pray for peace, people everywhere.'" What? Is this the way Noel Regny (yes, I looked him up, and his name IS Noel) wishes the Christmas story had gone?

The mawkish Christmas specials can actually be a real treat if you enjoy "disasterpieces"--particularly if they have a low budget. My wife and I enjoy watching them and laughing at them like a couple of ghouls pretty much every year. Our relatives just roll their eyes and probably pray for our souls. Some real favorites are "Snowglobe," in which an Italian-American woman wishes for a more...WASP-y Christmas and finds herself trapped in a Snowglobe with fake people, and "Christmas Town," in which a working woman with a child too old to believe in Santa (who somehow does) end up in Santa's village. "Country Christmas," with its clumsy political overtones and piratey Santa Claus is just too awesome for me to do it justice, so here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URzR7c8TRCI

In many others, such as "Desperately Seeking Santa," and "Mistletones," the mall somehow serves as The Center of the World, where both fame and fortune can be won by a talented performer with the proper yuletide spirit. A fun Christmas game is to write your own paint-by-numbers Christmas special, where you take elements of each movie, write them on cards, and draw them at random while fleshing out the plot.

Episode 54: Bad Christmas Songs

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