Three worst Christmas songs ever to get December off on the wrong foot
By Lee Vowell
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Hooray, it's almost Christmas, right? That time of the season when you spend money to buy gifts for people you don't see all that often. That makes complete sense.
But while you are out shopping, there is probably Christmas music all around you. But for every good song, such as "Fairytale of New York" by the Pogues, there are awful songs like the ones below. So beware! Choose a store playing good music.
Of course, one's taste in music is all their own, of course. But there is such thing as bad taste. And the tracks that follows are simply bad.
Three horrible Christmas songs to begin your December
"Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" - Elmo and Patsy
In the audio version of this awfulness, a grandmother gets drunk, ventures out, and gets killed by a reindeer of Santa Claus. But in the video version, the grandmother somehow survives and comes down the chimney at the end. In theory, that sounds like something out of a horror film, right? Grandmother gets brutally beaten by reindeer and then surprises the family by appearing out of nowhere looking all bloody.
But the audio version is even more heartless. The grandmother dies and and the grandfather doesn't care and keeps watching football while the rest of the family doesn't know whether to open the grandmother's presents, keep them for themselves, or return them. Christmas is supposed to be a happy season, I think.
"Baby, It's Cold Outside" - Various artists
Maybe the lyrics to this track were somehow - somehow - more wholesome when the song was written in 1944, but that either goes to show people were not smart or that we were a lot more jaded in the 1940s than we like to think we were. How else to interpret these lyrics but to assume there is some sort of developing crime scene:
Woman: I ought to say, "No, no, no sir"
Man: Mind if I move in closer?
Woman: At least I'm gonna say that I tried
Man: What's the sense in hurting my pride?
Woman: I really can't stay
Man: Baby, don't hold out
The song was written by Frank Loesser and he and his wife, Lynn Garland, used to sing it at the end of parties as a hint that their guests needed to leave. Then Loesser eventually sold the song to MGM, peeving off his wife who did not know about the sale, and the song won an Oscar in 1950 for Best Original Song for the movie Neptune's Daughter. "Baby, It's Cold Outside" replaced a different Loesser tune in the film. That song was called "(I'd Like to Get You on a) Slow Boat to China." Hmmm...sounds like another hostage song, so maybe Loesser had real issues.
"The Christmas Shoes" - NewSong
The idea behind "The Christmas Shoes" is decent enough: An impoverished boy wants to buy his dying mother some good shoes for Christmas. Of course, the concept is also one of commercialism and the mother would probably prefer the child to spend money on something else besides shoes, such as playing a bill or something. I am not one to judge.
But NewSong, which is a contemporary Christian musical artist, seems to miss the whole point of being humble and not buying fancy things to impress people. The boy even says, "I want her to look beautiful if Mama meets Jesus tonight!" I am no priest, but I do not think Jesus is going to care how the mother is dressed and especially won't care about the shoes as modern shoes - we can assume the boy is not buying the mother sandals - had not yet been invented 2,000 years ago.
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