In case you’ve missed it, we have entered the Christmas season. It is a time of good will to all men, except for the lady in the “Black Friday” Target commercials. The actress in this commercial was all excited about going to get the great deals at Target on "Black Friday". This is what Don Draper and Pete Campbell pitched the big wigs at Target. The commercials the public saw was a person in serious need of medication. Several of my Facebook friends mentioned how much they hated this woman, one even going so far as calling the woman a name that rhymes with “rich” and wanted her killed and/or fired. (Which would be a funny commercial, if you ask me.)
As long as we are complaining, let me add my yearly complaint about Christmas Songs. Here in the Atlanta area, we have two radio stations that play only Christmas music from Thanksgiving to Christmas. The music falls in to several categories.
Category One: Songs we all know and love sung by someone we don’t like. Usually this means Gloria Estefan.
Category Two: Novelty Christmas songs about the death of elderly relatives by reindeer, wanting the gift of zoo animals, and hula hoops (sung by a rodent).
Category Three: Christmas songs about doing it. (I mean this in the 70’s and 80’s meaning of the term.) The weather outside is frightful. Let’s do it! Later on, we’ll conspire, naked as jaybirds by the fire. It is hard to imagine what Jesus or the manger has anything to do with some of these songs. Whoever wrote “Santa Baby” should be ashamed of themselves.
Category Four: Various Rock Star Christmas Song. For every Bruce Springsteen “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” there is a Paul McCartney “Wonderful Christmas Time”, which is probably the worst song Sir Paul ever wrote and that is saying something. My favorite dumb rock star Christmas song is by The Beach Boys in which they tell us “Christmas comes this time each year”. No wonder Brain Wilson laid in his bed for years. [Speaking positively, I need to add that the best rocking Christmas song is “Run, Run Rudolph” by Chuck Berry]
Category Five: “The Twelve Days of Christmas”. This song, according to James Lileks, is the Christmas song equivalent to “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall”. But it is more than that now. It is now part of the annual argument about the meaning of the most annoying Christmas song ever.
In the 70’s, when inflation was all the rage, the news anchors at all of the “Eye Action Witness News” would read a story about how much it would cost to give “your true love” all of the presents in “The Twelve Days of Christmas”. It would be some astronomical amount that would make Ma and Pa shake their heads and start opining about Christmas in The Depression, when people would draw their presents on pieces of paper, if they were lucky enough to have paper, and give them to their loved ones, if they were lucky enough to have any. But Christmas was better back then!
When I got to college, I was taking a history class about the Middle Ages and the professor causally mentioned “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and that all of the presents were birds! Of course, being armed with that knowledge helped me become the success I am today.
Years later, I was watching a Pastor on TV who said that “The Twelve Days of Christmas” written as a ‘catechism song’ to help young Catholics learn the faith. (The two turtle doves were the Old and New Testament; the four calling birds were the Gospels, etc) That turned my “the presents were all birds” lecture on its head and soon, even I, the history major, was telling people that this annoying song was a catechism song.
Of course, I missed the two warning signs about this interpretation of the song. One, there is no documentation or supporting evidence except “I heard somebody say” or “Someone sent it to me in an e-mail”. Two, it became popular in the 90’s, the same decade Bill Clinton became popular. That says it all.
I could go on and on. Country music singers have no business releasing Christmas albums. “A-weigh in a mayger, no creeb for his baid. The lil’ Lord Jaysus laid down his schwet haid”. That song by the group Alabama, “Christmas in Dixie” is just about a dumb as it gets.
Now that I’ve offended just about everybody, may all of your Christmases be white.
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