If you want immortality, record a Christmas song.
In the movie About a Boy, Hugh Grant plays a layabout who is living off the royalties of a song his father wrote, Santa's Super Sleigh, an obnoxious Christmas song created for the movie. The movie was OK, I guess. But what struck me was how the writers fit into the plot what every musician knows - that if you record even one Christmas song, you will have royalties for life.
By this time tomorrow, you won't hear a single Christmas song. So popular one day, dead-to-me the next, put out to the curb like a dried-out Christmas tree. Odd, too, as in some Christian sects, Christmas runs 12 days (hence the song) until January 6th, at which time Congress convenes to tally Electoral College votes. It's in the Bible, people!
And every year, it seems, there is an "it" Christmas song, just as every year there is the "must have" Christmas toy that is worth assaulting another shopper for. Eventually, people get sick of the song and claim to hate it. For example, All I Want For Christmas is You is objectively a "good" Christmas song, but rubs a raw nerve because it was overplayed. In the past, other songs, such as Santa Baby (Popularized by Driving Miss Daisy) were played to the point where people said, "enough, already!" Then there is the brouhaha surrounding Baby, It's Cold Outside, which some claimed glorified date rape until it was explained to them otherwise.
Then, there are novelty songs, like Dominic(k) the Donkey which was all the rage one year and then forgotten about the next. Chinga-D-Ching, Mofo! Or take, I want a Hippopotamus for Christmas - please! A song that is bad objectively and also due to repetition. Jingle Cats is reviled by Mr. See, but only because I obsessively played it on repeat one year just to freak out our felines.
There are, of course, songs that are bad, objectively, but don't get a lot of airplay. The Waitresses (I Know What Boys Like) recorded Christmas Wrapping which is literally painful to listen to.
The gold standard of Christmas Music, of course, is The Vince Guaraldi Trio's A Charlie Brown Christmas which was released when I was five years old. You can listen to nearly the entire album, again and again, without getting tired of it. Moreover, you can listen to some tracks, such as Linus and Lucy at any time of the year. It is the standard by which all Christmas albums should be measured.
It is not, however, without its faults. For example, the track, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing seems innocuous enough until the children's chorus chimes in, singing - as children are want to do - at high volume and off-key. Screaming, really. You can't hit "skip track" fast enough. I basically erased this track from my Christmas play list.
The album also contains the best rendition of what I think is the worst Christmas song of all time - the Little Drummer Boy (Carol of the Drum). Why do I despise this song? A number of reasons. Objectively, it is an obnoxious song, with its phrum-a-rum-bum nonsense. But worse is its creation of a holy Christmas mythology - the presence of a drummer boy at the manger. You can just hear Joseph shouting, "Will you keep that racket down! We're trying to sleep here! My wife just gave birth, for son's sake!"
To be sure, the nativity has been embroidered upon over the ages. The "Three Kings of Orient Are" were apparently some kind of astronomers or wise men, not actual monarchs. But at least the characters existed in some form in the Bible. The little drummer boy, on the other hand, was manufactured from whole cloth. And who in their right mind thinks banging on a drum is a suitable gift for a newborn infant? It just makes no sense. And the song is obnoxious as well. David Bowie and Bing Crosby, in a duet (no, really) managed to make it even worse, which is quite an accomplishment.
To be sure, Christmas is loaded with tacked-on mythology. But it is secular mythology. You can make up Santa and reindeer and Rudolph and Frosty the Snowman as secular icons, but I think there is something wrong with creating new Biblical characters for the sake of selling a song. You know that Muslims wouldn't tolerate that sort of nonsense in their religion. And I am sure Orthodox Jews are none-too-keen on Hanukkah Harry. Make up secular icons all you want to, but when you start adding on to the Bible, you cross a line.
Then again, I guess that's how Christianity got started.
