10 Christmas songs you love to hate

[uk666]

10 Christmas songs you love to hate

1. The Christmas Shoes

 

"The Christmas Shoes," originally recorded in 2000 by Christian vocal group NewSong, inspires a very specific ire. It is a depressing (or heartwarming) Christmas parable wherein a little boy tries to buy a pair of shoes for his mother for Christmas but the mother is terminally ill, and her son wants her to look pretty when she meets Jesus after her death. The jaded singer is moved to purchase the shoes, and the true meaning of Christmas is restored.

Like many hated things, "The Christmas Shoes" is also wildly popular. It spawned a book and a movie and has been streamed more than 12 million times on Spotify. It has topped many a "Worst Christmas Song" list.

2. Do They Know It's Christmas?

https://youtu.be/94Ye-3C1FC8

The holidays are a fruitful time for pontificating about things like gratitude, personal privilege, and whether certain people are satisfied with their seasonal snowfall.

With "Do They Know It's Christmastime?" "On paper, this should be great. George Michael, Bob Geldof, Bono, Simon Le Bon, Phil Collins, Sting, Boy George — all those '80s icons brought together for a good cause. But once you stop trying to spot the superstars in the video with their carefully tousled hair, all you're left with is nine excruciating choruses of 'FEED the WORLD …'"

Bob Geldof has nobly taken the blame for what has aged into a cringe-inducing and myopic holiday take on humanitarianism: "I am responsible for two of the worst songs in history," Geldof said in 2010. "The other is 'We Are the World.'"

3. Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer

https://youtu.be/MgIwLeASnkw

You know things have gotten weird when even the creator of a novelty Christmas song expresses surprise that people still listen to it. This tender ballad was originally recorded as a kind of joke by Elmo Shropshire and his then-wife Patsy Trigg in 1979.

It rolled around on different records and gained some traction, and Shropshire recorded it a few times after he and Trigg divorced. The high point of the song's infamy arguably came in 1985 when a disgruntled DJ in Davenport, Iowa played "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" 27 times in a row before being pulled off air and suspended.

4. The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late)

https://youtu.be/3rnPHlOHb7g

It's generally understood that "The Chipmunk Song," and really any "Alvin and the Chipmunks" Christmas song, is an acquired taste. Did you know this song won three Grammys? Yes, three 1958 Grammys, for best comedy performance, best children's recording and best engineered record (non-classical).

It was even nominated for record of the year. Granted, at the time, the technique of speeding up the tracks to produce the grating "chipmunk" voices probably seemed rather charming. It is no longer, except to a few.

5. Santa Baby

https://youtu.be/Mk_GmhD053E

A 2021 survey reported by YouGov named “Santa Baby” the most hated Christmas song, but blame for the ditty’s reputation cannot be laid entirely at Ms. Kitt’s feet. If the original was criticized for being weirdly suggestive, the endless parade of covers in the ensuing decades have only made it worse.

Some covers, like the aforementioned Bublé version, attempt to downplay the sexuality with lines like “I’ll wait up for you, dude / Santa buddy, and hurry down the chimney tonight!” The cover’s release in 2020 generated, let’s say, some very negative and confused press.

6. Baby, It's Cold Outside

https://youtu.be/7MFJ7ie_yGU

This highly controversial Christmas song has a lot of haters, whether they find offense with early recordings featuring Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan or Dean Martin and Marilyn Maxwell, or the seemingly endless recreations that have spun forth in the decades since.

Much discourse has been devoted to whether the interplay between the male and female voices amounts to cozy sexual harassment or a sly coded exchange. During the early days of the #MeToo movement, some radio stations even chose to skip the song. However, when John Legend and Kelly Clarkson released a consent-heavy updated version in 2019, it wasn't a hit, either. Among its critics was Dean Martin's daughter, Deana Martin, who called the remake, with lines like "It's your body and your choice," "absolutely absurd."

7. The Little Drummer Boy

https://youtu.be/7oTdKkytYK8

One of the highlights of engaging in Hated Christmas Song Discourse is how often you learn brand new things, and see words and names arranged in ways you never could have imagined. Words like “The 2011 cover of ‘Little Drummer Boy’ by Justin Bieber feat. Busta Rhymes was named as one of Billboard’s 100 ‘Greatest of All Time’ holiday songs.”

Imagine telling that to accomplished composer Katherine Kennicott Davis, who wrote “The Little Drummer Boy” in 1941. The world is truly full of miracles. Anyway, while it usually doesn’t raise the same frothing ire as other songs, the “parum-pa-pum-pum” of it all can get grating. So can the visual of the holy family, exhausted and overwhelmed, with a squalling infant among a bunch of livestock, forced to put on a brave face while some little kid bangs on a drum.

8. Dominick the Donkey

https://youtu.be/Ca5wXojemRM

For every person who can’t stand this little song about a donkey who helps Santa deliver presents in Italy, there is someone else who will swan rapturously forth to defend it. “It’s so charming!” they say. “It’s so fun!” There is space for all of these truths. It can be charming. It can be fun. It can also be something no reasonable soul would listen to unless they were under extreme duress or highly impaired by a holiday beverage. Jing-a-di-jing hee haw hee haw!

9. Last Christmas

https://youtu.be/E8gmARGvPlI

As we have seen, not every hated song is bad. Some songs come to be hated because there are only so many times one can hear George Michael sing, “I’ll give it to someone special!” before something breaks inside.

There is actually a whole game, a whole culture, dedicated to avoiding such an unfortunate outcome. “Whamageddon” is a challenge with one chief objective: “to go as long as possible without hearing Wham!’s Christmas classic; ‘Last Christmas’.” There are other rules; the game runs from the beginning of December to Christmas Eve, you post your inevitable defeat on social media, you avoid intentionally Wham!-ing your friends, et cetera. There’s even merch!

10. Wonderful Christmastime

https://youtu.be/94Ye-3C1FC8

It takes a seasoned music expert to explain why a jolly synth ditty by a literal Beatle makes people turn off the radio. In 2021, musicologist Nate Sloan explained to Mental Floss that the song's lyrics and structure are "simple to a fault." It could also be the instrumentation, which consists of synths and bells and seemingly whatever else McCartney had lying around his living room when inspiration struck.

Regardless, it's also widely loved and despised.