Every dumb thought I have ever had about Christmas songs
Ho ho bleedin’ ho.
A final, festive reminder before we begin: because I’m like a younger, nerdier, and less beardy Santa, if you become a paying subscriber to this newsletter for a year before Christmas, you can have 30% off your first year! Anyway, that’s quite enough of that, let’s get your mum’s Christmas compilation CD spinning. Here are my thoughts on the festive playlist.
1. Chris Rea is from Middlesbrough. This means that Driving Home For Christmas is essentially a song about being stuck in a traffic jam on the A1(M).
2. War is not over, however much you want it to be. In fact, there is no correlation between your own wishes and matters of geopolitics.
My mum’s Christmas compilation CD. I apologise for the presence of the sex offender, it was the ‘90s, we didn’t know.
3. Consider the lyric, “It’s Christmas time, there’s no need to be afraid.” If we have learned anything from the last few years, it’s that the world’s problems do not magically stop for a week or two in late December, no matter how much we may wish them to. This suggests that, if you were afraid in November, there is absolutely no reason not to be afraid now. If anything, you should be more afraid.
4. While we’re on that one: actually, there will be snow in Africa this Christmas time, mostly in the Atlas mountains which stretch for around 2,500km across Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Closer to the location of the 1983-5 famine, December is also sometimes a snowy season on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. This is probably not the most problematic thing about Band Aid, if we’re honest, but this is a reminder that Africa is not a country, but a continent, containing at least 54 of the things.
5. Again: not the most problematic thing about the song in question, but American cars are not as big as bars. Either the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl had spent the mid 1980s frequenting some unusually small drinking establishments or what they were actually looking at was a bus.
6. The snow man doesn’t bring the snow. The snow man is a product of the snow. Roy Wood and Wizzard are thinking of rain man.
7. Also, that song came out in 1973, and the choir singing in it were the first year of Stockland Green School; it was re-recorded in 1981, because Roy Wood was annoyed about losing the number 1 slot to Slade. Either way, the children singing on that track are in their 50s, and very possibly in their 60s, which means that they probably voted for Boris Johnson and Brexit. Feel good about it now, do you?
(Incidentally, one of the few ideas I have ever had for a Doctor Who story is a Black Mirror-style Christmas special in which it literally is Christmas every day and the results are hell: the economy collapses! The turkey becomes extinct! Obesity and diabetes go through the roof! The villain would obviously be an evil wizard. RTD, call me.)
8. Why did both Wizzard and Slade release Christmas songs in 1973? What the hell was going on in 1973 that it produced not one but two Christmas songs that are inescapable every year even now? Was there something especially christmassy about glam rock?
8a. Same, but with 1984, when the festive battle was between Band Aid and Wham. Or, to put it another way: between George Michael and George Michael.
9. Despite the fact that Merry Xmas Everybody has been filling Noddy Holder’s bank account for nearly half a century now, there is no version of the Santa story in which fairies keep him sober for a day. Santa doesn’t have any fairies. He is quite famous, indeed, for having a staff composed entirely of elves.
10. I’m not sure where Paul McCartney got the idea that the children practice singing Christmas songs all year round? That sounds like it would be hellish for both parents and teachers.
11. Lol, Michael Bublé – whose name is quite obviously meant to be pronounced “Bubble” – changed the lyrics to “Santa Buddy”, just in case anything might think he fancied Santa.
12. My favourite Michael Bublé fact: he has a tribute act called Michael Dublé.
13. A spaceman did not come travelling to visit Bethlehem in any of the four gospels. What’s happened here is that Chris de Burgh has confused the New Testament with the book Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Däniken.
14. “He sees you when you’re sleeping/He knows when you’re awake” what the actual f-. It’s not okay, Santa. This is not okay.
15. I Believe In Father Christmas – a song about how Christmas/adulthood/the world is a disappointment these days, written years before I was even born, and whose last verse contains the line “I wish you a hopeful Christmas/I wish you a brave new year” – is unimprovable and anyone found being mean about it will be banned.
16. In my notes I have an exhortation to Kate Bush that “December is if anything more magic now than ever”. I think what I was getting at here is that our modern conception of Christmas is the result of an unholy alliance of Charles Dickens, Queen Victoria, modern mass media and the Coca Cola Company, and that until not that long ago, in the grand scheme of things, December wasn’t really that magical at all. But perhaps, given the last two years, Kate was actually on to something.
17. From now on, the news suggests, your troubles are extremely unlikely to be out of sight.
This will be, given the date, the last of these special weekly advent posts. From here, the schedule will revert to “fortnightly, ish, or whenever I remember”.
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