Posted on 12/18/2010 2:15:02 PM PST by JoeProBono
For many people, Christmas is a time for celebration. It is a time of parties, gift giving, reunions, food and vacationing.
Christmas is also a time of music, and there are countless songs that people enjoy during the holiday season. The music of the holiday season is something that unites people, as both religious and popular songs are enjoyed by a wide variety of people.
Of course, not all Christmas songs are universally enjoyed. Some tend to be a little more annoying than others and some are flat-out painful.
This may be due to the song itself, or it may be because it has simply been overplayed for so long that no one wants to hear it anymore. With that in mind, here are a few of the most annoying Christmas songs and why they are difficult to hear during the season.
Annoying Christmas Song No. 5: I Want A Hippopotamus For Christmas
I'm with you on both, but particularly the Drummer Boy, which brings about as much Christmas cheer as sour eggnog.
There are carols, there are novelty tunes, there are even some well-written ballads that celebrate the season without getting too corny or too syrupy. Most of them are overplayed, which should encourage today's composers (if that's what they can be called) to create something new and different, even if the lyrics don't have certain words that we all associate immediately with Christmas. But when did you last hear an original Christmas song played on the radio? 1990?
It's a fact that some of the more enduring popular Christmas music was written by Jewish composers: "Let it Snow," "White Christmas," "The Christmas Song," "Silver Bells," the list goes on.
What’s so strange about asking for a Hippo for Christmas? After all, Congress wants more Rhinos.
Santa Claus is coming to town by the Jackson 5 should easily be on this list - I’ve already heard it probably half a dozen times, and it sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard...
I personally like all 3 of those songs. Wouldn't be Christmas without them.
Ah...I used to listen to Shep’s radio show and I bought a few CDs of the shows a few years back. He was a real treasure. It was on a NY station (WNBC or WOR??) and I had to sneak my old Silvertone radio under the covers so my parents wouldn’t know I was listening to the radio late on school nights.Jean Shepherd was on WOR. (I have a couple of his surviving shows in my own old-time radio collection.) Good satirist, but occasionally his brains went to bed---such as the time he dismissed (in an introduction to a collection of Vic & Sade scripts) Fred Allen as nothing but a guy who made a career out of a bad impression of a Chinese detective. Anyone who thinks Fred Allen was nothing but One Long Pan should be dismissed as a) a functional illiterate or b) a horse's ass as it is, but I was amazed that Shepherd---a man who was neither a functional illiterate nor a horse's ass---would have been that dismissive of someone who was way, way more than just one character satirising Charlie Chan.
Here's one of my favourite old-time radio holiday shows:
I assume you mean to say that Bing Crosby was a Russian Jew. I don’t believe he was. If I remember correctly, he was a Roman Catholic of English-Irish descent.
Thank God It’s Not Christmas
What do I hear, what do I hear?
Chit-chat, and clinking glass
Cheap talk, a lady’s laugh
After hour
What do I see, what do I see?
Some sunken hideaway
Where people go to play
After hour
There I’ll spend the night
Meeting fancy thins
At bistros and old haunts
Trying very hard to sin
Then it is day end in a way
The pattern’s much the same
In-spots, a matinee
Every day
Blend with the crowd, blend with the loud
Hypnotic ebb and flow
Until the day goes slowly
Into night
See the same old crowd
At bistros and old haunts
‘Til the lights grow dim,
The not-so-subtle hint to be gone
Chorus:
Thank God it’s not Christmas
When there is only you
And nothing else to do
Thank God it’s not Christmas
Where there’s just you to do
The rest is closed to public view
Caroling kids, caroling kids
A trifle premature, in tones so rich and pure and crystaline
Call for the day, the popular day
It’s fast approaching now
But will the mood allow
One dissent
If this were the Seine
We’d be very suave
But it’s just the rain
Washing down the boulevard
(Chorus)
Popular days, the popular ways
Are for the chosen few
Not meant for me and you
Obviously
Popular nights, poplar rites
Great things to say and do
Aren’t said or done by you
Obviously
If this were Seine
We’d be very suave
But it’s just the rain
Washing down the boulevard
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UbkDzp5LuY
Porky Pig version of Blue Christmas.
I assume you mean to say that Bing Crosby was a Russian Jew. I don’t believe he was. If I remember correctly, he was a Roman Catholic of English-Irish descent.He was talking about the writer of the song, who wasn't Der Bingle but, rather, Irving Berlin.
Correct.
HELL YES!!! That "song" wins all awards for repetitiveness. Anything by Paul McCartney is enough to irritate me, though.
I listen to a couple FM stations that are all-Christmas music and they play that monstrosity and John Lennon's "So This is Christmas" much too much.
Somebody stole my Santa Claus suit. Somebody ripped off my beard, hat and boots. Some little fatso is all dressed in red. He even had the gall to swipe the pillow off my bed. Now what’s my kids going to think, If Santas a no-show, well boy, they’ll raise a stink. But, deck the halls and what the hell, I still got my jingle bell. So sucker you can keep the suit, ‘Cause frankly, I don’t give hoot. Somebody stole my Santa Claus suit. Somebody ripped off my beard, hat and boots. Some little fatso is all dressed in red. He even had the gall to swipe the pillow off my bed. Now what’s my kids going to think, If Santas a no-show, well boy, they’ll raise a stink. But, deck the halls and what the hell, I still got my jingle bell. So sucker you can keep the suit, ‘Cause frankly, I don’t give hoot. But, where oh where is my Santa Claus suit? That get-up set me back a bundle of loot. The beard alone was four ninety-eight. The box it came in was an antique orange crate. Some body took the whole shabang. If I find that rolly-polly mother, he’s going to hang. But gee, I guess that’s no way to be. He might do some good with it and all, thanks to me. So sucker you can keep the suit, ‘Cause frankly, I don’t give hoot.
“We Three Kings” only because every time I hear it sang it is being sung by a bunch of 3 rd graders and not being sang well.
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