Deck the hall with hunks of holly

[venta]

It is the time of year where one is obliged to give thanks to Shane McGowan and Kirsty MacColl. When shops are playing Frosty the Snowman and Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree on some kind of homicide-inducing loop, there is exactly one non-execrable Christmas Song.

And, owing to checking a spelling there, I have just learnt that execrable and excreable are different words.

Comments

[mejoff.livejournal.com]

The Christmas Song
by London after midnight

Solstice Bells
By Jethro Tull

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

I do wish I hadn't downloaded it off Kazaa and then vastly overplayed it to myself last year... I still know it's good, but my reaction to it has become rather dulled.

[zotz]

A band called Porn Orchard recorded a Christmas song for a radio station compilation a few years ago, and it's quite good. It's called This Holiday Season, and it's a spoof duet between Tom Waits and Peter Murphy about how awful Christmas is when your career depends on being miserable. It tends to curculate on the Evil Filesharing Networks™ as actually being by Waits and Murphy and called "Christmas Sucks".

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

One of us is _so_ wrong. Unfortunately it's rarely you so it's probably me. But I really, really, cannot stand that bl***y Fairytale of New York record.

Going off on a different but related tack - how do you decide what makes a Christmas song? Slade's "Merry Xmas Everybody" obviously is. But what about Christmas hits? A Christmas compilation I have has on it "Only You" by the Flying Pickets - a novelty hit at Christmas, but not a Christmas song. And if you allow that, should you also allow others such as "All Around My Hat" by Steeleye Span (in my mind that is a Christmas song because it was a hit at Christmas in 1975 and they did have a genuine Christmas song - Gaudete - a couple of years earlier)? Or Human League's "Don't You Want Me" which was the Christmas number one in 1981, but is otherwise completely un-Christmassy?

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

I don't mind Gaudete (in moderation), though I do now have trouble keeping Mott the Hoople's Golders Green out of my head when I hear it...

Top Tunes

[marjory.livejournal.com]

What about 'Little Drummer Boy', this year's wondrous duet with Jessica and Ashlee Simpson?

Okay... That wasn't very funny of me at all... Quite disturbing in fact...