OT Advent Calendar (& Hanukkah!) Day 7: Musical Crimes Against Christmas

Advent has always been my favorite time of year. Not only does it lead up to the festival of Christmas, but my birthday falls right around halfway through. What’s more, I grew up in snowy Central New York—that’s the barren hinterlands of Upstate, for those in the city so nice they named it twice—and if I didn’t get a White Christmas, the Great Lakes were good for a storm around my birthday so there’d at least be a good beginning to the winter.

Advent is far from an untouched subject around these parts, so I’m clearly not alone.

Your OT Advent Calendar this year will be musical. We’ll talk about diamond-in-the-rough traditional tunes just waiting for renewed popularity, crimes against Christmas, the silly songs and the songs that have become modern traditions. We’ll also talk about the notion of true Christmas Carols, those which address the twelve days festival beginning on Christmas itself, including not just the one day-counting song but another.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

Today is Saturday, so it is Theme Day—my ball, my game, my rules—and our theme is Crimes Against Christmas. Our Hanukkah song is “Al Hanisim.”

Christmas songs are a big deal. Write or record just one classic and you’re set into the Christmas firmament forever, regardless of what else you do with your career. Not to get ahead of ourselves, but tomorrow’s song charted twenty Christmases in a row, and the artist was no slouch otherwise. Mariah Carey had a great career, but which song do we still hear with any regularity at all?

This is tricky ground, however. A forgettable Christmas tune or cover and you’ll raise nobody’s ire. Drop a stinker and no one will ever let you forget it. I certainly won’t, so here goes.

SIMPLY. HAVING.

Sir Paul McCartney, 50% of one of the most influential music writing unit in popular music laid what might be the biggest stinker of them all with “Wonderful Christmastime.” There is nothing good to say about this song, not even that it eventually ends, because it sticks in your head like the hellish offspring of “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” and the theme from The Smurfs.

I imagine the song’s genesis being Paul McCartney locked into a studio and told he can leave in one hour if he can write and record a Christmas single, otherwise he’d be strapped to a table and made to listen to “Yellow Submarine” on a loop for 24 sleepless hours and the jackass refused to take one for the team and foisted this steaming pile musical poop on Western Culture. “They’ll weigh this against ‘Hey Jude’ and forgive me,” he thought. Oh, will we?

The melody? Lame.

The lyric? Lame.

The instrumentation? Childish. Childish and lame.

“But Bryan,” you say…and I’ll hear none of it. He plays the piano in the video even though there is no piano in the song. That’s John Cougar Mellencamp-level lame.

AND AFTER 1972, THERE WERE NO WARS

Maybe Sir Paul was feeling some heat from the other 50% of his sometime writing duo, John Lennon, whose 1972 protest song “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” is pure, unrefined musical sewage. It is apparent that no one knew, throughout the early sixties, that John Lennon was just one avant garde artist girlfriend away from a complete break with reality.

It seems rather predictable, in retrospect. I mean, once you’ve crossed the line between a dreamer and a person who earnestly calls a press conference in bed to end the Vietnam War there’s no going back, right? The next logical step is to write a Christmas song and use children to declare that war is over.

I don’t want to shock anyone, but, uh, there are still wars.

And is there a creepier way to begin a song than a fervently whispered, stereo panned “Happy Christmas, Yoko!” “Happy Christmas, John!”?

I blame every explainer on needlessly politicized family holiday gatherings on this song.

POPSTARS, COCAINE AND INSATIABLE SELF REGARD

The next tune is not only the worst Christmas song, but also the worst song to be a global success bar none. It is insipid, ignorant and poorly written. Its only purpose was to ensure that the self-obsessed pop fixtures that made it could assuage their guilt by doing something—how meaningful that something was to the people of Africa is not clear—for the impoverished of a place they poorly understood called Africa.

Given that Bob Geldof turned the appearance of caring into a cottage industry, it would appear that this song did a bang-up job of giving artists adequate remittance for the sin of success.

“Do They Know It’s Christmas?”

Well, the followers of Islam don’t care, the Copts knew it before you did and where do I find an ice pick to stab my ear drums into useless, bleeding masses dripping out of my skull?

As the story goes, some band nobody has cared about for 35 years walked into the studio, dropped a giant bag of coke on a table and everything went to Hell from there.
The lyric is a train wreck from the beginning.

It’s Christmas time, there’s no need to be afraid
At Christmas time, we let in light and we banish shade

The Hell? Who suggested that there was a need to be afraid? The rhyme is lazy and desperate.

But say a prayer, Pray for the other ones

Oh, the “other ones,” you say? You mean the residents of that entire continent?

Surely it can’t get worse than that!

There’s a world outside your window
And it’s a world of dread and fear
Where the only water flowing
Is the bitter sting of tears

Sweet. Fancy. Moses. Where to begin?

First of all, apparently the entire African continent is a “world of dread and fear.” Secondly, there is apparently no water. And that metaphor—the only water flowing is a sting? The what, now?—communicates one thing from songwriter to listener: I do not care; I am well aware that you will exchange your money for the laziest of my efforts, you stupid sucker.

At least it can’t get any worse.

And the Christmas bells that ring
There are the clanging chimes of doom
Well tonight thank God it’s them instead of you

Okay, so it got worse. What makes it even more poignant is that the worst line in the song—”Thank God it’s them instead of you”—was given to Bono, a man who has put his money and his reputation on the line to provide meaningful charitable aid to impoverished Africans.

After a couplet which informs us that “there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas time”—someone inform Mount Kilimanjaro—the writers double down on stupid.

Where nothing ever grows
No rain nor rivers flow

Did they not know that the Sahara and Kalahari aren’t the totality of Africa? The Congo is both a river and a substantial rainforest.

Today is also the seventh night of Hanukkah. I’ll turn it over to my great friend Cantor Jessica Epstein of Temple B’nai Abraham in Livingston, New Jersey.

Al Hanisim Heb. עַל הַנִּסִּים; “for the miracles” is a liturgical text which is inserted into the Thanksgiving section of the Amidah (Shemoneh Esrei or Eighteen Benedictions) and the Bircat Hamazon (Blessing after Meals) during the days of Hannukah. It is lengthy and elaborate in retelling the tale of Hannukah and the religious meaning but makes no mention of the “miracle of the oil.” Here is a rather flowery section of the text.

“…You gave the mighty (Syrian-Greeks) into the hands of the weak (Jews), and the many into the hands of the few, and the defiled into the hands of the pure, and the wicked into the hands of the righteous, and the malicious into the hands of those who engage in Your Torah. And You made a great and holy name for Yourself in Your universe; and to Your nation, Israel, did You grant a great salvation and liberation, as on this day. And subsequently Your children came to Your holy abode, and they cleared out Your Palace, and they purified Your Temple, and they kindled lights in the courtyards of Your holy place. And they established these eight days of Chanukah in order to give thanks and praise to Your great name.”

A full Hebrew text and translation here.

A fuller theological explanation of the text and a comparison with the holiday of Purim’s insertion can be found here.