I have this on the Phil Spector Christmas album, with the same lyric, and the same “WTF?” reaction.
When I googled the Bing Crosby version it lists the same lyrics as the versions with which we are familiar. However I watched the clip of Bing (accompanied by Ingrid Bergman as a nun). The words he sang are completely different. 
OMG Perry Como sang the same words as Aaron and Phil!
Among the best-known British Christmas ghost stories were those by the curate M.R. James. It was a tradition to publish one of his stories each year in the paper at Christmastime and they were wildly popular. H.P. Lovecraft thought the world of him, and his stories hold up very well and are legitimately spooky, relying on half-seen ghosts, monsters, and demons, often connected with the ancient world. Check out his collections “Ghost Stories of an Antiquary” and “More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary”. One of his stories was adapted to film as “Night of the Demon” (“Curse of the Demon” in the U.S. release.)
As Jerome K. Jerome, the British humorist (best known for “3 Men in a Boat”) wrote in the intro to the 1891 collection of Christmas ghost stories, “Told After Dinner”, ““Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories. Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about specters. There must be something ghostly in the air of Christmas — something about the close, muggy atmosphere that draws up the ghosts, like the dampness of the summer rains brings out the frogs and snails… For ghost stories to be told on any other evening than the evening of the twenty-fourth of December would be impossible in English society as at present regulated.”
The good news is that harmful spells and witchcraft and malefic ghosts have no power at Christmas, as we were assured by William Shakespeare:
Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our saviour’s birth is celebrated,
This bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit can walk abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planet strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch has power to charm,
So hallowed and so gracious is the time.
As Gene Wolfe has pointed out, the third line from end means that we are also safe from planetary invasion at Christmastime - on Hallowe’en, sure, but not Christmastide.
Regarding decorating for Christmas, I believe in times prior to the commercializations of Christmas, the tradition was to put up the tree on Christmas Eve. There is a lot of anticipation prior to Christmas (see: Advent) but I believe it was celebrated as a holiday beginning with Christmas.
Which is also how Easter should be celebrated, but people are hanging eggs from trees and flinging bunny decor around weeks before Easter now, completely subverting meaning of the season of Lent!
Maybe there wouldn’t be world hunger if you people would live where the food is!
- Sam Kinison
Well just let me say that I judge it a good Christmas season if I can avoid hearing “Snoopy and the Red Baron Christmas” which, so far this year I have.
But I just realized today that is can’t be “beginning to look a lot like Christmas” because that would mean that it just looks a little like Christmas.
Oh, yeah? Tell it to Charles Dickens.
It’s an interesting question–was Shakespeare, in 1609, accurately reporting a common English belief (that spirits were unlikely to walk abroad at Christmas)? … and then over two-and-a-third centuries, the belief changed so much that Dickens specifically used Christmas because he knew the idea of ghosts abroad then would seem likely?
Or did Shakespeare report a belief shared by few, and then over the years even fewer believed it, and therefore Dickens used the idea of ghosts at Christmas as a fairly routine contrivance?
Some scholar will know the answer.
*Christmas bells, those Christmas bells,
Ringing through the land… *
Arguably, the spirits were doing good, not evil, so may have been given approval to venture forth from Purgatory as a special dispensation.
One from my childhood that made me go WTF?
What the hell kind of message is that to send to a kid? Adults might find it cute, but nothing is more sure to give kids nightmares than to tell them that Santa Claus is skipping over them this year. Even Santa Claus Is Coming to Town doesn’t send the message as traumatically.
Skipped over? Seriously? You think that’s traumatic? How about being beaten and kicked by six to eight black men?
Blasphemy! I’ve loved “Snoopy’s Christmas” ever since I was a little kid.
Of course, I’ll admit my fondness for it as an adult is mostly nostalgia-based. I can see how it could be fairly insufferable if I heard it for the first time now.
While “Jingle Bell Rock,” “The Little Drummer Boy,” and the insipid “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time” all deserve to be banished from radio and retail store sound systems for the next forty years (not only a Biblical generation, but just outside the upper end of my life expectancy), there’s one more song that belongs on this list.
I refer, of course, to John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”, which has the most idiotic opening verse of any popular song I’ve ever heard.
So this is Christmas
and what have you done
Another year over
and a new one just begun
Um, John, that’s New Year’s you’re talking about. You really should have done fewer drugs.
The first two lines are awfully dumb as well. In the “So this is X” formulation, X is almost always something you’ve heard a lot about, but are finally encounter ing for the first time, e.g. “so this is New Orleans.” Lennon wasn’t exactly a stranger to Christmas by then.
And “what have you done” is usually followed by something that lends meaning to the question, e.g. “Sexy Sadie” where it’s followed by “you made a fool of everyone.” Here, it’s followed by the fact that it’s a new year. What have I done? I’ve* failed to impede the passage of time.*
After that opening, the rest of the song could be the best song ever, and it still wouldn’t make up for the awfulness of those first few lines.