'Tis the season … for retail workers, customer service agents, etc. to be subjected to endless rounds of 50-year-old renditions of “Jingle Bell Rock,” plus all the new! fresh! yay! reworkings by yesterday’s has-beens.
Wanna join me? Got specific gripes? I can start us off:
“Little Drummer Boy”
Picture the scene: an unmarried teenager has just given non-medicated birth inside a literal barn - complete with livestock and the attendant manure, flies, etc. - and has just gotten the $%! newborn to sleep, when some strange asshole barges in and starts beating on a friggin’ drum.
You just know that the ox and lamb kept time … absolutely lost their shit.
They spook easily, yanno.
“Little Saint Nick” (the Beach Boys)
The lyric “Christmas comes this time each year …” makes me irrationally stabby.
It’s an annual holiday. Do we not understand how annual holidays work?
Your turn, Dopers! What’s your absolute least-favorite, “I will murder someone or else stab knitting needles through my own eardrums” holiday music … and why do you hate it so?
I just googled the original Jingle Bell Rock and I stand corrected.
In the interest of fighting ignorance, the Bobby Helms version is 66 years old (released 1957) which is a bit too close to the Mark of the Beast for my confort.
ETA: I have never heard of the donkey song, and I’s a-feared to look it up.
The two worst by far are Jingle Bell Rock and the Jingle Bells version where the “singing” is barking dogs. I will walk out of a store before I’ll listen to more than the opening measure of either song. Oh, yeah, I just remembered, Santa Baby is horrific and the woman who sings it should be killed.
I’ve got no particular opinion pro- or con- about the many generic traditional renderings of Jingle Bells. It’s dumb schmaltz, but Christmas tunes are all dumb schmaltz.
The Donkey Song is kinda catchy. Like Baby Shark catchy. I can see it being a big hit at elementary school kiddie pageants. Cute, but slightly redeemingly cute. I first learned of it just a couple of years ago myself.
Christmas Shoes is hands down the worst piece of shit that they play at Christmas. It has no redeeming qualities. I don’t know what I find more annoying, the song itself, or the people that get all teary eyed about it.
Every single version of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” They all suck. And they are everywhere. It’s the de facto advertising song for the season. You can’t escape it.
I’d take an hour of Mary did you know? over an hour of Christmas Shoes any day. Though I admit that I can’t present nearly as good of a rant against Christmas Shoes as you did for MDYK.
the ox and lamb 
“Christmas comes this time each year …” 
