This is the best Christmas song.
Since I have a 2 year old who desperately wants a monkey for Christmas, very relevant.
Actually, I got that from Jesus At McDonald’s At Midnight by Mojo Nixon. 
Moving from MPSIMS to Cafe Society.
Day’um that was nasty. And I only lasted a few seconds.
I wish youtube had a glurge-o-meter & I could set a blocking threshold to be auto-blocked from stuff like that. Kinda like “safe search” on Google.
I always thought They Might Be Giants had the best take on this song.
You want a great Christmas song? They don’t get any better than this…
The refrain of Feliz Navidad does it to me. (Result of a former workplace’s decision to use a c60 with the same tracks on both sides on a continuous loop in my work area three weeks out of the year for four years running.)
The only therapy I have for it is mentally replacing the lyrics with “I wanna stab you right in your fat face / I wanna stab you right in your fat face / I wanna stab you right in your fat face / With a rusty rail-road spike.”
When I first heard the song, I assumed Mommy was a slut. It wasn’t until many years later that it occurred to me that it might have Daddy in a Santa suit.
But if the kids are in bed, why is Daddy in the Santa suit? I mean, as a real honest grown-up now, I can see the possibilities, but in a kiddy song from the 1950s?!
I got right away that Santa was actually supposed to be Daddy. I recall the Dad-dresses-as-Santa as a well-worn trope. For years the only thing that stuck in my craw was that I didn’t find the narrator’s obliviousness plausible.
It wasn’t until years later that the whole narrative began to unravel in my mind. The point of dressing up as Santa is to be seen by the children, thereby re-enforcing the adorably pointless lie and setting the child up for burning shame for all the years she spent telling her friends that nuh-uh she saw Santa with her own eyes. You know - the magic of childhood. But in this case I need more info on the wacky set of circumstances that led to the shoddy stage management of this lovable little fraud. You know something? I don’t think the problem was in the planning and execution of the Santa scam on the part of the characters in the song. I think it was lazy writing on the part of the song’s composer.
But maybe I’m just not recognizing a cultural theme. Maybe what appears to be lazy, cliche and nonsensical is actually done for ironic purposes. It’s another joke, like the one about Santa Claus – we find out years later that the Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer tv special was just painfully stupid, with dialogue awkwardly forced to produce lines from a song that managed to permanently yoke a commercial property to a traditional legend.
I always thought the weird part was the punchline: “Oh, what a laugh it would have been / If Daddy had only seen / Mommy kissing Santa Claus last night.” The oblivious kid is giggling over the idea of her parents and Santa Claus all pitted against one another in some sort of confrontation.
The weird part is where mommy is dressed in a reindeer furry costume.
“Fleas gnawed my dog!”
Grandma
Do they Know it’s Christmas?
Haviing a wonderful Christmas time
All need to be banned.
Oh, and also- any version of Have a Jolly Holly… NOT sung by Burl Ives, and the madonna “Sanat Baby”.
I was just about to post about the bloody shoes! Patton Oswalt has the best take on it.