I don’t hate Christmas music, for the most part. I’m happy it’s a once-a-year thing, but for that month, I can put up with a few dozen repetitions of “Deck the Halls” and “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Adeste Fidelis” and all the rest, until they go back into cold storage after the New Year.
With one exception.
There is this one song. This one fucking song.
It’s not the most commonly heard of the Christmas standards. If you tell Alexa to shuffle modern holiday favorites, you’ll hear Mariah Carey’s tribute to holiday horniness three times before this one pops up.
But that’s enough. That’s more than enough. Because it is dire. Truly hateful and grotesque. The worst entry in the Christmas catalogue, by a fair margin.
Which song?
Fuck this fucking song. Fuck it to death. Load every tape, every disc, every copy of the sheet music into a giant trebuchet, and launch the whole fucking heap of bullshit into the sun.
When this song slithers into the mix, when it inflicts itself on my ear-holes, I feel an immediate stab of palpable physical rage. I want to scream at the speaker. But I can’t, and I don’t, because to vent my true feelings would frighten my children and irritate my wife. If they are distracted, I quietly tell Alexa to skip to the next track at the first opportunity. If that’s not an option, I leave the room. But where neither choice is possible, I sit and stew in furious silence, tamping down the urge to remove my face with a cheese grater.
Why, you ask? What is it that makes this song the potion to bring out my inner Hyde?
It’s simple: the song combines two of the things I hate most in this world, in a precisely balanced stew of perfect toxic glurge.
The first is its embodiment of that noxious strain of modern Christianity which celebrates Jesus as a figure of authority and magic and ultimate power. Prince of peace? An exemplar of humility? Nah, fuck that. He’s like a superhero and shit! Walks on water! Controls the weather! Abolishes illness! Rules the world! He’s Doctor Strange plus Hercules! Our Messiah can beat up your Messiah!
It’s frequently said that if Jesus were to return today, he would be horrified by his own so-called followers, and this fucking song should be Exhibit One.
The other quality that makes my skin crawl is the song’s deep and grotesque sexism, verging on misogyny. The male songwriter came up with one lyrical hook, and hammers it home over and over: I, a dude, am explaining to a mother what kind of relationship she should have with her kid. In the context of the lyrics, it’s ambiguous whether Baby Jesus is a newborn or still in the womb and shortly due, but either way, it’s a fraught time for a mother, and the last thing she needs is some puling dork leaning over her and mansplaining her future.*
And it’s not just the lyrics, either. You would think a song about the Christ’s awesome future would be celebratory, but the songwriter had other ideas. Instead, he uses a dirgey minor-key melody that gives the whole song an insistent whininess, like a complaint about unfair parenting from a sulky teenager.
The overall effect, setting wrongheaded words against a dreary musical lament, makes the song feel like the manifesto of a borderline-incel creep who’s trying to press some tedious point on a reluctant female listener, acting hurt and offended at her lack of receptiveness for his brilliant insights.
Barf.
And it’s barely even a holiday song in the first place. It’s essentially pure Christian glurge, hanging onto the vestiges of the season’s original religious purpose. It fits the same category as stuff like “Little Drummer Boy,” but that (a) is at least relatively upbeat and pleasant, and (b) gets grandfathered in as a traditional piece. “Mary Did You Know” uses that as an excuse to elbow itself in at the Christmas table, an uninvited guest claiming undeserved status as a new holiday standard. If not for that, I could ignore it entirely.
Instead, though, I get to experience the sudden sting of its occasional reappearance in the December playlist, and I grind my teeth through its sappy, poisonous drivel.
Soon, it will be January, and this nasty little creature will return to its eleven-month slumber. Hiding in its house of winter malignance, the dead song waits dreaming.
* Yes, I am aware that alternative lyrics were written in response to this very criticism. I’ve read them. Unfortunately, they feel to me like an almost self-parodic oversteer, and are just as patronizing in the other direction, like first-wave girl-power cheerleading from a militant poet, well-intentioned but real-world-inexperienced, proudly holding court on the quad.
