That would be Bowie and Bing Crosby, taken from an early 70’s television special. I only like it for the odd juxtaposition…
Spare a thought for those of us in the Southern Hemisphere who have to endure the songs that pertain to Good King Wenceslas checking out the SNOW, and Jingle Bells’ sleigh dashing through the SNOW, and fucking partridges in pear trees (no partridges down here folks, or snow for that matter).
It’s summer in the south you northern Xmas imperialists! 
“And the waves hit the booooooat and they all drowned like rats
And their lungs filled up with waterrrrrrrr…”
- Richard Jeni
Ok, just so this won’t be a complete drive-by/hijack, please consider the following: Christmas music can be bad. Very, very bad. But can it really be any more annoying than the crap attached to other holidays? Like every awful fake Irish accent heard in commercials around St. Paddy’s day, or bad Vincent Price/Bela Lugosi imitations around Halloween?
Perhaps it’s just because they’re generally around for a shorter duration, but IMHO they’re far more grating than Christmas music.
bernse
lol! I totally agree with you…hate hate hate Bruce Springsteen Christmas songs…
Heh heh…
I just released my very first CD ever, and it’s all Christmas songs. All held up to the cold, hard light of a distorted guitar. No sap. No glurge. No cute widdle chiwdwen singing about Mommy’s Christmas Shoes. Just music. And damned good music, if I do say so myself.
Yeah, that’s just twisted.
I like the soundtrack from the Charlie Brown Christmas cartoon as Christmas music. People laugh when they hear the idea, but then they start listening and want to borrow the CD (and don’t return it - growl).
Ugh. Certainly, the “creative” variations on the standards can be quite excruciating.
And let me tell ya, it doesn’t get any better in different cultures, we also get annoyingly repetitive Xmas music programming. In my particular context we have to deal with “Chrismas music” having to do nothing with the Holiday, but that just has the beats, rhythms, styles of the traditional seasonal music backing up the usual vulgar/commercial lyric content.
I played Urinetown’s rendition of “Little Davey Dinckle” at work five times in a row. I have been informed that if I ever play it here again, I will killed with an electric drill; i.e. bored to death.
Good King Wenceslas looked out
And burned to a crisp in a fire
Yeah, you’re right. Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. The only solution: Australian Christmas music. Down with winter-themed songs!
A few Christmas songs I enjoy: O Holy Night, The Shepherds Watched their Flocks By Night (which seems to have completely disappeared from the repertoire lately for some unfathomable reason), Christmas on Christmas Island (I dig big-band Hawaiian music 
) but I concur on singing the songs the way they were meant to. No more screeching, “SAAAAAAAAAAN-ta Claus is coming - to TOOO-oown!!” Bloody hell!
And I still have, going through my head, a song which sounds like a reject from the “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” soundtrack, "Everybody’s waiting for the man with the bag . . . " which Macy’s insisted on playing over and over yesterday. 
I think I may have you all beat.
A few years ago I worked at the mall for the holiday season. Bad enough to make me hate Christmas music right there, as my store played the usual Christmas music. But there was a horrifying twist. We were a corner store at an ‘x’ in the mall, and had 2 sides open to the mall, thereby able to see and hear clearly all that went on outside our store. Now, this was the place where they decided to put Santa and his merry elves, thus attracting many, many tired and screaming children to wait in a long line in order to allow their parents to ooh and aah over them sitting on Santa’s lap. Of course, we cannot allow children to wait in a long line without being entertained! We must provide them with something to watch! Thus, a wooden display of elves was created, directly facing our store, and a soundtrack provided for the tykes to listen to. But, the line is long and winding, and the children are only in front of the display for a little while, so we will put the soundtrack on a 5 minute loop. Oooh, look, children, at the happy happy elves talking about the toys they are making!, Now, listen to them sing their elf song in their elf voices!
::harmonica tone::
A little work here, and a little work there.
Making lots of toys for kids everywhere.
We work in the morning 'till the day is done.
Then we all go home, and we haaaave a liiiiittle fun!
This began in November and went on until Christmas. I worked about 40 hours a week, and this was up for about 6-7 weeks. I heard this song over …(doing the math)…3,000 times!
::twitch::
(I noticed the next year, when I was no longer working there, they had changed the display so the kids had to pick up phones to hear the elves, so that the surrounding stores were no longer being tortured.)
I only like Jazz Christmas music (and maybe John Lennon and David Bowie). The rest of it just stinks. As for my recurring Christmas music nightmare…my dad’s boss decided they would mime Bruce’s “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”, and my dad would be the drummer. Well, he played that fuckin’ song 8 times every night for 6 weeks so he could get the drum moves EXACTLY right. He’s a drummer anyhoo, but my son and I almost shoved his drumsticks through our ears in our useless attempt to get relief from that hideous, simplistic rendition of an already shitty song.
From my post to [url="http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=114802&highlight=pinocchio"another thread:
Talking ornaments were responsible for the most apocalyptic portion of my Christmas season last year.
I was in a hardware store trying to buy something, not even Christmas-related. I was nearly broke, exhausted, and the clerk discovered some kind of hold on my card. I had to stay on hold for ten minutes with the card company before they would let the transaction clear.
During this whole time, there was this display filled with bright, flashing, loud automatic Santas all clamouring in a variety of irritation subroutines. After having to endure these monstrosities while humiliated and on hold trying to get access to what little remained of my money, I was at the end of my rope. I remember distinctly thinking, This cannot possibly get any worse.
The manager walked up to the display and, without provocation, activated an automatic Pinocchio that I’d previously failed to notice. It lit up, ground with mechanisms. My world teetered and stood still, and I felt like the third-class passengers on the Titanic watching the iceberg drift up. It’s worse.
The little mouth flapped open, and the thing started to shriek this appalling Christmas pseudocarol, at about twelve octaves above middle C. CHRISTMAS IS A VEEERYYYYY SPECIAL TIME OF YEEEEEAAAAAAR!!!
It continued to yowl, adding its prepubescent, tinny scream over the caterwauling of the Santas and the canned muzak of the card people. I nearly burst into tears right there in the store. But what could I do? I was trapped on the phone. I had to endure that little torture device until it was good and finished. I had my transaction approved, fled the store, and hid under the bed.
That day will haunt my nightmares to my dying hour.
I don’t like Christmas music very much. That’s why I regularly carry around Duke Ellington’s Three Suites. The first suite is Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, so I think it qualifies as Christmas-ish.
The best part about it is that it seamlessly moves into progressively less syrupy-sweet tunes, until by the end of the album you’ve got some smooth Christmas-free Strayhorn-Ellington.
If you can’t handle the Duke, the goons at SomethingAwful recently cooked up a list of Christmas albums we can be glad we don’t have to hear.
I went shopping in October and they were playing Christmas music. October. That’s fully two motherfucking months before Christmas. Fuckers. Simply having a wonderful Christmas time? Fuck off, I’m here for a fucking pumpkin!
And you folks who send Christmas cards in November? This is not good organisation, people, it’s the wrong fucking time of year.
Elsewhere on the SDMB, I’ve mentioned the three-meter-tall mechanic elf who sings and moves his head and arms almost, but not quite, completely out of beat with the music. The elf’s repertoire is regrettably limited to a five minute show, repeated four times an hour, mostly of badly translated American twentieth-century Christmas standards. Rudolf er rød på nesen… And, unfortunately, he’s not far from our storefront, in what is normally a quiet cafe across the way.
An update on the situation: last Saturday, the elf was silent. There was a sign resting on his knees, saying he “had a cold” and “the doctor recommends rest”. Ah, I thought, mechanical problems. Thank jah for small favors.
It was not a malfunction.
It was sabotage! :eek:
Seriously, somebody cut a wire. I don’t know who, but several of our cashiers have joined in Operation Elficide…
Man, I know the feeling. A couple of years ago, I happened to be on the island of Cyprus doing business a couple of weeks before Christmas. Right smack in the middle of the fucking Mediteranean.
Christmas decorations I can understand. An angel, a nativity scene. Ribbons and stuff strung around the lobby of the hotel.
Nice weather. Folks ambling around in shorts, people laid out by the ocean sunning themselves. Really nice.
So, we’re driving along, headed for the next job, and we come upon a round about.
Set up in the middle of the round about is a huge display:
Santa Claus on his sleigh, reindeer pulling away. Elves. The wise men. *THREE METER TALL *Mother fucking Frosty the god damned Snowman!
Look, nobody knows better than I that it does occasionally snow on Cyprus. They’ve got their own ski club on top of the highest mountain down there. I fucking know it snows because one year I got caught in a fucking snow storm - but I was damned near at the top of that highest mountain at the time.
Mother fucking Frosty the god damned Snowman was in a round about so fucking close to the beach he oughta been wearing swimming trunks instead of that damned hat and a fucking SCARF, for god’s sake.
And the music. For fuck’s sake: Why, oh why, do you have to play “Jingle Bells” and “Walking in a Winter Wonderland” on Cyprus radio?
We went to eat one evening, and there was a large family in the restaurant having a Christmas party. It was really cool, because they had a couple of local musicians playing dance music and stuff. We got to watch them do all those really cool greek looking dances and stuff. And then they just had to go and play “Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer.”
The surest way to get me to change radio stations is for them to start playing Christmas music - unless they happen to dig out “Christmas at Ground Zero.” Then I’m gonna listen all the way through and smile.
As someone who’s hated the bland, banal, endlessly repetitive, sappy, syrupy, schlocky, cringe-inducing, ear-bleeding, droning, blithering, babbling, abso-frickin’-lutely unlistenable music that plagues EVERYWHERE AND EVERYTHING this time of the year, I just want to say this: Thank you. You people are wonderful.
And classics, schmassics. It’s all tripe…every last goddam sappy syllable and note. Doesn’t matter who’s singing it. Doesn’t matter what the spirit is or where the song’s from. All of it sucks.
The fact that I have been completely unable to convince one other person of the incredible obviousness of how unlistenable this is, of course, only makes me appreciate you guys even more.
Damn Velma, I didn’t think my mall experience could be beat but the elves sound far, far worse than the Barrel of Shrieking Trees. Would you like some of my drugs? 
Forget about the Christmas music itself…
DOES EVERY FUCKING COMMERCIAL THAT COMES ON TV HAVE TO TRY TO BE CLEVER BY WORKING THEIR FUCKING JINGLE INTO A CHRISTMAS SONG?