Christmas Stalking - day 22

Let's face it. The holidays make people cranky. Extra-extra-long line-ups, bare shelves (seriously, how can there be NO chocolate "J"s left in the whole world?), seemingly endless holiday concerts, and rapidly diminishing bank balances (along with rapidly expanding waistlines), all set to an ever-present soundtrack of bad to questionable* holiday music. 

As you already know, topping my list of favourite Christmas songs is "All I Want for Christmas is You". Following not-so-closely is U2's "Angel of Harlem" (Ok, not technically a Christmas song, but Bono sings about "a cold and wet December day", so it counts.), "Baby, It's Cold Outside" (Except for the Norah Jones/Willie Nelson version, which skeeves me out, for obvious reasons.), "Fairytale of New York" by the dentally challenged Pogues, and, despite my attempts to hate it, "Last Christmas" by Wham! Honourable mention goes to "Do They Know It's Christmas" by Band-aid; not because it is especially good, but because I obsessed over the video when the song came out in 1984 and I still like to name each singer as they do their part.

The songs which deserve a lump of coal and always make me lunge to change the station are "Holly, Jolly Christmas" (especially the Burl Ives version**. Kiss 'er once for me? Good lord, no, sir!), "Dominic the Donkey" (Eee-aw, Eee-aw! No!), ANYTHING by Boney-M and/or Bon Jovi and/or Bruce Cockburn, "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" by Bruce Springsteen (What's so funny, Bruce? No, really, what?), and Bruce Cockburn's uber-depressing version of "O, Little Town of Bethlehem". 

So, in an attempt to banish the awful and keep away the crankies, I am going to make myself a festive playlist on my iPod and keep it on constant rotation until the danger of hearing "Mary's Boy-child" has passed. 

*A couple of days ago, I heard an operatic version of "O, Holy Night" playing in a drugstore that was so awful, the employees and shoppers were visibly cringing. Now, I'm no Kathleen Battle, but even I could do better than what they were trying to pass off as singing. In retrospect, perhaps they were trying to increase traffic to their headache relief section, but I suppose we'll never know. I paid for my moisturizer and high-tailed it out of there before any further damage could be done to my eardrums.

**True story - every year my ex-husband sends me a text message when he hears Burl's Holly, Jolly for the first time of the season, because he knows that I loathe it so.