Merry Yaksmas To All

The tree is up, garland is slung around the balustrade and I’ve even managed to string lights on the 20-ft hemlock outside without winding up in a wheelchair. There’s a fine Yule atmosphere, albeit a fatigued one, in the house and all that’s left to do is to perform multiple amputations on the holly bushes for swags and boughs. I probably should start in on making cookies to give the house a proper seasonal scent. And get some Velcro tabs to keep the damn electric candles from toppling off the window sills. Gotta get the Christmas cards out was well, find a way to keep the cat off the tree so there’s less pine needle barf to mop up and finally get a frame for the poster of “Yul Must” with its squad of fat Swedish tomtegubbar getting tanked on some brown hooch. So, I guess there’s still plenty left to do, but at least this is a season where making all these preparations has a sense of fun. And we’ve got a couple hundred holiday tunes spinning on the iPod deck to soundtrack the efforts everyday.

I’m a sucker for Christmas music, having bought at least one or two new CD’s each year just to get the one or two songs I dig. Before the advent of iTunes and pirate applications you were cornered into buying whole albums of mostly bland stuff – cold oatmeal music – just to have a couple good, cinnamon carols. We have a big snazzy collection of jingly hymns as well as a serious back catalog of junk ranging from utterly forgettable through lamely goofy to pretty freaking atrocious.

Forgettable is what it is and I’m hard pressed to recall any of the songs in this category. I know there’s at least one Michael Bolton ditty that fits. That guy sucks up substantial tracts of eternity to get through a song, sometimes putting me close to sleep at the kitchen sink, shattering coffee cups or hypnotically sawing my wrist with steak knives. I have to remember to delete that bastard from the playlist before Christmas Eve. If a Bolton tune is playing when Santa comes it may just drone Donder and the whole team right off the roof. A backyard of groaning, broken reindeer and a crippled Kringle could have a negative effect on the kids’ morning mood.

Lamely goofy can go two ways. There are tunes which you just have to hear a couple of times each year to make the season feel complete. Lou Monte’s Dominic, the Italian Christmas Donkey ranks among the most sublimely stupid, yet perfectly joyous, novelty songs ever made. Bob Rivers’ Walking ‘Round in Women’s Underwear and Red Peters’ You Ain’t Getting Shit for Christmas are also sure bets to add some smiles to the holidays. But there are more misses in this category, songs which shoot for Christmas but only come up with enough cheer for Palm Sunday. Isaac Hayes’ The Misletoe & Me dulls out the vibe in three notes while the great tenor, Lucian Pavarotti, fucks up regally when he takes a crack at O Holy Night – in English. Sounds like an uncle from Palermo stinking of baccala, soused on Strega and crooning broken English into the Christmas Tree. O-ah Holy-ah a-Night, the stars-ah are-ah a-brightly… Sorry, Uncle Lucie, maybe Jesus can forgive you for that one but I can’t. At least Hayes and Pavarotti tried because there’s plenty of stuff which makes you wince for the lack of effort. I Saw Daddy Kissing Santa Claus is the classic loser here. It ain’t too witty, mostly just switching “Daddy” for “Mommy” in the lyrics and Mommy is there anyway as the song is a cop out. It’s actually Ma in the Santa suit and not some guy from the office giving Daddy a little real whisker action on Christmas Eve.

The list of atrocities would include just about every Christmas tune ever performed by a punk band (or at least those whiny little shits and retards who’ve been rehashing and sterilizing the genre these days). The notable exceptions here are The Ramones’ Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want to Fight Tonight), also the best Xmas carol performed by a Jew, and The Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ Xmas Time (It Sure Doesn’t Feel Like It). Although that particular tune ranks among the crazy-long roster of Christmas downers it is poignant, honest and beautifully performed. Can’t forget The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York either. Leave it to Shane MacGowan to turn alcoholism and failure into a gleeful ballad with an indisputable Christmas feel. After those it all goes back to rock stars writing crap and pop stars re-singing starchy versions of stale classics.

Perhaps the song I detest most of all is Do They Know It’s Christmas, written by Bob Geldof and sung by a hundred other self-righteous jackasses caught up in Live Aid Save-The-World-With-A-Song delusions. “…there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmastime”? Here’s some news, Bob & Sting & Bono: even if we bought enough of your pompously conceived discs to eradicate hunger on the Dark Continent it still isn’t going to fucking snow because… it’s Africa. The song is a pithy reminder that some very wealthy musicians, slow to reach into their own pockets, prefer to make us feel guilty about poverty and cough up the revenue for their task. We shell out 15 bucks for a charity album of which (after production, distribution, promotion and performer “expenses” are covered) about 35-cents makes it to the Ethiopian rice fund. Imagine the Christmas spirit they could spread if they each sold one of their mansions and delivered the profits, in food and medicine, right to Darfur themselves. Bono seems of the mind that a fashion shoot on a waterless African farm will do more good than buying the farmers some pipes and pumps and helping with the labor of irrigating the field without a film crew in tow. Such a visionary. He’ll probably get a Nobel Peace Prize.

Damn, I hate holier-than-thou types so much it almost made me forget where the hell I was headed with this post. I did make it a point to ensure that that insidious Band Aid song didn’t transfer into my iTunes folder and, as long as nobody slips the actual CD into a player it won’t be heard intentionally this year. As for the rest of the questionable songs on the playlist, I try to delete one here and there when I think about it. I’m about to nix an Acid Jazz remix/dub of Jingle Bells at this moment. There is one tune, however, which I’ve yet to make the necessary effort to delete: The Cat Carol by Meryn Cadell.

I can’t tell if it’s just so awful, depressing or weird that I feel it needs to be retained as a fathom-marker for the obscene depths to which Christmas Music can sink. It might even be more depressing than the destitute dying momma in Christmas Shoes. It’s about a freezing cat trying to get back in the house on Christmas Eve. During a blizzard. The kitty meets a freezing mouse and digs a hole in the snow for shelter for them both. Then the thoughtful feline curls around the rodent to keep it warm. Then the cat freezes to death. Then reindeer arrive, start crying over the dead tabby but not even Santa can resurrect it (his life-giving gifts are limited to snowmen). But the rat is alive! Hooray! The cat had given it the most precious of gifts – life! Yippee, Christmas is awesome! There’s a frozen catsicle on the stoop but it gets to come back every year as a Cat Constellation so the mouse can look up at its savior/pal next time it’s shivering its ass of with hypothermia – Weeeeee! Hallelujah!!!

The issue with the song isn’t that it neglects to send Saint Nick kicking down the door to beat Xmas justice into the bastards who forgot their kitty on Christmas Eve. Though Cadell tries to come up with a redemptive finish – the “gift of life”, “cat in the sky” horseshit – the huge problem with The Cat Carol is that it rolls out so slowly, in such a weepy and mewling tone, you won’t even notice that there’s some sort of special Christmas message in it. You’ll either wind up feeling as rotten as the people who locked their pet out to die or you might just get suspicious that the joyless, fanatic morons of PETA managed to slip a track of misery into your Holiday CD. That thought has crossed my mind more than once.

I haven’t had to dwell on it too much, however. Even the iPod thinks it’s a crummy song and shuffles it into play rarely. But when it does come on I can’t help but wonder what kind of person comes up with such pathetic canticles and thinks it’s wonderful. Why the hell would someone even think it up? Cat Carol sure has the unmistakable air of a human-hating, Humane Society vegan freak. It even has some Indigo Girl flavor what with the Death To Happiness undercurrent. It’s also difficult to pinpoint the gender of Meryn Cadell. Sounds like a chick name. Kind of sounds like a lady singing. No, hold on…it’s a man, right? Naw, it’s definitely a girl. I don’t know – a castrato? What would the Information Age be if we didn’t have half a dozen trivialities to Google everyday?

Turns out that Meryn Cadell is a female to male transsexual. Go figure. But it saves me from having to wonder about the motivations of the person who wrote The Cat Carol. It no longer matters as I’m not going to pretend I have any insight into the mind of a tranny. Besides, you don’t have to be psychologically unique in the world to sing terrible Christmas Songs. You could just be Paul MacCartney. Or Bruce Springsteen. Or Madonna. Or John Denver (Please Daddy, Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas - yay!). Or Whitney Houston…okay, maybe you do need a few loose cogs to get into the carol-singing business.

So what’s the point? I’m no longer sure I’ve got one. But it’s been hard year on the world so I’ll just wish a Merry Christmas and happier times to Meryn Cadell and everyone else. Except Sting.