(Ear-bleeding) Holiday Traditional Songs

There haven’t been any new Christmas/holiday songs that have caught on and become part of the winter traditional song family since Mariah Carey’s 1994 hit “All I Want For Christmas Is You.”

Why is that?  With thousands upon thousands of new songs being written every year by artists, groups, orchestras, shitty boy bands, drunks, and goofy teens, does nobody feel enough holiday spirit anymore to write the next uber-popular^* (and each year soon to be more annoying) Christmas song?

"Cash Rules Everything Around Me" I can't wait for hip-hop caroling, seriously.

Unlike most people, or at least unlike all of the women I’ve tried mentioning this around, I can only stand to listen to these holiday songs on Christmas Eve and Day; anything more than that is simply excessive.  Do you listen to Valentine’s Day songs for a full month before the red lover’s day?  Are you patriotic enough to willingly listen to the Star Spangled Banner every day leading up to Independence Day without starting a new revolution?  I rest my case.  In fact, this year I proactively avoided turning on the radio in November to avoid any chance of hearing a Christmas song before Thanksgiving.  I proactively refused to visit any store lest they be decorating a Christmas aisle before Thanksgiving.  I sat huddled in the corner of my room talking to myself (and growing a wicked beard) until I was prepared to re-enter the winter festive world.

By the time you’ve driven around from home to your relatives to your friends and back home on these two days, you’ll have heard practically every traditional song and even a few dozen repeat covers sung by different no-talent artists.  This realization may sound bitter, cold, and oddly similar in many ways to a well-known greedy character that was visited by three ghosts who was taken through time to learn some sort of lesson… which, by the way, is a story I doubt anybody he told believed; maybe his Prozac finally kicked in.

And thus, maybe we should cease all hope in a new traditional song being born in a manger under a star or wherever else they come from.  This conclusion may not have been drawn from any particular source before I wrote this paragraph, but that’s what happens when I start a chapter and finish writing it a month later.  My mind changes, new ideas may flourish, and I progressively lose all initiative in the chapter idea I previously started.

Regardless, if we haven’t been able to come up with the next long-lived holiday song since the mid-90s, then let’s throw in the towel and cease making Christmas albums that nobody buys besides your mom.  I’m not blaming her taste because the wholesome Christmas spirit isn’t something to be against, only that the age of these holiday pop-aligned albums has come and past.  Furthermore, this artist self-ban I’m suggestion doesn’t exclude cover songs.  There are at least 33 versions of “Jingle Bell Rock” and three alone would have been adequate enough to appease the masses.

But despite my apparent bitterness and flip-flopping of acceptance, if there was more of a variety of Christmas songs to pleasingly tease my ears, my patience for holiday music would probably rise.  However, until then… bah humbug.

^*This is the only time in the entire book/blog that I will knowingly write “uber” and not instantly hate myself to the fullest potential.

For more of my sporadic “book” chapters, continue through The Goofy Book 3.