Monthly Archives: December 2011

Creepy Christmas Carols

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I love Christmas carols, but some of them are downright creepy if you think about the lyrics a bit.

I didn’t really notice it much until a colleague commented that “Baby It’s Cold Outside” may possibly be a story about sexual violence, rather than a harmless, coy flirtation between two people in love. Now I can’t hear the song without getting creeped out.

Then all of a sudden many Christmas songs seemed suspect. A friend commented on “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” whose lyrics are ominous at best: He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake.

That’s enough to give a kid nightmares, I’d say. Heck, that’s enough to give an adult nightmares. I’m gonna start keeping mace under my bed just in case.

And then there’s “Winter Wonderland,” in which a couple performs a mock marriage ceremony officiated by a snowman and later they “dream by the fire” about the plans they made. Yes, that’s what the song is really about. Which isn’t creepy, but it’s a little strange.

“Santa Baby” is a song dedicated to the me-first selfish mentality, and seems to be about a woman with a sugar daddy who she hopes will marry her. Weird at best, and creepily anti-feminist at worst.

I don’t know. I’m re-evaluating some of these Christmas tunes this year…

The Least Menacing Menace Ever

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Evil snowglobe? I didn’t think even the SyFy channel could find a scary-movie menace that was this profoundly unmenacing, but apparently yes, they have made a movie about an evil snowglobe.

I am not joking.

This movie is about an evil snowglobe.

I’m guessing it’s going to make Snakes on a Plane look like a Cecil B. DeMille piece.

An evil snowglobe.

Really.

The Long Dark Christmas Carol of the Soul

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My friends who work in retail are already beginning to get a little… funny… about having to listen to the same twenty or so Christmas carols over and over again at work.

I’m not sure this constitutes torture under the Geneva Convention, but it is certainly annoying. My workplace doesn’t play Christmas tunes over any sort of loudspeaker, and if it did, I would probably want to take an axe to said loudspeaker too.

I always maintain that the problem isn’t Christmas songs in and of themselves, so much as the painful lack of variety of said Christmas songs. There are literally hundreds and probably more like thousands upon thousands of Christmas tunes out there, yet our ears are assailed by the same 20-25 of them every single time we step into a store during the holiday season. Even the new Justin Bieber Christmas songs might be an improvement.

… okay, maybe not. But at least they’d be new.

The shame of it is how many great Christmas songs there are that simply don’t get played, because they’re weird, old, or just because Elvis hasn’t done a version of them. Instead they play Paul McCartney’s “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time” which, Geneva Convention or not, is definitely torture.

So. Why do we keep singing Christmas carols? Here’s a wonderful article from Slate that examines the question, and gives the long history of Christmas songs–how the early Church hated pagan adaptations, how Puritans hated them and how the modern Christmas celebration arose.

And I also have two additions to my 12 Carols series, one of which is based on the other. Yes, I know that makes 14 carols, technically. What can I say, math has never been my area of expertise.

Lord of the Dance is only a quasi-Christmas carol. Its words were written in 1967, and it tells the story of Jesus’s life in first-person. It has absolutely nothing to do with Michael Flatley, I promise.

Lord of the Dance was based on Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day, however, which was a Christmas Carol, published in 1833, but traditional long before that.

They’ve disabled YouTube embedding for this one, but have a listen. It has a weird little syncopated rhythm, and I remember singing it once in choir. It was fun.

Where Do You Keep Your Socks in a Video Game?

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Nice Barrels.

Nice Barrels. Mind If I Rob You Blind?

My friend walked into somebody’s house, saw two beer barrels, and opened them up. Inside one, he found a pair of pants. In the other, there was a paint brush. I believe the homeowner was probably keeping his beer in his sock drawer, or maybe the mailbox.

Video games don’t make a whole lot of sense, do they? In real life, even if you could just wander into people’s homes and take all their stuff without any kind of protest, what you’d find in a beer barrel would probably be, well… beer.

This isn’t true of video games, and hasn’t ever been, as far as I know. In the old SNES Zelda, you could more or less wander around in people’s houses and check all their pots and urns for valuables. If you found any, you could just take them, even if the owner was standing five feet away and watching. That’s not really stealing, is it? I mean, they’d object, surely, if there was a problem.

Now we have the game Oblivion, which came out in 2006. My friend (we’ll call him C.J. for now)  was commenting on how strange people’s habits were in the game.

He found one of the characters annoying.

“… so I stole her urn and threw it in the river.”

If life were like video games, we’d go into people’s houses and find urns full of coins, glass bottles full of faeries and beer barrels full of paintbrushes. Nobody would keep pants in a pants drawer or socks in a sock drawer. They’d keep medicine in their grandfather clocks (Final Fantasy VI) and store gold coins in bricks (Super Mario Brothers).

We’d go to work and burn down bushes to try to find secret passages (The Legend of Zelda) or arrange pills (Dr. Mario). At the end of the day we’d put on our raccoon tails and fly home (Super Mario Brothers 3).

Then again, we might come home to find our urns vandalized and our precious paint brushes (so cunningly hidden in beer barrels) stolen by adventurers.

Given games, though, I doubt we’d care.

(Photo borrowed from a pretty cool review of Final Fantasy VI. Check it out!)