Oddly enough, I fell in love with "The Christmas Flip-Flop" without even realizing it was a parody of "Christmas Shoes." I wish I could include more from Ho: A Dan Band Christmas, but there's no video for "Let's Get Drunk and Make Out This Christmas" or "Christmakwanzakah." If there were, Dan Band would have four of the top ten spots on this list.
On the subject of "Christmas Shoes," I refer you to Patton Oswalt's thorough breakdown of just what makes the song so terrible:
This song was a bonus track on Everclear's So Much for the Afterglow CD. If you sat through about five minutes of silence after the end of "California King," you started to hear jingling bells and this came up. Looking it up on Amazon, though, I now see you can buy "Hating You For Christmas" all by itself. Ah, the wonders of the digital age.
This album came out in September of 1997, a few weeks after my then-fiancée informed me that she'd rather start sleeping with other guys in her dorm at grad school than get married to me a year later. Everclear's sound is a combination of violent outbursts, self-loathing, affirmations, triumphant reassurances, longing for a past that admittedly wasn't as good as your memories wish it had been, and lamentations for lives that you never got the chance to live. In other words, the perfect music for someone who's had his heart completely shattered and isn't sure whether it's worth it to keep living if the only real hope he has is the off chance that some day he'll be able to say, "Ha, you were wrong!"
Anyway, I listened to this song a lot in December of '97. Since it was just a bonus track, Everclear didn't make an official video for it. Instead, someone just dubbed it over clips from Rudolph.
"I could have been someone."
"Well, so could anyone."
I hope you like The Dan Band.
Because this isn't the last time you're going to see them on this list.
There are a few Gary Hoey songs that could go here. I was debating "12 Days of Christmas," "Deck the Halls," and "Happy Xmas," but "God Rest" has always been my favorite. There's no official video, so instead enjoy this lighting display someone created to go along with the song.
Christmas is not just a marketing opportunity for Best Buy and Walmart. It's also Christianity's big recruiting drive. The lights and decorations and music are all around us, be we Christians or Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, or atheists. But unless you fall into the first category, you can count on someone asking you why you're participating if you don't believe in Jesus.
In short, Christianity, which prides itself on having a Christian attitude, likes to treat Christmas time with less maturity than my four year old son when he has a toy he doesn't want to share with his sister. "Hey, that's our holiday. Don't put those twinkling lights on your house unless you're willing to accept that Christ, who was God made flesh, was born of a virgin and gave his life that you might have eternal life!" It's as though "Jingle Bells" contained the Lord's Prayer in it. And the most obvious ploy, "Only Christians should be allowed to get presents!"
Oddly enough, midnight Christmas mass or other religious ceremonies might be best closed to atheists, but instead the church and your most religious family members will openly try to get anyone to attend. But regardless of what Christians may wish was true, most of the traditions surrounding Christmas either have become secular or, in many cases, started out as secular (or non-Christian), were co-opted by Christianity, and have become secular again. Decorating trees, putting up lights, hanging missletoe, and singing carols do not require a religious test. Nor should they.
The fact is that Silent Night is a pretty song. So is Handel's Messiah, and I don't have to accept Jesus as my savior to sing songs about him any more than I have to be coming straight out of Compton or to honor a vow to not turn around because Der Kommisar is in town to sing either of those songs. Religious or not, the six or seven weeks from Thanksgiving through the end of the kids' winter break is about a lot more than the birth of a Jew born in Palestine 2000 years ago.
All of this was a long winded way for me to say Tim Minchin does a good job of explaining why even an atheist can "really like Christmas" in White Wine In the Sun.
My sister and I listened to John Denver and the Muppets Christmas album so many times my parents had to buy a new copy after about two years. Many of the songs fall into the gap between "too silly to be taken seriously" and "too serious to be funny." A few others fall into the "so over-the-top it kind of sucks" category.
The version of "Silent Night/Stille Nacht" on the album, however, hits just the right balance. The producers used the chorus of multiple voices united, allowing the likes of Gonzo and Kermit to blend instead of stand out for comedic purposes. I also love the history lesson and the use of the German lyrics.
"Walk This Way" gets a lot of credit for thrusting rap into the mainstream, but Run-DMC deserves similar credit for "Christmas in Hollis." When A Very Special Christmas came out in the mid-80's, it featured a lot of rock star covers of songs that ranged from "not so bad" to "the only possible reason I can imagine you put that song out is because you are a Satanist who is bent on destroying Christmas." (I'm looking at you Stevie Nicks version of "Silent Night" that goes on for about fifteen minutes just repeating, "Well it was a... si-i-lent night. Yes, it was a... ho-o-ly night.")
But Run-DMC not only did an original song, they also managed to tightrope that line between "keeping it real" and "acceptable to play while Grandma is in the room." The song has endured, and at this point may be the most played of all the rap pioneers' songs considering it gets more play in department stores and on radio stations every December than "Rock Box" or "You Be Illin'" gets in all 12 months combined.
I don't have a lot of memories of my dad from when I was little. Understand, he and my mom have been married for almost 40 years, so this isn't one of those "he went out on Christmas Eve to buy a pack of smokes and we never saw him again" stories. And today, we're as close as we could possibly be, but from about the time I was three until I was 16, he and I didn't have much to do with one another.
That said, this song manages to bring back memories of my dad. I remember listening to this album in our old house in Ohio and thinking of it as "dad's music." My mom has more Christmas albums than anyone in their right mind could ever stand to listen to in one lifetime, but this is the only one that stands out as dad's.
This video, which is from a Christmas special appearance in 1967, is worth watching just for the cymbal crash at 1:18. Also, listen for the James Bond Theme-like strings toward the end.
I have a lot of struggles with Christmas. I think my biggest beef is that it's so blown out of proportion that it can't possibly live up to it's own hype nor our expectations. If we could all just tone it the fuck down, the holiday season (and I say "holiday season" because I'm talking about the whole month and a half from Thanksgiving through the Monday after New Year's when kids go back to school, not because I've declared War on Christmas, Fox News viewers) is awesome on a level that we simply can't maintain for the other 10 1/2 months of the year.
A case of how Christmas shoots itself in the foot is the dozens of Christmas albums that come out every year from artists looking to make a quick buck, but without anything of substance to contribute. As such, I hate about 99.8% of the Christmas music that's out there, but, as I've said above, the other 0.2% is the kind of soul-grabbing music that can flood your brain with memories, make you cry, or force a smile even when you're looking at your credit card statement.
With ten days until Christmas, I've decided to share my ten favorite Christmas songs. Yes, I could have started on Sunday and done the 12 Days of Christmas Countdown, but that seemed a little cheesy to me.
Speaking of the 12 Days of Christmas, that's as good a place to start the countdown as any. When I was five or six years old, I'd negotiate whatever I had to if only my parents would let me stay up and watch SCTV on the weekends. My favorite characters--just ahead of Count Floyd--were the McKenzie Brothers. It wasn't until years later that I heard this song on The Doctor Demento Show when I was in fourth grade.
For the past week, I've had to take my kids to school every morning. Considering I stay up until 3AM or so most nights writing, you can imagine that A) I didn't get much writing done this week, B) I didn't get much sleep this week, and C) I'm not very happy about either A or B.
Making matters worse is the reason I had to drop the kids off all five days last week instead of my customary one. Their mother, who teaches fourth grade at another school, needed to go in 45 minutes earlier than usual to help run Santa's Secret Store.
For those who don't remember Santa's Secret Store from your elementary school days, let me summarize. A company carts in a bunch of cheap crap that ranges in price from a quarter to fifteen dollars, touting it all as affordable gifts. Teachers run the cash register and at the end of the week, the company comes back, counts up the sales, and gives the school a percentage of the sales to use for field trips or special projects or paying teachers salaries so layoffs can be delayed for another month. Whatever.
What's worst about this whole fiasco is the false hope it gives the children. I had to fight it in my own children every day as they begged to "go to Mommy's Santa Store" after school. They pulled change from their piggy banks, eagerly anticipating buying presents for me and their mother and their grandparents.
Economist Joel Waldfogel has a new book out called Scroogenomics. I haven't read it yet, but I have heard several interviews with him and am intrigued by the ideas behind it. An expansion on a paper Waldfogel wrote 15 years ago, the book makes the case that gift giving is almost always an economic loser.
To quantify the value lost in gift giving, Waldfogel compared the price someone paid for something to the price the recipient would have been willing to pay themselves. For example, a couple of my friends are getting customized NFL jerseys of their favorite teams with their own names and numbers. These cost $100 each (the website had a sale on Black Friday so I got them for a bit less, but we'll use $100 as the price for this example). My friend Rob is a Packers fan, so I got him a Packers jersey with his last name and the number 99 on the back. If Rob is asked, "How much would you pay to buy that jersey for yourself?" and he answers, "$75," then I have wasted $25 from an economic standpoint.
My goal isn't to dissect Waldfogel's argument too much--I will delete the three paragraphs I've written here and expand on them in a separate post--but rather to use it to make the case that Santa's Secret Shops are among the worst offenders. After all, how much would you pay for one of these?
The sane among you answered, "Nothing. What the hell am I going to do with that?" If you found out that someone paid $3 to buy it for you, not only would that be a loss of $3 per Waldfogel's calculations, there would be the added loss of other unquantified values like how much respect you lose for the person who paid $3 for a little rubber piece of crap, the disappointment you feel for the gift you received versus the anticipation you had for it prior to unwrapping it, and the disappointment the gift giver feels when it becomes clear you didn't like the fun, google-eyed rubber sunburst he bought you.
Santa's Secret Shop's greatest crime is selling itself to children as a place to buy great gifts for grown ups. With this in mind, kids scrape together some cash, whether by asking mom and dad or by busting open their piggy banks, and go to the shop, expecting to find gifts that mom, dad, grandma, and grandpa are going to love.
I remember in fifth grade, we had a Santa's Secret Shop set up at my school, so I took a couple dollars hoping to find something for my parents. I don't remember what I got my dad, but I settled on a big pencil for my mom. It was blue and about a foot long and almost an inch in diameter (too big to fit in a pencil sharpener, you'll note). At the time, I recall thinking, "What the hell is my mom going to do with this?" but I felt pressured to get something there because I wanted to be able to say I took care of everything by myself. I didn't need Dad to take me out to the mall to get Mom's present and vice versa.
On the plus side, I didn't get anything like this.
This is the worst of the worst that Santa's Secret Shop has to offer. At $8.50, this adjustable-to-fit-the-head-of-any-dad cap is out of the price range of most shoppers. The one afternoon I dropped in with the kids, about 60-70 kids came through the shop and I don't think anyone had more than $5. And therein lies the tragedy. $8.50 is a lot of money just to disappoint your dad. Hell, kids are doing it for free every day!
But the lost value far exceeds the $8.50, which, it should be noted, is a huge amount of money for a fourth grader to spend on anything, much less something that is only going to cause family strife. There is also the frustration his father is going to feel, knowing that his child spent the equivalent of a decent Friday's entrée on an ugly, stupid hat that will never get worn.
At least, that's what he hopes. But that's not the case at all. Unlike the yellow rubber thing that can be tossed in a drawer or a "#1 Grandma" ornament that can be hung on the back of the Christmas tree for a few weeks every year or the foam rubber keychain that can be used to hold the key to the garage, back gate, or utility room, the hat serves only one purpose.
And dad only has one head.
Receipt of this hat on Christmas morning gives dad two "value-losing" options. Either he's going to have to wear it out in public, upsetting himself as he is silently (if he's lucky) ridiculed by everyone who sees him, or he has to explain to his child, his own flesh and blood that he loves in ways he never imagined he would love anyone prior to having this new life born into his own, that he has terrible taste in gifts and would have been better off buying Dad a Wendy's value meal and pocketing the rest of the cash because no, no, I'm not going to wear this gaudy thing, not even long enough for your mother, who hasn't stopped laughing since you handed me the package, to snap a picture just so she can mock us both twenty years from now in front of your wife and my grandchildren.
You can imagine how well this will sit for Christmases in perpetuity. Speaking as someone who refuses to decorate the Christmas tree every year because my mom and grandmother got mad at me for putting too much tinsel on our tree in 1980, I can tell you those memories stick with you.
On top of all the tensions that Santa's Secret Shops bring to families every year and the economic losses it perpetuates, the school only raised $190 (which, sadly, was more than double what it raised last year). That means that if every teacher who worked it had paid $8 a day not to have to come into work 45 minutes early and stay 45 minutes late every day, they would have made more money.
Off topic: I've been sick lately. My daughter just started preschool two weeks ago. The kid had been sick three times in her whole life and after four days in class, brought home some virus that's probably going to kill me. Just now, I was typing this up and looked down to see blood on my desk, apparently coming from my face. That can't be good.
Just when you thought I was out of Warrior shit to throw simian-style at the comicbloggosphere, it's time for some seasonal fun with the the batshit insane wrestler.
The Warrior X-Mas special is nothing but a series of two-page spread pin-ups by a various artists, most of which are higher caliber talent, such as the cover to the left by Joe Quesada. More interesting, at least to me, is that the legal fine print refers to this as Warrior #3, which raises a whole new batch of questions of how we got from the idiocy of #2 to the stupidity of #4 as they clearly had nothing to do with one another.
Of course, we can't just have crazy pictures--which there are, just wait. Warrior has to have his word-process-arhea inside the front cover. Call me lazy if you want, but rather than comment, I will just type it out for you. (I'd scan it but somehow he decided nothing screams "X-mas" like impossible to read orange Arial font on a black and white negative of the cover.)
Sure you do. You remember. How can you forget? You were going to catch him that years... catch him red-handed... catch him with the goods... with you GOODS. Now you remember... getting warm and fuz-z-zy, aren't ya? One of the greatest nights was Christmas Eve. You went to bed knowing that when you woke the next morning, the breaking and entering that took place was okay 'cause the burglar left the goods instead of cleaning you out, except for the cookies and milk, of course. You never caught him, but hey man, the dude was there. You felt him and a couple times you even had a blurry vision of him. So, he sorta looked a little like Dad, but you couldn't swear it was Dad and besides he was at your buddies house too. It had to be real. You believed it and that made it real.
Then one year an asshole (oh yah, relativeslove to be the bearers of this kind of devastating news) presents himself and proceeds to smarten you up to this idea that Santa Claus is fictitious and Christmas is only for kids. "Ahh, man... what a bummer", you say to yourself careful not to show how you really feel when you run home to Mom and ask her the second most difficult to answer question you'll probably ever ask her (#1 being the... "Hey Mom is this thing hanging between my legs good for anything other than just peeing?"). Taken. Stolen. Never to given back. Just suck it up, boy. You're a man now.
Up till then you had faith. Life was good. Barney was your beagle, the best friend you ever had... not some purple dinosaur and Santa Claus was the epitomy of ultra exclusive customer service. A bad ass dude who always got the job done. Oh, sure he forgot a thing or two on your list once in awhile, but hell your list was 65 pages long and you knew he had your buddies to take care of as well... Remember, life is the challenge. What to do...?
Chances are, that special asshole relative will be at the upcoming Christmas dinner (you know, the one where an all points family truce is in effect until New Year's Eve... with the booze, the gloves come off) spilling his pitiful story about how his/her life is nothing but a tragedy. Well, when fatso opens his mouth this year, shove this Special Edition Warrior Winter Wonderland Pinup book down his throat and say... "Paybacks are hell, aren't the Uncle Joe..."
Okay, I know I said I was just going to share without commenting, but... come on! One minor thing first, since there are several spelling, punctuation, and usage errors it's hardly worth noting, but "... spilling his pitiful story about how his/her life..."? You've already established the pronoun "his," why switch to "his/her"? Second, I really hope someone took this issue to heart and brought it with them to a family reunion to share, shoved down throats or otherwise, with extended family. In fact, it's funnier if it was shared in a non-violent way. "Uncle Tom, Aunt Karen, Grandpa, I'd like to show you all something I've found that really symbolizes to be the true meaning of Christmas."
After the smoke clears, snatch your grandma's favorite pumpkin pies (go ahead take 'em all, nobody fucks with a Santa Savior, trust me), along with a few dozen chocolate chip cookies, a keg of...ah...milk, some Metallica Christmas Melodies and a few good buds (interpret at your own risk). Now, plant you ass next to the crackling (you can hear it can't ya?) of a rich, pinon-smelling (you can smell it, can't ya?), full-blown, rustling campfire. Now, let your eyes venture into the chill of the night while time runs back to the those handfuls of days when believing was good, real good... back to the nights when you knew he was coming... back to the times before the "system" stole what wasn't their's to steal... but this time your goin' to catch him and this time he's goin' stay cause ole' friends promise never to cease believing... All About Believing.
PUNISHER: SILENT NIGHT
No matter how many times I see his work, I can never really decide whether I like Kyle Hotz's artwork or not. All my Google searches of Kyle Hotz refer to him as the "master of the macabre." A Google search of "master of the macabre," however, forces you to wallow through names like Edgar Allen Poe, Berni Wrightson, Stephen King, Ambrose Bierce, Vincent Price, and H.P. Lovecraft long before you get to Hotz.
I was prepared to declare this grandiose and arrogant, but, upon further reflection, I suppose there can be more than one "master" of a given craft. Universities hand out Masters degrees to thousands of people a year. Every year at Augusta a new golfer wins The Masters Tournament. Yoda, Qui-Gonn, and Mace Windu all were able to coexist as Jedi masters. I guess my issue is with the use of the article "the" instead of "a." Regardless, I can't say Hotz's art in this issue is necessarily "bad," but it definitely doesn't work for this story.
Andy Diggle is trying to do his best Garth Ennis and the opening scene almost works, though I'd say it ultimately reads more like Carl Potts than Ennis. Punisher is watching a drug deal go down on a wharf, kills all but one of the guys with a sniper rifle, and goes in to interogate the last one. He learns that a mobster who has gone deep deep deep into hiding may be coming out of his hole to kill another mobster who'd turned rat and gone into witness protection. So, obviously, it's a holiday tale...
Actually, where it gets its Xmas twist is when the Punisher tracks down a mall Santa who epitomizes both why Hotz's style earns him the macrabre master seal of approval and why Hotz shouldn't be drawing this book.
The grey Santa's overbite just gets worse and worse and he looks less and less human with every page. He tells the Punisher that the witness protected mobster is back home to make up for his sins of the past by throwing a big Christmas party at the orphanage where he grew up. The other mobster is so determined to kill him, there's going to be a big firefight at the orphanage. Punisher in his desire to both kill mobsters and protect orphans heads up to the orphange with Ghoulish Santa in tow.
Oh, yeah, and Frank gets a Santa suit of his own.
This seems pretty stupid to me. Why couldn't either A) the informant be one of the elves helping the mall Santa or B) the Punisher put on an elf costume? Santa and an elf makes sense, but two Santas is stupid. There's even a scene where one of the mob bodyguards asks why there are two Santas, so it's not like this thought didn't occur to Diggle.
From there it's standard--and seemingly rushed--typical bad Punisher story. It's stories like this that make people like one of my fellow Guys Buying Comics (cough... Chris... cough) think of Punisher as a one-trick pony. The mobster and his guys come to kill the other mobster and his guys, the Punisher blows up all the soldiers with claymores in the above mentioned snowmen, and the first mobster tries to get away, leading to the Punisher chasing him in a reindeer driven sleigh and giving us a line so bad I hope Andy Diggle is forced to have it tattooed to his forehead.
"No. With Heckler and Koch." Also, see what I mean about Gross Santa's overbite?
So, Punisher catches up to the guy, who drowns in a frozen lake after Punisher cracks the ice. He then goes back and kills the other mobster for good measure, dresses him up in the Santa suit, and leaves the body for the orphan kids to find. You know, because the Punisher is all about protecting innocence.
Merry Christmas, kiddies!
Overall Rating: 1/5 and that's only because I don't want to stoop to 0/5's just yet. When Punisher stories are good, they are very, very good, but when they are bad, they make Rann-Thanagar War read like Bronte.