Buzzfeed ranks the ten most depressing Christmas songs. Surprisingly, "I'll Be Home For Christmas" does not make the cut.
Monday, December 14, 2009
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What!?! My least favorite Christmas song, "Baby its Rapey Outside" didn't make it? Fail list.
Also, I once heard "Christmas Shoes" and it is the worst song ever written. Ever.
I would listen to "Christmastime Is Here" all the way through every hour on the hour for a week before I would listen to that vile song about the shoes even once. I have never met a person who didn't have strong negative feelings toward that song.
But I must say that I have always loathed "Christmastime Is Here". I wonder if it could be saved with some Springsteen-ization the way that "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" was.
"Christmas Shoes" = ear pain. Not helped by the lyrics on-screen. Or Rob Lowe.
Kris Kringle Was a Car Thief by Wesley Willis always tugs at my heart strings. Rock over London, rock on Chicago!
That song rocked a camel's ass. Mitsubishi: the word is getting around.
Anything as sung by Karen Carpenter. How could anyone NOT know she was going to die young when she virtually wrote suicide notes while singing Christmas songs! They are beautiful suicide notes, though.
Anyway, I actually prefer the depressing Christmas songs, though I actually love Christmas. I think, though, for me Christmas is so much about nostalgia and sentimentality, that melancholia seems appropriate.
Oh, God, I heard her "No Place Like Home For The Holidays" at the grocery this weekend, and YES.
Her "I'll Be Home For Christmas" makes me WEEP! FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELINGS!
I presume the irony of a grocery story playing Karen Carpenter was not lost on you.
grocery store, jolie, you dumb slut.
This is why I love A Christmas Carol and any other Christmassy ghost stories/Victoriana with soot, poor teeth et al.
Best 'Christmas Carol' ever: Albert Finney in 'Scrooge.'
Bill Murray in "Scrooged."
MICKEY'S A CHRISTMAS CAROL IS THE BEST EVER AND I WILL HAVE NO ARGUMENT!!!11! Seriously, it had Scrooge playing Scrooge! How can you beat that?
Mr Magoo's Christmas Carols puts all of those to shame.
A Muppet Christmas Carol is far superior. All y'all need to sit down, shut up, and respect.
Alistair Sim beats them all with a bicycle chain, and then glasses them. Although I do like Patrick Stewart's interpretation as well.
Alistair Slim, yes - you are correct.
Man, the Mr Magoo one is so great. The LA! LA! LA! song when they are selling all his belongings -- perfect.
I must be missing something, because I do not see "Do They Know It's Christmas" .. although I really must be missing some hidden jump, because I only count nine. Seriously? That song made me weep when I was a child. They should have really explained that there ought not be snow in Africa, and so forth.
Feed the World!
most hilarious lyrics in that song. Don't miss Bono's line, "Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you" !
"And there won't be snow in Africa this Christmastime..." Really?
How about, And the only water flowing is the bitter sting of tears?
What about "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer"?? I've also had issue with the Narrator and Grandpa's indifferent attitude toward their family tragedy.
Please, Grandpa totally killed her and framed Rudolph. There had to be a L&O about it at some point.
"Christmas in prison," john prine? just READING the lyrics gets me weepy.
'I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus...' precursor to divorce?
"I Had a Little Dreidel" doesn't do very much for the holiday spirit.
I always play this when I want to get really maudlin for the holidays
http://www.amazon.com/December-Piano-Solos-20th-Anniversary/dp/B00005NNDO
"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer". So, what if someone is physically different in a way that will never be useful to you? Is laughing, name-calling, and reindeer game exclusion ok then?
silly, you forgot the last part where that dude's physical deformity proves to be an advantage, and he goes down in history.
Man, everybody forgets Prince's "Another Lonely Christmas." Somebody actually DIES in it. And the Wedding Present's "No Christmas," a mountain of human neediness.
Each Wedding Present song at least a hill of human neediness.
I love this song. My favorite is "My Little Drum" off the same album.
Love this album. Not depressing!
The winner in my personal Christmas Melancholy Sweepstakes is "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (esp. the original, with that trademark Garland quaver): "Someday soon, we all will be together/If the fates allow/Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow..."
It just levels me, every time.
Ditto. I always sing the original line over the 'hang a shining star' retread, even when Rolfe sings it on my beloved John Denver & the Muppets version...
My nomination for Most Depressing Christmas Song Experience from a 1970s Made-For-TV Movie would be Frank Sinatra singing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas over an Army base PA system in The Execution of Private Slovik.
Right; and the original original began, "Have yourself a merry little Christmas / It may be your last"
'If I sing that to that sweet little Margaret O'Brien, they'll think I'm a monster!'
I know this is so stereotypical BUT I LOVE JUDY GARLAND!!!
Thanks for the link, Patrick. That was a neat little read.
To be fair, Margaret O'Brien's character was a morbid little trollop herself, what with all those doll funerals.
(I love Meet Me in St. Louis, and I actually do watch it every Christmas.)
"One More Drifter in the Snow" Aimee Mann
and Sufjan's 400 or so Christmas songs
"Daddy's Drinking up Our Christmas" is a tear jerker. As is "The Little Boy that Santa Claus Forgot" by Nat King Cole - "That poor little laddie/he doesn't have a daddy". SOB!
Smashing Pumpkins' "Christmastime" just came on the Muzak at work. Uplifting!
'O Holy Night' can choke me up, also 'Ukranian Bell Carol' and 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.'
I actually like the older, more classical Christmas Carols, generally in a minor key.
Mahalia Jackson singing 'O Holy Night'...
Best version of that song ever. Listening to it right now. She is ridiculously awesome.
O Holy Night is such a snake in the grass!
How do you mean? The high notes?
You think that you are just going about your business, with ambient innocuous xmas music, and then that sneaky crescendo! and suddenly you are overwrought and affected! By O Holy Night. Or maybe that is just me ...
Yes.
Any Christmas music that played background to my father swearing while putting together toys still puts a knot in my throat.
Really, it totally stresses me out.
For Best Christmas song, I'd like to nominate anything and everything from the John Denver and the Muppets. Fuck Mariah Carey, Bruce Springsteen, Manhein fucking Steamroller, and the rest of them. Christmas is all about Muppets.
Emmet Otter FTW!
Yes. It does NOT get any better than "12 Days of Christmas" or "Christmas is Coming."
Absolutely. We play the shit out of the Muppets and Charlie Brown this time of year.
"Piggy pudding?"
"No, FIGGY pudding... with bacon."
"What?!"
Is that special on DVD?
Edna St Vincent Millay's "Ballad of the Harp Weaver" on Johnny Cash's 1963 LP, The Christmas Spirit.
Oh. GOD.
I had forgotten that.
That has to be the most depressing Christmas album ever. Remember "Ringing the Bells for Jim"?
Most depressing Christmas song has got to be Meryn Cadell's The Cat Carol. It's about a cat who is let out on Christmas Eve. Its owners forget it's outside, a blizzard begins, the cat is crying piteously on the step asking to be let in, and finally gives up and freezes to death.
Merry Catmas!
I think you're going to make Choire cry.
'Tis the season to play The Pogues ft. Kirsty MacColl on repeat. The Fairytale of New York should be depressing (New York crushed our dreams and our love for each other), but instead it's both darkly funny and wonderful.
"Happy Christmas yer ass!" I have such sentimental memories set to that song.
Hee -- that is the oudemia family's Xmas repeat favorite, too. Accompanied by our own drunken caterwauling. xxx
Let's all go-a-Wassailing.
Chest hurts, homeless by an open fire
Jack's lost and napping at your door
"Fool" cried Balk, being shunned by the choire
"Your not an Asian your an Eskimo"
Everybody knows cranberries and some Jack Daniels
Help to make the awl sound trite
Although it's been said many times, many ways
Merry christmas to you
oh I am late to this, but Nellie McKay's "A Christmas Dirge" is just devastating. "Christmas time may always be the saddest time of year," it begins. "But if misery loves company, let's play at solitaire." And just gets better from there. A gorgeous tune. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHteYSqr2fU