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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3618 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 19, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Christmas songs thread

We're quickly approaching the end of the period of the year in which Christmas songs are an omnipresent aural nuisance, so I thought it'd be a good opportunity for us to talk about our favourite and least favourite songs in that genre. I am here defining a Christmas song as an original composition in the pop genre created for commercial reasons, and hence excluding all carols and traditional tunes.

Favourite Christmas songs

  1. "The Christmas Song" — Nat King Cole: An obvious choice perhaps, but it occurred to me this year that there is literally no other Christmas song I prefer. Cole may have had the single most beautiful male singing voice in the history of pop music: I found myself tearing up in the office a little bit, not because this song is sad, but simply for how remarkably rich and sonorous the timbre of his voice is. The chord progressions and instrumental arrangement still sound fresh and unexpected eighty years later, and the production is warm and intimate. It's amazing to me that this song may well have seen more airplay than all of the other entries on both lists combined (definitely if you count all of its innumerable cover versions), and yet it still doesn't feel "overexposed" to me.
  2. "The Power of Love" — Frankie Goes to Hollywood: Widely considered a Christmas song even though the lyrics don't refer to the holiday even indirectly, its cover artwork and music video nevertheless had a strong Nativity theme. An arrangement and vocal performance so striking and forceful that it completely overpowered the act's original camp ironic intent — listening to it, it's almost impossible to believe it's from the same album as "Relax" (also a great song in its own way).
  3. "Fairytale of New York" — The Pogues: This long occupied my #1 spot, which probably had more to do with a sense of misplaced nationalism than anything else. But in spite of that, I cannot deny how stirring I find the traditional arrangement, MacGowan's limitations as a vocalist are well-compensated for by the duet format with MacColl (all the more haunting now that both singers have left us), and the nostalgic-yet-venomous lyrics make it easily the most bittersweet Christmas song ever composed.
  4. "Driving Home for Christmas" — Chris Rea: Charming and jaunty, with a wonderfully grizzled vocal from Rea.
  5. "All I Want for Christmas is You" — Mariah Carey: I don't care if it's overplayed: Carey's vocal performance is a staggering accomplishment, the composition and arrangement sound timeless (it's no accident that "who originally sang AIWFCIY" is a common Google search: it does legitimately sound like a song first composed in the 60s and given a fresh arrangement by Carey in the 90s, and I mean that as a compliment), and it's aged far better than most Christmas songs (hell, most songs) from the era of its first release. Carey's retirement plan was well-earned.

Honorable mentions: "Santa Tell Me" by Ariana Grande, "Snowman" by Sia, the only decent original Christmas songs composed in the last thirty years.

Least favourite Christmas songs

An effective punchline would just be for to me to write "1. All the other ones", but that's not in keeping with the spirit of this space, so to be more specific:

  1. "Merry Xmas Everybody" — Slade: This is what Hell sounds like to me. Tedious, monotonous arrangement; performances which are both boring and bored-sounding (as if the musicians can't believe they're debasing themselves by recording a Christmas song, and are just gritting their teeth and trying to get through it as quickly as possible); flat, muffled 70s production; a tiresome and not remotely catchy chorus which recurs a whopping six times, as if the band are hoping to beat you into submission through rote repetition alone. It's appropriate that this song is guaranteed to get played at every boring office Christmas party where no one really wants to be there and the cheap white wine isn't serving as an effective social lubricant, as it literally sounds like a boring office Christmas party. It occurred to me this year that I literally cannot think of any song where, if forced to choose between listening to this song and another song, I would pick "Merry Xmas Everybody": it is just that annoying. Any of the musical compositions released by Crazy Frog (who was literally designed to be annoying)? Yes. "Cotton Eye Joe"? by Rednex? Yes, in a heartbeat. Anything by Limp Bizkit or Nickelback? Easily. "You're Beautiful" by James Blunt? No question. "Zombie" by the Cranberries? Definitely. Anything by 100 gecs? No doubt. The only song which I might have to think about for a minute is "What's Up?" by 4 Non Blondes, and they'd probably still cinch it in the end. Seriously. Fuck this song.
  2. "Do They Know It's Christmas?" — Band Aid: Music criticism is a difficult discipline because it can be enormously challenging to convey in words why you find a particular melody annoying, why a synth tone gets on your nerves, what it means to say that a vocal performance sounds lifeless or that a mix sounds sterile. Faced with this obstacle, a lot of music critics retreat from music criticism and focus instead on lyrical criticism (which really has more in common with literary criticism), as it's much easier to convey in written words why you think a piece of text is badly written. It's striking how often lists of "worst pop songs ever" are really lists of perfectly adequate pop songs with bad (or "offensive") lyrics e.g. perennials like Paul Anka's "You're Having my Baby" or Richard Harris's "MacArthur Park" — I don't think anyone would argue that either song is especially obnoxious from a compositional or performance standpoint. An excessive focus among critics on lyrical quality over musical quality rather misunderstands the nature of the enjoyment the average listener gets from music: "great composition with mediocre lyrics" is probably the rule rather than the exception among beloved pop songs, and lyrics have to be really bad before they'll make me not want to listen to a well-composed, well-produced song (the only example which immediately springs to mind is "Hardly Getting Over It" by Hüsker Dü, which literally would have been better as an instrumental); conversely, I don't care how good your lyrics are if the composition sucks and the performances are annoying (i.e. Bob Dylan and 90% of post-punk music sucks). This is a very lengthy preamble to convey that, from a musical, compositional standpoint, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" is actually fine: Phil Collins's drumming is solid, the synth tones haven't aged half as poorly as many from that era, the melody is legitimately catchy, and the dozen or more vocalists sound like they're giving it their all. But the lyrics are so obnoxious, smarmy and self-important that it's all for naught. There won't be snow in Ireland this Christmastime either — where's our charity single? I understand that Bob Geldof (who wrote the song alongside omnipresent 80s journeyman Midge Ure) rather regrets the song, although for my part I would still say it's one of the better-composed songs in his back catalogue, and doesn't sound half as dated or irritating as "Rat Trap" or "I Don't Like Mondays". But more than just the obnoxious lyrics, when listening to this song I can't help but think it might be indirectly responsible for the ensuing decades of pompous grandstanding from pop, rock and punk musicians. Every time a punk band has paused in between songs so the singer can deliver an impassioned but clumsy ten-minute speech about how Orang Man Bad, Save Teh Trees and Muh Free Palestine, they're channelling the holier-than-thou spirit of Band Aid, if unwittingly (even if they would profess to despise the song for its white saviour qualities).
  3. "Christmas Tree Farm" — Taylor Swift: This song was unavoidable on the radio last year, and I didn't know who it was by but found it enormously irritating. This year I Shazam'd it, discovered that it's by Swift and thought — well, that checks out. I have to admit, the Cult of Swift is one of the things I find most baffling and alienating about the modern era. I'll hear people gush about how memorable and timeless her songs are, and then I listen to them and they sound functionally indistinguishable from those of any other teenybopper (by popular consensus her artistic peak was "All Too Well", and to me that sounds like a Sixpence None the Richer cut that they left off the album for not meeting their rigorous quality control standards). I'll hear people talk about how her lyrics make her the spokesperson for an entire generation of Western women (hell, Western people) — and then I read them and they're just spiteful put-downs towards her contemporaries or an embarrassing list of groan-worthy penis puns. Far from "growing with her audience", Swift now seems even more spoiled and adolescent than she did when she actually was an adolescent. Who knew the weird horsey girl and the toothy-head giving (but I repeat myself) demographics wielded such power and influence?
  4. Anything by Michael Bublé: Mickey Bubbles: "As a self-confessed Christmas prostitute, I would like to release a Christmas song." Producer: "Okay cool, let's come up with a chord progression and a vocal melody." Bubbles: "No, I don't want to write a Christmas song — that would take too much effort. I just want to record a cover and release it." Producer: "Okay, why don't we do a straight cover of $ChristmasSong? After all, it has such a memorable melody and hook that it's been beloved by generations of Westerners. A cover version is sure to do numbers." Bubbles: "Awesome. But I want to put my own spin on it, so I'm going to alter the phrasing and introduce loads of completely unnecessary syncopation and flourishes until the original melody is barely recognisable." Producer: "... okay, I see where you're coming from. But the entire reason people liked the original is because of its memorable and instantly recognisable melody." Bubbles: "Yeah." Producer: "... and so if you release a cover that has the same lyrics as the original but the melody and phrasing are altered beyond recognition, people won't like it as much. In fact, they'll probably find it really annoying and distracting." Bubbles: "Yeah." Producer: "... and that would be bad." Bubbles: "Yeah."
  5. "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town" — Bruce Springsteen: I needed something to round off the list, and it was either this or "A Spaceman Came Travelling" by Chris de Burgh: that one seems to have fallen out of favour quite a bit and I can only recall hearing it twice this Christmas, whereas I heard "The Boss"'s (ugh) rendition of this classic several times a week since mid-November. Aside from Clarence Clemons's lively saxophone break, this isn't a patch on the Jackson Five version, and Springsteen's pre-song ad-libs to the audience and his backing band are impossibly grating and forced. The Cult of Springsteen isn't as hard to understand as the Cult of Dylan (unlike Bob Dylan, Springsteen can carry a tune, and I can't argue with the sheer majesty of "Born to Run"), but the more of his music I'm exposed to the more overrated I find him*, and many of his affectations seem just as contrived as those of, say, Bono. Even seeing him perform live didn't move the needle for me much (granted that seeing him perform when he's in his seventies is going to be a very different experience to seeing him perform as a younger man). Maybe I should listen to Nebraska from start to finish and it'll click for me.

Dishonorable mentions: "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" by Patsy & Elmo, "Stay Another Day" by East 17, "Run Rudolph Run" by Chuck Berry, "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" by Gayla Peevey.

*I understand why he objects to "Born in the USA" being played at Republican rallies by politicians who seem to have missed the point of the song; on the other hand, perhaps he should be grateful that the song is played in public at all because it fucking sucks, and the less said about "Dancing in the Dark" the better.

In a similar spirit, I listened to three Christmas albums front to back while I was cleaning the house yesterday, and I will review them here:

Emmylou Harris—Light of the Stable (1979)

Progressive Country was the 1970s reaction to what was perceived as an increasingly homogenized and commercialized Nashville sound. The most notable expression of it was in the Outlaw Country of Waylon and Willie, but the genre was much broader, and included anyone who emphasized the folk/blues/roots music that country was based on. It was the progenitor of what we would now call Americana. Emmylou Harris was part of this movement (if you could call it a movement), and had one of the most consistent album runs of any country musician I've heard; Boulder to Birmingham may be one of the finest country songs of all time, and everything she released bewteen 1975 and 1981 is worth listening to. Except for this. Granted, there's nothing particularly offensive about it, but it's mostly just unspectacular traditional country versions of Christmas songs. I say mostly because the title track is the exception, and deserves to be part of the contemporary Christmas music canon. Harris may not be a household name, but one would think that the guest vocals by Dolly Parton, Neil Young, and Linda Ronstadt would count for something. Then again, this was actually released as a single back in 1975, and the album recorded four years later mostly as padding, so whether it's even necessary is questionable. 3/5.

Elvis Presley—Elvis Sings the Wonderful World of Christmas (1971)

This could also be called Elvis Sings Lame Renditions of Bad Christmas Songs for Money. The program contains 2 sacred Christmas songs, 2 traditional pop Christmas songs, a bunch of conemporary country Christmas songs that are so uninspired that none were good enough to be released as singles, and a decent version of Merry Christmas Baby. I say decent because it doesn't hold a candle to the Charles Brown original. The contemporary material wouldn't be horrible, except it's overly reliant on key changes to keep the forward momentum, and they include a vocal group called The Imperials who sound like they also did the Love Theme from Airplane. 2/5.

Bright Eyes—A Christmas Album (2002)

Bright Eyes is the project of Conor Oberst, a North Carolina singer/songwriter/indie rocker who released a bunch of shitty, half-written, self-indulgent albums before finding his footing circa 2005 and absolutely killing it thereafter. Indie rockers don't often release Christmas albums, but when they do they usually consciously try to do something other than go through the motions, and this album is no exception. Unfortunately, this means that we get what is possibly the only slowcore Christmas album. The 11 cuts are all either sacred or secular classics played in a way seemingly intended to make a festive season outright depressing. To make matters worse, he fumbles the ball by using Frank Sinatra's jollied-up lyrics to "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" rather than the depressing original ones. It gets bonus points for trying, and there's reason to listen to this, even if you won't want to listen to it again. 2.5/5.

It's striking how often lists of "worst pop songs ever" are really lists of perfectly adequate pop songs with bad (or "offensive") lyrics e.g. perennials like Paul Anka's "You're Having my Baby" or Richard Harris's "MacArthur Park" — I don't think anyone would argue that either song is especially obnoxious from a compositional or performance standpoint.

"You're Having My Baby" is terrible from any standpoint, and the lyrics only make it worse. "MacArthur Park" is brilliant and was recognized as such at the time, but it suffered from three huge problems that have made it a Boomer punchline in the years since. The first is the unfortunate lyric about the cake, which is really the only thing that's remarkable about they lyric but nonetheless sounds ridiculous. The second problem is that in the musical world post-Sgt. Pepper there were a lot of attempts to write pop music with the same level of sophistication as classical music, and while MacArthur Park was definitely in this vein it featured an overwrought arrangement behind an actor who couldn't sing his way out of a paper bag. The final reason is that a decade later Donna Summer recorded a disco version. While disco's critical reputation has been salvaged in the years since, contemporary observers are generally talking about stuff like Chic that has some degree of R&B grounding, not Giorgio Moroder's Euro-trash arrangements. That song is an object lesson in why people began to hate disco.

But it's otherwise a great song. For years my only exposure to the song was my dad's vinyl copy of Maynard Ferguson's Live at Jimmy's album, and the big band version included on it is a tour de force. Pretty much every high school band director I knew loved that version, and I've played various arrangements of it in community bands and the like over the years. It's a shame that these days it's seen as nothing more than a punchline.

It occurred to me this year that I literally cannot think of any song where, if forced to choose between listening to this song and another song, I would pick "Merry Xmas Everybody": it is just that annoying.

I'd rather listen to this than anything by Frankie Does a Pound of Blow, Bangs a Hooker in the Back of His DeLorean, Then Watches Miami Vice and Drinks New Coke. I don't have a problem with that song, though they probably don't play it on the radio as much over here as they do in the British Isles. In any event, Wizzard is much better, if only because a.) Roy Wood actually wanted to do a Christmas song and wasn't acting at the behest of his manager, and b.) They understood that a glam Christmas song would work best if the 50s nostalgia factor was cranked to 11. Remember, this was the year American Graffiti came out.

The chord progressions and instrumental arrangement still sound fresh and unexpected eighty years later, and the production is warm and intimate.

Interestingly enough, the version that's almost universally played is actually a rerecording. Nat King Cole originally recorded this in 1946 with the King Cole Trio (Cole on piano plus bass and guitar). The first version is jazzier and only features the trio. The original hit version was the first version released and uses the same arrangement as the common version, though Cole's voice wasn't as mature as it would later become and still has bit of an R&B flavor. He recorded it again in 1953 to get a higher fidelity version on magnetic tape. Nelson Riddle, best known for his work with Frank Sinatra, provides an arrangement that is faithful to the original but a bit lusher. The mono recording also has Cole's vocals more forward. The version you are almost certainly familiar with is the stereo version from 1961, by which point Cole's voice had fully matured.

(it's no accident that "who originally sang AIWFCIY" is a common Google search: it does legitimately sound like a song first composed in the 60s and given a fresh arrangement by Carey in the 90s, and I mean that as a compliment)

Soul singer Carla Thomas did record All I Want for Christmas Is You in 1963. But it's an entirely different song so I guess it doesn't count. It's also not very good.

the nostalgic-yet-venomous lyrics make it easily the most bittersweet Christmas song ever composed.

I always felt that this was the song's Achilles Heel; as much as it tries to be cynical, it's really just a love song. If you want unfiltered Christmas cynicism listen to Blue Xmas by Miles Davis. Guest singer Bob Dorough does not sound as if he's capable of experiencing joy. If that's a bit too blunt, there's [I Bought You a Plastic Star for Your Aluminum Tree] by Michael Franks, who balances his cynicism with humor rather than sentimentality. Franks and Dorough both being Jews probably has something to do with this.

Anything by Michael Bublé:

There's a scene in the movie Ray where one of the guys in the booth is irritated that Ray seems to be imitating Nat King Cole and Charles Brown. Buble inhabit the uncanny valley where it isn't clear if he's trying to imitate Frank Sinatra or Mel Torme, all with a healthy dose of auto-tune on top to make things even weirder.

The Cult of Springsteen isn't as hard to understand as the Cult of Dylan (unlike Bob Dylan, Springsteen can carry a tune, and I can't argue with the sheer majesty of "Born to Run"), but the more of his music I'm exposed to the more overrated I find him*, and many of his affectations seem just as contrived as those of, say, Bono.

I once heard someone describe Springsteen's music as sounding like it was taken from a musical about rock and roll, and I have to say I agree. It's not so much that there's anything particularly bad about his music, it's just that it's dripping with so much blue collar earnestness that it verges on parody. To get back to the Wizzard song, one thing Roy Wood understood is that 50s throwbacks have a certain amount of inherent cheesiness and that by embracing that cheese you can toe the line between parody and earnest tribute; hell, Ween made an entire career on toeing that line. But it's a fine line, and on the other side of it is Meatloaf, an artist who actually cut his teeth in rock musicals. The cult of Dylan makes more sense to me because Dylan was instrumental in moving the music beyond where it was in the early 1960s. Springsteen inspired John Mellencamp and Melissa Etheridge but the whole Heartland Rock thing was basically a stylistic dead end.

I have to admit, the Cult of Swift is one of the things I find most baffling and alienating about the modern era. I'll hear people gush about how memorable and timeless her songs are, and then I listen to them and they sound functionally indistinguishable from those of any other teenybopper (by popular consensus her artistic peak was "All Too Well", and to me that sounds like a Sixpence None the Richer cut that they left off the album for not meeting their rigorous quality control standards).

I've felt the same way for a long time. For all of the hype Sift gets there is maybe one song that I'd recognize as hers, and it isn't due to lack of exposure, to be sure. I can't even say that I necessarily dislike her; everything I've heard has been in one ear and out the other. It's like her music is so unmemorable that my memory of it is being erased in real time.

Maybe I should listen to Nebraska from start to finish and it'll click for me.

Everybody, if they get the opportunity, should do this at 2am while on an all night drive.

Jesus our brother strong and good aka the Friendly Beasts is my go to this year.

Love:

No Place Like Home for the Holidays Out of the classic songs that get played over a store radio this time of year, this is the one that I whistle to myself when I'm cutting down the Christmas tree. My mother loves Christmas, which is the only thing I really like about Christmas, so that's what makes me happy to think about.

What are you Doing New Year's Eve Obviously a holiday season song rather than Christmas, but New Year's Eve is my favorite romantic holiday. Valentine's day is commercialized garbage, anniversaries are mostly kinda dumb in practice; but kissing at midnight to ring in the New Year is a particular moment that can only happen with one person every year, and having someone to kiss is a critical status symbol in high school/college, and being together is part of being a couple. The O'Jays do a really perfect, slinky arrangement. It carries both the longing and pleading, and a certain sly naughty offer to it. The speaker is humbling himself before the object of his longing ("Oh-oh, just in case, I stand one little chance, Here comes the jackpot question in advance..." "out of the thousands of invitations you receive") but the performance and arrangement reflects a confident offer of pleasure.

Hate:

Wonderful Christmastime I hate the Beatles, which makes this pretty straightforward. Saccharine and awful.

Happy Holidays My most boomer take, I hate the phrase Happy Holidays. Growing up I was a good little liberal, inculcated with the idea that the "War on Christmas" was Fox News bullshit and that inclusiveness meant wishing everyone Happy Holidays rather than Merry Christmas, so that you wouldn't make people feel bad if they didn't do Christmas. This was based on growing up in a culture in which the religious majority-minority dynamic was built around Christians and Jews, and Jews historically took the view that celebrating Christmas was a threat to their religion, and equally they have no interest in me celebrating their holidays. I wanted to be tolerant, so I went along with it. Then as I grew up I got to know more Hindus and Muslims, and they love Christmas, and they would love for me to stop by on their holidays. I realized that nobody means Happy Holidays, it's just a corporate generic gesture, not the way one means "Merry Christmas." I don't feel good when someone wishes me Merry Christmas, and I'm not offended or left out when someone wishes me Eid Mubarak or have a good Diwali or whatever. We should all just wish each other to have a happy [holiday one actually celebrates] and we all understand that if we aren't celebrating, they're just hoping we have a good day that day.

Happy Holidays by Andy Williams was on repeat on an album playing in the nurse's station the night my second son was about to be born. I heard it many, many times as I sat there in an office chair in the wee hours off the hallway of my wife's hospital bed and waited while she experienced labor. I think I had never heard it until 2010. Which is odd. Special place in my heart anyway and I love it. Same with all the Home Alone featured Christmas songs, as well as Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas where I remember that scene in The Victors.

Happy Holidays My most boomer take, I hate the phrase Happy Holidays.

You've linked Andy Williams' Happy Holidays/The Holiday Season medley, which is the perfect subversion of the original and the general "happy holidays" sentiment: its chorus is Happy Holidays, but 90% of the lyrics are about Christmas and no other holidays are mentioned at all.

Which is in my opinion the best way to respond to the Happy Holidays term: I mean Merry Christmas, you mean Merry Christmas, we all know that Christmas is the only holiday that really registers on anyone's radar. Happy Holidays means Merry Christmas, it is an entirely Christmas-owned term. If the Jews want us to get Hanukkah in there, they better get started on doing some outreach and getting people on board, because right now my second favorite December holiday is Diwali. It's got nothing to do with Christmas, but the snacks are great and the celebrants are generous with them.

You've linked Andy Williams' Happy Holidays/The Holiday Season medley, which is the perfect subversion of the original and the general "happy holidays" sentiment

I find it obnoxious to listen to in line at the Home Depot. That's really all I'm saying about. I'm not doing literary analysis.

If the Jews want us to get Hanukkah in there, they better get started on doing some outreach and getting people on board

At scouts as a kid, the Dreidl was crackerjack, so there's been some effort. And in middle school chorus, the token chanukah songs were normally pretty good. So it's not impossible.

At scouts as a kid, the Dreidl was crackerjack, so there's been some effort. And in middle school chorus, the token chanukah songs were normally pretty good. So it's not impossible.

Yeah I vaguely recall someone coming to our schools a couple times, maybe making some latkes, and learning some songs. Systematize that, bring a basket of challah and some chocolate coins for the dreidel gambling game every year, and it'd be a fantastic initial impression.

But I think it would drop off pretty heavily in adulthood, because while I remember Diwali celebrations in the office quite fondly, I don't remember any Hanukkah equivalent, and I know I have Jewish coworkers. Which speaks to your initial point: Judaism doesn't seem to have much interest in us getting involved in their holidays. So thus I claim the "holidays" for Christmas and Christmas alone, as Diwali lands much earlier, the Asian New Year is later, I have never seen anyone genuinely celebrate Kwanzaa, and New Year's is basically a Christmas extension.

Wonderful Christmastime I hate the Beatles, which makes this pretty straightforward. Saccharine and awful.

pedant alarm Strictly speaking this is a McCartney solo single. Obviously I agree with you, I despised this song for years before learning it was written by a man widely considered to be one of the best songwriters of the twentieth century. What the fuck kind of off-day was he having?

My most boomer take, I hate the phrase Happy Holidays.

As part of my ongoing war against the intrusion of American culture into Ireland, I recently learned to my dismay that children in primary schools are now being instructed to say "happy holidays" rather than "happy Christmas". In Dublin, the river Liffey runs through the city, with the southside stereotypically considered more posh and affluent than the comparatively impoverished northside, and whenever I venture into the southside I discover that it's been so infected by secular woke nonsense that they literally aren't celebrating any religious holiday anymore. Seriously: the Christmas lights (for everyone knows that's what they are) fall under the banner of "Winter in Dublin".

Winter in Dublin. What the fuck. Every time I see that stupid sign I want to tear it down. I'm sure if I asked whatever idiotic gang of apparatchiks responsible for the decision why they went for "Winter in Dublin" rather than "Christmas in Dublin", they would be completely unable to articulate why, just listing off a string of incomprehensible woke word salad about "inclusive" and "modern Ireland". It's got me thinking about the concept of asymmetric multiculturalism: Christians in Christian countries aren't supposed to ostentatiously celebrate their faiths, but Muslims in Christian countries can do so to their hearts' content. No Muslim in Ireland is going to be saying "happy holidays" to any of his co-religionists when Ramadan next rolls around. But to my relief, I noticed that one set of Christmas lights on the northside wishes everyone a happy Christmas, not a happy (ugh) "winter in Dublin". Working-class Dubs evidently have no time for woke nonsense of this description.

(In Dublin City Council's defense, there's also this sign reading "Nollaig Shona Duit" on the southside's Grafton St, one of Dublin's main shopping streets. "Nollaig Shona Duit" is Irish for "happy Christmas to you". The message is crystal clear: you can celebrate your faith, as long as you do so in a language no Muslim is likely to understand.)

Not even an honorable mention for "Merry Xmas (War is Over)" in your least favorite list?

Even as a confirmed John Lennon hater (this article might as well have been written about me), I can't find it in my heart to get too up in arms about that one. It's inoffensive background music with a predictable melody and chord progression, and it seems that, for once, John was able to persuade Yoko not to do any atonal wailing and screeching atop it. Nowhere near as irritating as any of my least favourite Christmas songs, from a compositional, lyrical or sonic standpoint.

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