don't forget to hang up your sock

Well, only a few of you have voted for your most hated Christmas song ever so far, and I must say, you have come up with some good ones. (Bad ones? Whatever.) I have to concur that they are, indeed, horrid. Still time to have your input, everyone else!

So, here is my list:

5. I agree--"Christmas Shoes" is just too depressing for the Christmas spirit. Besides, it's just so fake sounding. How many little boys have you ever seen talking to store clerks and total strangers about their dying mother? In perfect rhyming meter, no less.

4. "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas." Do I really have to explain the annoyance factor here?

3. "The Holiday Season" (aka, "He'll Be Comin' Down the Chimney Now"). He's a big fat bundle of joy? Don't forget to hang up your sock? Did someone get paid to write those lines? Because I think it's totally unfair that some writers work hard, long hours to do better than that and get diddly squat and have to farm out their first born children and . . . oops. sorry. Christmas is not the time to rant about the unfairness of life.

2. "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree," original version. Now I know this is a favorite of many people. And I have no problems with subsequent versions of the song. But Brenda Lee's voice makes me crazy. She scoops, slides, whines--everything I hate in current pop singers, cone to think of it. She would've made a great American Idol. "And we'll do some cuuaroooling." What kind of word is that?

1. "Santa Baby." Absolutely no contest here. First, the thought of some woman singing this stuff to Santa and lying in wait for him is just . . . wrong. Second, can we say materialistic? And third, at every Christmas recital I go to, some teenage girls has to sing this song. And if it is wrong coming from an adult, just imagine the pictures one gets when it comes from a 15-year-old girl who, yes, sings it with all the madonnaesque gusto. Eew.

So, there they are. Have a wonderful holiday season, baby; wear your Christmas shoes while you rock around the Christmas tree, and, if you find a hippopotamus under your tree, don't blame me. I hate the song.