From my Christmas Archives:

It is official. Listening to hours of hideous Christmas carols piped through stores and shopping malls during December is not good for your health. 

In 2004, the Austrian Trade Union Federation spokesman Gottfried Riesser said, ‘This is psychological terror for shop workers’. A study by the union found the piped Christmas Carols make workers ‘aggressive and confrontational.’ The union has asked retail stores to tone it down. This would indeed benefit us all.

 As if listening to Frosty the Snowman sung by the Hallucinating Choristers is not torture enough, now we have to endure demented yuletide ringtones, including:

— A Funky Jazz Jingle Bells that sounds like the sleigh horse trod on a live power line.

—A Techno Deck the Halls that sounds like a xylophone attacked by a machine gun. 

I was reared on cuckoo Christmas carols. In the 1960s we owned 3 EPs one was:

— Bobby ‘Boris’ Picket’s The Monster’s Holiday:

Twas the night before Christmas when all through the castle

My monsters were having a yuletide hassle

The tree was all trimmed in foolish things

Like Werewolf fangs and vampire wings. 

So popular was this pre-drug-era psychedelic song, its author, Ross Bagdasarian, thought he’d try Christmas Carol writing, producing …  the terrifyingly popular ‘The Chipmunk Song (Christmas don’t be late)’ sung by Alvin and the Chipmunks. Unfortunately, they sounded like a choir of over-excited castrated rats. I still have the Alvin and the Chipmunks LP. (That’s a record for anyone born… forget it.)

There is too much hideous Christmas music about because every man and his dog has to make a Christmas Album. One year, the Singing Dogs barked their way through Jingle Bells. They would be TikTok stars today. Correction. YouTube stars.

While WHAM, or George Michael to be accurate, could croon a suitably soulful Christmas ballad, namely  Last Christmas, other singers just don’t suit the Christmas Carol vibe. For instance:

—Johnny Cash singing ‘Joy to the World’ is so depressing, you feel like taking out the turkey and whacking your own head in the oven. 

— Snoop Dogg’s Christmas in tha Dogg House makes you wonder if someone has spiked the Egg Nog with Special K … Ketamine, not the breakfast cereal.

—And Goofy singing the 12 Days of Christmas has you asking Santa for a shotgun.

Then there was church. None of the Christmas Carols sung at church are hideous, but many Christmas Carols can be sung hideously. My family was always late for Midnight Mass at St Mary’s, which, by the way, was just over the road from our house in Kyneton, Vic, so we always ended up jammed into back pews next to the local drunks. I can still hear that slow, off-key drunken version of Silent Night:

Shilend nide, olly nide, oilish carm, oilish ride

Rown yon vershon, muffer an shild

Yep! There is some pretty bad music about at this time of the year. Stay calm. Shove a bit of tinsel in each ear and, as the drunks would say, have a  Merrrrrreeeee Chridgemash.