Jinglehideousis: Fear of Christmas Carols

Posted on December 21, 2025 by Kerry Cue

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.

Is Grandma fit to babysit?

Posted on November 12, 2025 by Kerry Cue

It is 10 years since I wrote this for The Independent Australia. The test is still applicable.

I wrote this article Is Grandma fit to babysit? KPI Test for Independent Australia when I heard that there is such a thing as Grandma School.

How E M Foster’s dystopian world became our reality!

Posted on July 3, 2019 by Kerry Cue

THIS WRITER’S LIFE: In Foster’s 1909 novella, The Machine Stops, people communicate via glowing screens but live lonely, isolated lives. His dystopian world has become our reality. We wrote The Sunday Story Club as an antidote to screens.

LISTEN

AMAZON

BOOKTOPIA

My satirical Novel about American Gun Culture … coming soon.

Posted on November 17, 2018 by Kerry Cue

My satirical novel, TARGET 91, about American Gun Culture is being published soon in the US (Penmore Press, Tucson, Arizona), UK & Aus. As an Aussie author of 20 books, I still had to work out how to introduce myself to an American audience. Here is my bio blurb introduction for the new book.

And here are some pics of The Andy Griffith Show (1960 – 1968). It was a sitcom with heart about a widowed sheriff, his small son and a dumb deputy. I grew up in a household that was the The Andy Griffith Show times 5 (there were 5 kids) on crack cocaine. Not that we took drugs. But my family was crazy enough without chemical intervention. I did write 3 best selling books about growing up on a small police station in rural Australia.

How to Smile for Idiots

Posted on November 5, 2018 by Kerry Cue

With 2 new books coming out within the next year I’ve been told by publishers to get onto social media. I found that online SMILING isn’t what it used to be.

My satirical Novel about American Gun Culture

Posted on February 15, 2018 by Kerry Cue

My satirical novel, TARGET 91, about American Gun Culture is being published soon. As an Aussie author of 20 books, I still had to work out how to introduce myself to an American audience. Here is my bio blurb introduction for the new book.

Is Grandma fit to babysit?

Posted on July 28, 2015 by Kerry Cue

I wrote this article Is Grandma fit to babysit? KPI Test for Independent Australia when I heard that there is such a thing as Grandma School.

A bird? A plane? An Ozzie Mozzie Zapper!

Posted on June 12, 2014 by Kerry Cue

My first book was published in 1983 so – add old timers accent – ‘I been ’round this here old place a long time’. The following event is one of the oddest experiences I had in the world of publishing. That is, if you don’t count, being ‘heckled’ by Barbar The Elephant at the Sydeny Writers’ Festival.

You may think I’m merely a mild mannered reporter. But, dear reader, I have fought a ‘superhero’ battle. It all began years ago when I wrote a book for kids titled ‘How to save the world before breakfast’. Subtitle ‘A magazine for young superheroes’. To cut a long story super-short, D.C. Comics kindly explained to my little Aussie publisher that they owned the word ‘super heroes’ and we could, to cut through the legal jargon, bugger off.

I immediately imagined the D.C Comics legal team was comprised of escapees from Krypton who, having discovered a loophole in the this-planet-will-explode contract, had escaped early in rockets and re-established themselves on the planet Legalon producing a race of Super Lawyers who were taking over our Solar System by suing the pants off every creature in the Universe.

Suffice to say, a barrister-type friend who, in his legal regalia in a high-wind did look quite Batmanish, pointed out that D. C. Comics were right. They owned the words ‘super heroes’. It was not a copyright matter. It’s a trademark!!!! So my publisher pulped the first book cover and I changed the subtitle to ‘The hilarious first addition of the Superkids Magazine’. And so the book, which gave advice on ‘How to select the right cape for you’ and ‘How to keep your hair neat in a cyclone’, was eventually published.

Read Full article published Herald Sun 14 JUL 2004 also The Advertiser (SA): A bird. A plane. An Ozzie mozzie zapper

Major Tom to course control, I’m floating in a most peculiar way

Posted on July 31, 2013 by Kerry Cue

Ed White Gemini 4 1965 NASA

….THE real threat to the survival of universities is not deregulation or funding issues, but the virtual campus with lecturers sitting at ground control and students getting lost in cyber space.

It’s 1969. I’m studying science-engineering at Melbourne University on a campus electrified by radicalised politics. The student union quadrangle has the excitement and clutter of an exotic bizarre awash with Hare Krishnas, rock bands, flute playing hippies,

badge wearing Trotskyites and more.

With 38 contact hours, I was blessed to attend university, despite being the only girl in my course (thus unable to skip too many classes), at a time when campus life was rich and academic standards demanding.

Fast forward 40 plus years, I’m walking across the university campus on my way to the Faculty of Engineering alumni dinner. A few students, talking on mobile phones and wearing shoulder bags, rush past me toward the street. It’s early evening and tumbleweeds could roll through the union building quadrangle. The union looks like any other cafe in Melbourne at that hour. Floors are being swept. Chairs stacked. It’s closing down. I can hear football players shouting as they train on the university oval, but otherwise the student union is dead.