If you’re anything like me, you’re sick to death of the same five or six Christmas songs on the radio that some stations have been playing since late October. I mean, I’m as much a fan of Christmas carols as the next guy, but variety is the spice of life, and all of us seem to be subsisting off of a pretty bland diet. So with the holiday season now at its zenith, here are a few hidden musical gems to spice up the office parties, gift exchanges and holiday get-togethers still left on the calendar.
Christmas at Ground Zero — Weird Al is clearly the king of the comedic song. And over the course of his long career, he’s wracked up quite the music catalog. Naturally, more than a few of the greats have fallen out of general circulation owing to simply ho many of them there have been over the decades. The one that I’m always the sorriest to see people not talk about is this catchy little number about the fallout surrounding one apocalyptic Christmas. Its bleaker than a lot of family-friendly music tends to get (maybe why this one seems to have been singled out for obscurity of all the Weird Al songs out there), but that’s more than a little bit of what makes this song feel so fresh and unique, even (or especially) in 2019.
Dominick the Donkey — When I was growing up, there were only so many options when it came to Christmas music. That wasn’t just a matter of there being less oddball things to market to oddball people like me, but also because Mom ruled the roost and Mom liked exactly two Christmas CDs: one from the Muppets and one from a group of Gaelic women. And these were both fine in and of themselves, understand, but you could only listen to them for so long before you went insane with the repetition. The one brief respite I would get from those songs came in the form of Dominick the Donkey, a fun little ditty about how Italian Chirstmas might differ from what we experience in America. It’s fun, it’s funny and it sure is a catchy little jingle. And, at any rate, it sure beats the same version of The 12 Days of Christmas endlessly repeated.
Spidey Bells — One of the great, (and, ironically) unsung gags from last year’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) was that Peter A. Parker put out a terrible (but popular) Christmas album as part of a massive slate of successful Sider-Man-branded merchandising. As a tie-in for the movie, Sony released an entire Spider-Man Christmas album, with songs from each of the now-iconic Spider-people that headline the movie. And while there are plenty of great songs to choose from (including a Miles Morales riff on Joy to the World and a Peter B. Parker lounge-rendition of Up on the Housetop), the best by far is the song that we actually get to listen to snipbits from in the movie: Spidey-Bells — a song so great that you actually get to hear Spider-Man have an existential crisis in the middle of it (complete with complaints that his agent never calls him back and that he’s stuck making this album when he has a degree in chemical engineering).
Twas the Fright Before Christmas — It seems like everybody’s got a gimmicky Night Before Christmas parody these days, so there’s a genuine wealth of options to choose from for this slot on the list (another excellent choice from recent years would have been the version made for the Into the Spider-Verse Christmas album). However, my perennial favorite riff on this Christmas classic has always been the one put-out on the Tales from the Crypt Christmas album, where the titular Crypt Keeper makes a quicksand trap for Santa to land in on Christmas night, but has a last-minute change of heart when Santa decides to give him his Christmas presents anyway. The schlocky violence and pun-laden lyrics are a perfect contrast to the family-friendly veneer of the holiday, and it’s bound to catch more than a few relatives at your Christmas parties off-guard when you put it on at your aunt’s holiday bash.
White Winter Hymnal — Unlike many of the other songs on this list, this one has actually caught on (more or less) in the mainstream. Introduced to the world on the Fleet Foxes’ self-titled 2008 album (and later covered by the likes of Pentatonix), this oddball carol is a dark twisted song about murder most foul at the height of the Christmas season. With lyrics calling back to the campfire ghost story about the dead little girl whose head is tied to her body by a red ribbon and the upbeat suggestion of grievous violence on children, this is the kind of music you can get others to sing along too without them ever paying close enough attention to the words to realize what they’re actually going on about.
