It's Not Christmas Till Christmas.

We’re three days into the Little Drummer Boy Challenge and Whamageddon (so far, so good) which I think really just stand in for our collective impulse to run from all the the terrible Christmas songs and execrable recordings of good Christmas songs that saturate our manmade environment for 6 weeks every year — though this year most of us are getting a break from it because we’re not leaving home. OR SHOULDN’T BE.

I don’t have any strong feelings about the Wham! song. It’s fluff and doesn’t pretend to be anything but. I don’t mind it nearly as much as, I don’t know, Christine Aguilera bushwhacking her way through O Holy Night. The LDBC I take much more seriously. There literally is no song worse than that song, and there are a thousand self-serious covers of it out there, from Boyz II Men to Bad Religion, waiting to assault you. It is endless and, for such a messagey song, it has no message. I hate it.

I do have strong feelings about Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, and I avoid it more scrupulously than either of the official challenge songs because the revised version that everyone sings now completely misses, or I should say avoids, the whole point of the song, which is the whole point of the season, which is that, no matter how bad things might be right now, if you have faith, the darkness will end. There will be light again. You don’t have to be Christian or even religious to feel the power of that metaphor.

Reportedly, Frank Sinatra loved the song but didn’t want to sing something so sad — the obvious question being that if he loved the song why did he murder it? — and had it re-written. (It’s fitting that Sinatra is the culprit here. Much later, he stole New York, New York from Liza Minelli, who, also, like her mom, did it better. To say the least.)

I was heartened to come across this article this morning. Maybe this year, because the words of the song, as in its original wartime context, can be read absolutely literally, it’s possible to appreciate again the power of this song, its honesty about our sorrowful circumstances, the pain we feel being so long separated from so many of our loved ones, a pain without which the hope in the song (“someday soon we all will be together”), the faith, the promise of light after the long dark night has no meaning.

It is, no question, the best Christmas song ever written. But you will never hear it even if you spend from now to Christmas Eve in a mall. You will hear some bullshit that sounds like it about a million times. If you want, you can do what I do: every time someone starts singing it, sing along (either out loud or in your head — read the room) but sing the original lyrics.