So, I’m traveling today, which means that, unless Jesus performs a miracle on my iPad keyboard, it’s likely this is the only post you’ll get from me for at least a couple of hours. Which means, of course, that I have to make it good, right?

I want to talk Christmas songs. Not the kind you sing in church, but the kind you’ve been hearing on that one radio station that flipped its programming to Christmas music just after Labor Day and has been haranging you with approximately 80000 versions of the same eight songs for three months. There are some truly terrible Christmas songs. And in the spirit of the congenial debate often at play in this blog, I want to declare that there is a Most Terrible. 

“The Christmas Shoes” is the worst Christmas song ever written. Not only is it needlessly depressing, agenda driven and cloying, making it basically the Upworthy of Christmas songs, but its based on a premise that all Americans know to be untrue: that anyone standing in a checkout line the day before Christmas is really interested in the plight of anyone else also standing in the checkout line the day before Christmas. Your mother is dying? Great. My in-laws just invited themselves over, and they’re staying for three weeks. Beyond that, it’s just a terrible, terrible song. 

You are free to disagree, of course, and I expect you will. Here are a few more that at least deserve an honorable mention.

• “(Simply Having A) Wonderful Christmastime)” – Paul McCartney – Honestly, all of the complaints about this song could also be made about Wings’s entire catalog. But the “choir of children” is pretty terrible for having practiced all year long. They sound more like the “choir of drunken backup guitarists.”
• “Last Christmas” – WHAM!, Taylor Swift and, because it technically could get worse, the Cast of Glee – Nothing about the song makes sense, literally or anatomically. No one can re-gift your heart without first performing some complex surgery and involving a medi-vac helicopter.
• “Happy Christmas (War is Over)” – John Lennon and The Plastic Ono Band – Because nothing says “have a wonderful holiday” like someone strangling a cat in the background of loosely-researched political propaganda based on a false premise and a mis-reading of the calendar.
• “Feliz Navidad” – Celine Dion – No, not the original Jose Feliciano version. The version of the Spanish classic that no one needed and no one asked for sung by a Canadian woman who speaks French.
• “Do They Know Its Christmas” – Band Aid: Of course they know it’s Christmas. They’re hungry, not stupid.

Merry Christmas, Spectacle readers!