Messed Up Christmas Song Lyrics Nobody Talks About

Love it or hate it, you can't escape Christmas music. Some stations switch over to an all-holiday-jams format as early as November 1 and maybe you can avoid it then, but once Santa parks his sleigh at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, it will be everywhere: grocery stores, shopping malls, TV commercials, people literally showing up at your front door and singing it at you, and so on.

Even if you love Christmas music, there's no denying it's inescapable at a certain time of year. Some people of a more Scrooge-ish or Grinch-esque disposition might find themselves inclined to tune it out, but many of the most popular songs can dig their way into your subconscious, and you find yourself humming or singing them against your conscious desires. And when these songs run through your brain, sometimes a word or phrase might strike you, making you realize, "hey, this is pretty messed up."

While there's no shortage of hugely terrible, disgustingly offensive, and actively harmful Christmas music out there — like "Santa Claus Has Got the AIDS" and "I Farted on Santa's Lap (Now Christmas Is Gonna Stink for Me)," which are both very real – this list looks at classics of the holiday canon by respected artists you have definitely heard of that just have a line or two that could use a bit of polishing.

After the breakup of the Beatles in 1970, John Lennon began writing and performing songs with his then-new wife Yoko Ono. The seventh single released by the couple and their Plastic Ono Band was "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)," a combo Christmas/protest song that has since become a holiday standard, covered by a broad variety of artists including Sarah McLachlan, Neil Diamond, Diana Ross, Jimmy Buffett, and the Polyphonic Spree. You've heard it, probably, gently accusing you of not having done enough with your year and culminating with the implication that global war continues simply because you, the listener, did not want it to stop enough. Yeah, that one.

Anyway, the song was part of an extended multimedia anti-war campaign by Lennon and Ono that began with billboards reading "WAR IS OVER! If you want it — Happy Christmas from John and Yoko" as a means of protesting the Vietnam War and promoting social unity and peaceful change via personal accountability. So it's probably safe to say that Lennon didn't know that wishing a happy Christmas "for yellow and red ones" would read as mega racist 40-some years later. While modern people still frequently use the terms "black" and "white" to refer to racial groups, years of negative associations have made it completely uncool to call Asian people "yellow" and Native American groups "red." But at least Lennon has the "it was a long time ago" excuse; why on Earth was this line left unchanged for the 2012 version from Glee?

While each year sees a revival of the tiresome discourse surrounding "Baby, It's Cold Outside" and "Santa Baby," there's much less discussion about another entry in the (disgustingly large) canon of "sexualizing Santa Claus and/or Christmas in general" songs: "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus." While you're probably most familiar with the versions by the Jackson 5 or John Mellencamp, or even the ones by Jessica Simpson or Amy Winehouse or Reba McEntire (why?), the original version of the song was recorded in 1952 by literal 13-year-old human child Jimmy Boyd. It's terrible! Not every child is Brenda Lee; stop putting them on your novelty Christmas songs.

Anyway, the premise of the song is that the child narrator (or the adult Reba McEntire) sneaks downstairs on Christmas Eve and sees Mom getting rutty with Santa and thinks it's mega hilarious. The punchline is "what a laugh it would have been if Daddy had only seen Mommy kissing Santa Claus last night." The joke, of course, comes from the dramatic irony wherein we, the older, more mature listening audience know that in this case, "Santa" actually is just the kid's dad in a suit and beard and all this canoodling is within the bounds of wedlock. But the kid doesn't know that! This child is fully delighted at the idea of his mom doing an adultery with an immortal gift-bringer on the eve of the child Jesus' birth. True story: This song was formally condemned by the Roman Catholic Church in Boston until Boyd explained the joke to them.

Remember that episode of The Good Place where the demons have a party and the most torturous way they can think of to celebrate is having Bad Janet blast an airhorn while alternating playing Puddle of Mudd's "She Hates Me" and Elmo & Patsy's "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer"? There's a reason that latter song would be a favored method of torment by actual demons from kinda-sorta Hell, and that's because it is an absolute circus fire of a song that should be stricken from human memory but nevertheless remains a perennial hit.

The song is a mess from top to bottom, including such groan-worthy puns as "incriminating Claus marks on her back" and tired jokes clowning on an old lady's blue hair, and worst of all, impugning the reputation of Santa Claus with the claim that he "plays with elves," which ... yikes, dude. But the real kicker is the revelation that Grandpa is taking the death of his wife extremely well: "See him in there watching football, drinking beer and playing cards with Cousin Mel." Sounds like an innocuous enough coping mechanism, until you see the video and realize that Cousin Mel is an attractive younger female cousin and suddenly the whole thing comes into focus: Grandpa got his own wife drunk and sent her off in the snow to die so he could hook up with (his own?) Cousin Mel and then he blamed it all on an ineffably good spirit of generosity who wouldn't be around to defend himself.

While many traditional Christmas characters like Santa or the Three Kings or the Krampus (if you're nasty) go back hundreds or even thousands of years, Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer are two more modern figures that have been indelibly imprinted on the popular holiday imagination. Part of the reason for that was that Frosty was specifically designed to follow Rudolph's example. The "Rudolph" song had been a huge hit for singing cowboy Gene Autry in 1949, and so the next year "Frosty the Snowman" was written to be his big follow-up, and it was a smash success, likewise being recorded by dozens of other artists and getting adapted into a beloved Rankin/Bass animated special.

"Frosty" is, on the surface, a pretty sweet wintertime romp, with children witnessing magic firsthand and the product of that magic being a rulebreaking friend who embraces and indeed embodies the topsy-turvy nature of the holiday season and undermines the authority of the local police. All good there. But ... he dies at the end, right? Like the winter snow and childhood itself, this innocent avatar of childlike play will melt away under the rays of adulthood's sun. Worse, Frosty knows his end is nigh: "Frosty the Snowman knew the sun was hot that day, so he said, 'Let's run and we'll have some fun now before I melt away.'" Suddenly this children's song is the bittersweet tale of a guileless snow golem confronting and accepting his own mortality. Heavy stuff.

Just to flip the script a little bit, here's a song that's maybe not quite as messed up as it may sound on first listen. "Winter Wonderland" was written by composer Felix Bernard and lyricist Richard B. Smith while Smith was being treated for tuberculosis in a Pennsylvania sanitarium, having been inspired by seeing snow covering the ground in the park in his hometown of Honesdale, Pennsylvania. First recorded in 1934, the song has subsequently been recorded over 200 times, many of which rearrange the original lyrics, adding verses, deleting others, moving things around.

One thing basically every version has in common is the verse in which the narrators build a snowman and pretend it is Parson Brown. The imaginary preacher asks if they are married, and they say, "No, man, but you can do the job when you're in town!" It turns out it is a surprisingly common interpretation of this song that the narrator wants to bone down with a snowman. You know, like "do the job"? Wink wink, lascivious eyebrow waggle. But, like, nah, man. The narrator is part of a couple ("we can build a snowman") and the preacher is asking if the two of them are married and they tell him not yet, but he can perform the ceremony ("do the job") while he's in town. These are the plans they have made (to get married by a snow person) that they will subsequently face unafraid, conspiring by the fire.

The real mystery here is, who's this new bird? Is it ... a penguin?