12 Days of Christmas - Day 4: goofs of the magi

There are a few reasons why Halloween gets an entire month's worth of posts on Armagideon Time and Christmas gets a measly week (and change). The primary explanation is that Halloween's spooky vibe appeals to me more than the retail industry-driven insanity that Christmas has become. There's also the fact that the Yuletide holiday season has long-since bled through the Black Friday (and, oh, how I hate that descriptor for the day after Thanksgiving) boundary, so that candy corn and toxic light-up skulls immediately segue into artificial evergreen trees, NASCAR^TM ornaments, and Christmas music played 24/7 on the local "oldies" (if by the term you mean Billy Joel's body of work and "Muskrat Love") station.

Too much of a good thing is bad enough. Too much of something that is already ambiguous in nature (not so much Christmas, but the foul dust that preys in its wake) is nigh unbearable. I'm hardly a standard bearer for traditions, but there was a natural, comfortable cadence to the flow of fourth-quarter holiday celebrations -- Halloween's ghoulish revels, Thanksgiving's harvest-tide feast, Christmas's whatever, topped off with New Year's clean break. I'm aware of the cui which bono from the present extended yet accelerated arrangement, but the net effect has been to utterly leech whatever charm the season once possessed.

Yes, I know there are movements to reclaim the "true meaning of Christmas," whatever the hell that's supposed to mean, but the omnipresent crush of marketed holiday cheer is capable of insinuating its way through all petty boundaries. Even the tinkle of my piss off the porcelain plays out the tune of Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmas Time," such is the season's insidious, unrelenting ubiquity.

The final reason why I keep the Christmas holiday festivities here limited to a shorter period of time compared to Halloween's is because of the dearth of material, or rather a dearth of material that hasn't already been posted recently elsewhere. Finding unique Halloween-related material was easy, even with a couple dozen other folks out there working in a similar vein. There's a greater latitude for selecting "spooky" -- which encompasses entire genres -- than for Christmas music, especially after I add the "I like enough to post" qualifier and my desire not to poach on others' turf. So no "Christmas Bop" by T. Rex or Oscar the Grouch's sublime "I Hate Christmas" this time round, even though both tracks made the final cut. I won't even bother with The Pogues' "Fairytale of New York," because it's almost a given that the song will occupy at least half the slots on the Hype Machine's Top 50 as the 25th of December draws closer.

I was horrified to discover that The Damned's "There Ain't No Sanity Clause" had already been posted last Monday over at the always excellent Planet Mondo, which I would have known if I hadn't fallen behind in keeping up with my favorite blogs. Sorry about that, PM. Your write up was far superior to mine, if it's any consolation. John over at Punks on Postcards has also put up a rather nifty Christmas Oi! compliation, which I had debated picking up at a used vinyl store back in the day, but the extortionate price and the presence of tracks by Splodge and The Gonads caused my to stay my hand. AM, Then FM, Mostly Ghostly and Wonderful Wonderblog are all presently offering excellent selections of music from Christmases past, and are well worth checking out, as well, because the odds of seeing OOP Perry Como holiday material here are pretty much nil...

Guys in luchador masks working elements of The Chantays' "Pipeline" and Del Shannon's "Runaway" into a surf instrumental version of a holiday standard? That's more my speed, by far.

Los Straitjackets - God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen (from 'Tis The Season For Los Straitjackets, 2002)