Christmas Shoes
While there are a few good ones, check out the best Christmas songs over here, the list of terrible cheesy numbers goes into the hundreds.
But even amongst the usual tripe that gets rolled out over the festive season, there are the truly terrible examples that leap out of the crowd and stun you with their terribleness.
So, of course, we assembled the five worst festive songs we could find out there in the wintery wastelands of music for your delight and disgust.
So put on you Santa hats and get ready to reach for the eggnog, because this isn’t going to be pretty.
5) Dominick The Christmas Donkey – Lou Monte
So the children of Italy don’t have Santa to look forward too according to Lou Monte, but a rather dim donkey called Dominick.
Released back in 1960, this incredibly cheesy, plodding track is the epitome of everything that’s bad with the novelty song. Pointless, stupid and without any real tune.
The worst thing of all though was this nearly the Christmas number one last year after another backlash towards The X Factor and Chris Moyles nearly got the terrible novelty song to the top of charts.
4) Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer – Elmo and Patsy
Nothing says family and togetherness like an elderly relative getting killed by rampaging reindeer right? Well, that’s the story according to husband a wife singing duo Elmo and Patsy, whose 1979 effort is still haunting the season.
If this rather dodgy basis isn’t enough to put you off, then the awful, reedy vocal should be enough to make you go running out into the road just in case a careening sled might knock you down and end the experience early.
3) Boys and Girls (Xmas Time Love) - The Cheeky Girls
For those who’ve managed to cleanse your mind of the duo, these were a pair of atrociously bad Romanian twins who rose to fame by being terrible on reality show Popstars: The Rivals. A total novelty act, they had a brief attack on the charts before we all got tired of their schtick.
They managed to release not just one, but two Christmas songs. Two! It’s the second that makes this list though as it’s so toe-curlingly terrible that it makes their debut ‘Touch My Bum’ look like Stairway to heaven.
More autotune than the entirety of Ke$ha’s first album and with less rhythm than falling down a flight of stairs, this is a boring, mind numbing tale of winter romance. It even has multiple rapping sections where the girls let an unnamed mate have a crack at spitting some rhymes. Terrible, terrible, terrible.
2) Please, Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas) – John Denver
We all know that country music and booze go hand in hand, but John Denver has managed to mix both of those with Christmas and create this monstrosity.
A tale of a boy pleading with his alcoholic father not to lay off the sauce in order to not make his mother sob the holidays away sounds just about as awful as it sounds.
Thank goodness it’s only two and a half minutes long. Any longer and we might not have been able to take it.
1) Christmas Shoes – Newsong
While most Christmas songs get preoccupied with Santa or the family, Newsong’s horrific 2000 holiday song ‘Christmas Shoes’ focuses on the important thing. Deathbed presents.
Yep, this is a song all about a child trying to buy his dying mother a new pair of shoes just incase “Mamma meets Jesus tonight”.
A Christmas song about buying a dying mother a new pair of shoes! That’s about as useful as a caterer who doesn’t know how to construct a sandwich. Newsong’s effort is so dull, depressing and emotionally manipulative that you don’t even have to see the awful TV movie video to despise it.
This beats out John Denver’s song by simply being so cloying and maudlin that it actually makes you feel ill by the end of its ghastly run.
What are the Christmas tracks that get under your skin and make you dread nipping out to the shops? Let us know in the comment section below.
FemaleFirst Cameron Smith