1. Paul McCartney is embarrassed about the song, probably because he makes more than you make in a calendar year off the song annually. (That sum: $400,000 per Wikipedia, and if that’s only half accurate the previous sentence is likely still true. He should be ashamed.) People who hate this song despite it like you’re supposed to hate child abuse, fire ants, and Nickelback: passionately, deeply and without reservation.
Christmas Song Octagon: Defending ‘Wonderful Christmastime’
Our writers would like to fight you over Christmas music, so please: step into the Christmas Song Octagon and keep it clean. Our first song: “Wonderful Christmastime” by Paul McCartney, defended by Spencer Hall
2. You’ll be shocked to learn he recorded the song by himself, something that happened at lot in the 1970s when musicians, scarred by over a decade of exposure to hallucinogenic drugs, only saw other people as giant groundhogs, and then fled terrified into their studios with drum machines and synthesizers as their only protection. Groundhogs cannot stand the sound of electronic instruments, something you would know if you’d read the liner notes to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, or if you are Todd Rundgren, noted giant groundhog target.
3. This song came out in 1979, when my dad bought his Christmas pants. Per photographic evidence, my dad wore these pants every Christmas between 1979 and 1987. They were plaid, and looked like a bottle of Passport Scotch poured into polyester form. They appeared once a year from a lead-lined box my dad kept under the house, because plaid pants of a certain age and pattern have their own radioactivity. That was the price of being a father of his era, and he paid it bravely.
4. Those pants and “Wonderful Christmastime” got trotted out once a year for reasons no one could properly explain, along with all the other things people did at Christmas. These didn’t even fall into any kind of written code of holiday behavior or common ritual: the giant tricolor tubs of popcorn that apparated from nowhere, spiral cut hams falling into the picture frame from nowhere, the pair of horrendous pants creeping their way onto sun-starved legs, and songs like “Wonderful Christmastime,” a collection of extraterrestrial synthfarts and sleighbells rigged over Paul McCartney singing things like “we’re here tonight/and that’s enough.”
5. McCartney might have been making these up as he went. In fact, there is a pretty good argument to be made that post-Beatles, bathing in cash and hiding from the British tax cops, Paul McCartney made music designed not to be sold, consumed, or heard under any circumstances whatsoever. He put Linda McCartney on backup vocals. He made songs like “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” and latched three or four songs together at once and called them songs. People simply refused to stop buying them no matter how hard he tried to pepper-spray the listener with gibberish. If he were more deranged, it would have worked, but even a deranged Paul McCartney is a milquetoasty kind of deranged. Also, he was really, really high.
6. Taking Kurt Cobain’s place is nothing. Paul McCartney already tried to kill Paul McCartney, and failed. Bellowing out “Territorial Pissings” as a geriatric bass player is nothing at this point if you’ve listened
7. None of these things were good, often not even by association with the one event in the year you could rest assured would go well for a child. One uncle would show up with another lady whose name you were not required to remember, because she would not return the following Christmas. Another would give you the gift all ten year olds craved--a full famine-proof tub of Stetson cologne--while asking you how many black kids you had at your school. Someone would do a very poor job hiding their drinking; someone else would fight with someone else over their children. Then, after a period of awkward socializing, you would disperse, usually into a car pulling away beneath a sun setting on a gray leafless and soggy cold scroll of hillsides.
8. That’s usually when my memory has “Wonderful Christmastime” playing: in the car, on the way back from that moment when you most acutely realized how flawed, uneasy, and average everyone you called family really was. This one time in the year when everyone put on their best face, dressed the kids up, showed up at the same place and thought....that’s it? The only time you could really relax at Christmas--after the collars scratched your neck, and you stopped living in fear of embarrassing yourself, saying the wrong thing, or heaven forbid falling in the creek like you did that one year--you got back in the car with your family where you could be your horrible, average, mediocre self.
9. The song is just that: average, mediocre, a toss-off comfortable in being anchored to its time. At best--if you get past the spacefarting synths, the lone high note that evidently got stuck in the first 20 seconds of recording and plays through the whole song, the buried, meandering guitar solo way down at the end--it is adequate, just barely holding on to coherence. There is nothing about “Wonderful Christmastime” that isn’t made to die: the unfrozen keyboard noise, the forgettable lyrics, even the video, clearly made in three sloppy hours of effort with a hundred dollars and a boatload of beer.
10. It is crap--I won't argue it's not, and Paul McCartney wouldn't either. Multi-color tubs of popcorn, day-old spiral cut hams, and scotch-colored pants are crap, too, and so were most of the objects piled together to make what I would call Christmas. (Salt-water taffy from Gatlinburg: i will never understand why this was necessary then, or ever, to have at a holiday.) So much of what Christmas in any family setting happens with a sudden flurry of crap: things slapped together at the last second, toys assembled with stickers in the wrong places, lovingly in the wrong places, mind you, but still all hacked together by people clearly doing everything they can but just barely holding it together at the seams.
11. I used to hate the song because of how much I liked it, but you can't edit memories by critical content. That would be a lie, and it would leave out the painful temporality and impermanence of it. In 1983 I sat at the top of the steps at my grandmother's wearing itchy clothes, wondering why my dad was wearing Scotland on his ass, and why my uncle had a weird accent, and why we lived where we did when there were better, more interesting lives to be had. There were people living baronially somewhere, and at Christmas they listened to Handel and ate strange game with exquisite cutlery before giving each other the gift of their company, and perhaps also a blimp to peruse private islands with together on one of their endless vacations.
12. Memory doesn't let you do that. I like "Wonderful Christmastime" because it is crap, specifically my crappy memory's soundtrack, taken from that moment when the car pulled from the drive, and we were where my family was I believe happiest: in the glorious potential of transit, bundled into a Chevy Caprice owned by some company, and moving between sad, definite places in a time no one would ever consider worth documenting or noting. My parents would play the radio, and this crappy, stupid, giddy, slapdash, crappy song would play. And that would be enough.
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