Do We Know It's Christmas?

'Tis the season for overspending, overeating, overreaching, and crap, crap music. And yet I find myself oddly inulgent toward the crap this year, partly because I'm in that weird Christmas space where you actually want to bake and shit. I'm actually quite a fabulous cook, and make all sorts of treats my family can't live without: old family recipes like the nasty-sounding but actually delightful Tomato Soup Cake (a spice cake with cherries and nuts), the evilly addictive Peanut Blossoms (a peanut butter cookie with a Hershey's kiss on top), and Scotch Shortbread, dense and buttery as fudge (a favorite of Thersites). Little Thersites has requested gingerbread men, so we'll do that, too.

But when I bake, I love to listen to Christmas music. I have the Vince Guaraldi Charlie Brown CD, and The Roches Three Kings, and some damn version of The Messiah. But hands down, my favorite is a collection (currently gone missing in my house) of Christmas songs by Black Vinyl Records called Yuletunes. Great stuff, really; Shoes, Matthew Sweet,The Spongetones, 92 Degrees, Herb Eimermann.... it's a terrific disc. Feeds both my demons at once. I'm hunting for it today.

But oddly, none of these tunes made the cut for this year's favorite Christmas song. Not even the newly rerecorded "Do They Know It's Christmas?" has managed to displace, you guessed it, "Fairytale of New York" as the preferred song of the season, according to a VH-1 poll. My heart just glows:

You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it's our last!

*Sniff!* I think I'll go get some egg nog....