That Fuc**ng "Wonderful Christmastime" song!

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Every year, starting in late November, and ending in early January, I am filled with an uncontrollable rage. A burning desire, a ruthless ambition, a heartless dementia. Who, or what, could possible invoke such strong, negative emotions within myself?

Paul McCartney. For most of the year, I have no issue with Paul McCartney. He is, after all, the man who wrote Back In The USSR, Eleanor Rigby, Let It Be, Band On The Run, and countless other great songs. But for just five weeks of every year, I want to strangle Paul McCartney to death.

Why would I, a perfectly rational human being, want to kill Paul McCartney? Allow me to explain. A few nights ago, having just spent the last five days stuck in my Dad’s apartment as my bathroom was being torn apart, I was at our local K-Mart. I was certainly not having a "wonderful" Christmastime. Then it happened. That song came on the PA system. It poured forth like bile from a ruptured gallbladder - the infamous Wonderful Christmastime!

Part of me wanted to run outside and wander around like a lost puppy for the next five minutes. Instead, I stayed inside, absorbing the aural atrocity I had heard so often before, examining the repulsive ditty as if I were a scientist studying a caged chimpanzee. I wondered to myself, of the hundred-odd people in the store at the time, how many wanted to kill Paul McCartney then and there? How many of them were seriously contemplating hiding in the bathroom, or abandoning their carriages in the checkout isle just to "escape?"

Wonderful Christmastime raises some serious ethical questions. Can it really drive a good man mad? Imagine cornering the man who killed your family in a small, dark room. You’re pointing a gun in his face, ready to pull the trigger. At that very moment, as if my satanic intervention, Wonderful Christmastime begins playing full-blast, but only in that room. Would I shoot him, putting him out of his misery? Would the song drive me into a murderous rage, forcing me to stab him to death with a pocket knife? Or would I lock him in the room, surely a fate worth than death?

The most disturbing thing about Wonderful Christmastime is it’s relentlessly cruel, mechanical inhumanity. Despite being 27 years old, it’s bitter, pre-manufactured coldness has yet to be equaled in modern popular music. Whereas every other 70s novelty song has been put to rest, it marches onwards, impervious to criticism, unstoppable as the Nazi Blitzkrieg. Had Pink Floyd produced a holiday album entitled Christmas From Behind The Wall, it could never instill in me the soul-crushing depression that Wonderful Christmastime does.

Consider: Wonderful Christmastime can not actually be the product of an actual human being. Certainly, someone with strong pop sensibilities like Paul McCartney would have paused before putting such lyrics on paper:

Simply… having… a wonderful Christmastime
Simply… having… a wonderful Christmastime

The choir of children… sing their song
They practiced… all year long
Ding dong, ding dong
Ding dong, ding dong
Ding dong, ding dong

Not only did McCartney choose to sing this song in an obnoxious lock-step manner, he obviously wrote it in about ten minutes on a piece of toilet paper. The moon is right, the spirits up? Lift a glass, Ahhh, don't look down? Honestly, did Paul McCartney revert to an infantile state when he entered the studio to record this piece of schiese?

Perhaps killing Paul McCartney for a song he wrote in 1979 is an excessive use of force. After all, he already died in 1967 during the production of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Killing him again would be a waste of manpower. Can we imagine a world without Wonderful Christmastime? It isn’t hard to do.