I love Christmas and the jollification that comes with it and the carols that come with the Holidays are a big part of the reason.Christmas brings out the best in many tune writers: think Handel, Wesley, and the obscure pious pastor who wrote Silent Night.

Hallelujah!

Clever, but aging, singers have long learned from Bing Crosby that hitching their wagon to a new Christmas hit (think White Christmas) will buy you the closest thing to career immortality this side of the angelic choir. The marketing guy who invented Rudolph gave Gene Autry a reason for living and when combined with Rankin/Bass weirdness shaped my childhood.

Then there are the other songs. These songs are so bad that each could destroy the Holiday for you. One Torrey student after hearing our winner lost his faith and became a Hippie and could only be restored to the Truth by hours of patient work with Bach.

After extensive testing here are the worst Christmas songs ever:

5. If you can listen to all of Dominick the Donkey, chock full of stereotypes, you probably hate Christmas and Italians.

4. Teach this song to your children and it will be sung endlessly. I will not write the title to avoid putting it my mind for the rest of the day. Click at your own peril. Really.

3. A drunk grandmother. Death. Death by Santa. Before Tiger Woods brightened our Holiday, there was Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer.

2. Proving that Madonna (the singer not the real one) will do anything for attention and also proving that her reputation as an artistic genius comes from those working for Madonna (not the one that will be remembered in fifty years) we have Santa Baby which is badly written (“Santa honey, I wanna yacht and really that’s Not a lot”), consumerist driven enough to make Charlie Brown cry, and disturbing in ways that put a boo-boo on Santa’s heart.

1. This song is weird. It is violent. It is the biggest failure in the history of humankind to create a charming character. It may have caused the “group” who introduced it to be sucked up into the space/time continuum. Who is it? It is Socko. It may have failed due to Conspiracy. I unfold the meaning of this horror here.