That's a different version from the one I heard:
Jingle bells, Santa smells
40 miles away...
Plug your nose 'cause there he goes,
In a beat-up Chevrolet!
The only time I ever sang that was when my grandmother's friend wanted me to tell her of any "fun" songs her little grandson might like.
I taught her this one in the hopes that it would annoy the kid's mother, who was such a stuck-up snob. The grandmother thought it was funny, and said I was "clever" to think that up - I told her I couldn't take the credit, since I'd heard it from a classmate many years before in elementary school.
I was thinking more like Santa vs the Grinch. They're creative, these marketing types. I'm sure there's a way to make more money out of Christmas than what they are currently doing.
A lot of it's about the money these days. You should see the insane prices for regular-sized artificial Christmas trees on the walmart.ca site. A
cheap one is over $300. There are a couple listed at well over $2000.
Christmas used to be a time of year when I had money on my mind - selling crafts in various shops around town and at a couple of craft fairs.
I used to belong to a craft co-operative that was situated in our old court house (when the new one was built the old one was turned into offices, studios, and a gallery). One year a Christmas craft fair was booked into it, and it was a mix of professional tradespeople from out of town and local crafters... and at the last minute the City decided to levy an extra business license on everyone there.
Well, the trade shows didn't have a problem with that. But the locals? Even the court house management tried to explain to the City that they were levying fees of hundreds of dollars on local grandmas who just wanted to make a little extra Christmas money, and they couldn't afford that. The City wouldn't budge, so the people who were able to pay, did... and had to jack up their prices accordingly.
How I benefited from this fiasco was that the public came, saw the prices in the room where the fair was, then promptly headed over to the co-operative that was open year-round and we
didn't have to pay that extra license. So our prices stayed at their normal levels, and I remember having to quickly make a bunch more of my reindeer ornaments and other things, because everything had sold out by closing on Friday, with two more days to go with the craft fair - and two more days that we could reasonably expect to benefit from the high prices the people there had to charge to make up for the cost of their tables (which weren't cheap to start with), plus the extra license.
I don't mind the children's songs at all, but I do mind if they're on 24/7, and if that's all you hear during the holiday season. The kids have got to have fun too after all. If it was an occasional thing that came on every once in a while I wouldn't be commenting on it at all and wouldn't have a problem with it.
Fortunately for me, I don't go out much, particularly at this time of year. The stores are way too crowded, and I have problems with crowds at any time of year. At Christmas, I just want to get in and out as fast as possible.
That said, there are usually a couple of seasonal kiosks I like to check out at the local mall. One of them sells fancy calendars (got a Thomas Kinkade one and a Gary Patterson cat calendar last year) and another one sells rocks, minerals, and carved figurines. I usually pick up a couple of small things there each year. I try to stay out of the stores themselves, as much as possible, mostly for the crowds, but also to minimize the exposure to yet another round of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.
As for American culture influencing Polish Christmas traditions, I'm not sure how much of that has happened. I think the main thing is that our santa has changed from a more orthodox looking santa to a more Coca Cola looking santa. As for christmas carols though, I guess I can't really say because I don't live there, but all of our key carols are sung in Polish. It would be hard to displace them with stuff sung in another language, even if it's English.
I meant in a more general way, not just Christmas. It would surprise me if some of the modern North American carols aren't at least known there, even if the preferred ones are the traditional Polish carols.
Possibly because in the U.S. each time a black person climbs down through an unsuspecting person's chimney, somebody gets shot. It's safer to do that sort of thing when you're white and jolly.
Mind you that would be even easier to do if you were female. I guess I can't think of a good female version of "Santa" though
I tried to find just a clip of Mrs Slocombe's lines in the "Are You Being Served?" episode I mentioned earlier, about equality and why women should be able to play Father Christmas, but so far have only found the entire episode... which is very non-PC by today's standards (the show was made in the '70s).
To me it's not about the religious message either. When the Christmas carols come on, it just adds to the atmosphere. "These are the songs our ancestors used to sing and crap they used to believe, allelujah". It makes everything sound more festive, the actual religious references in the music don't really matter. It's like when you sing, oh I don't know, songs from Lord of the Rings, say you're hosting a LOTR party and music from the movie comes on - you can sing along or just listen along and ignore the obviously made up details of the lyrics, and enjoy the atmosphere that the music helps create, since it goes along with everything else going on at the party.
I never saw Lord of the Rings, but that would be an interesting thing to do with Dragonlance. There were lots of songs and poems in the novels, sheet music in the game modules (some of it really beautiful - I adapted it to the organ and learned to play it), and sections in the Leaves From the Inn of the Last Home chock-full of recipes. We actually did a whole party menu of those one time for the college SF club I was in - everything from appetizers to beverages to main dishes to desserts.
So that's all cool, and I understand that kids need to have their own songs too, because their brains are not fully developed yet and they need very simple and catchy songs to help get them in the holiday spirit. But when all people play is these kids songs during the holidays and nothing else, hour after hour, day after day, it just makes me feel like that not fully mentally developed moron after a while. Mix it up a bit and I won't have a problem with it.
The songs don't need to be cutesy, just simpler and memorable. I think the first Christmas song I ever learned was Away In a Manger, and remember thinking that a manger was a pretty stupid place to let a baby sleep.
I wrote a short TOS Christmas filk to the tune of that carol (just one verse).
