Christmas songs are terrifying. And they are often sung by terrifying people. Nothing is scarier than a bunch of expressionless children you don’t know all singing eerily together right outside your window in the dead of night. Every Christmas song inspires its own special breed of terror.For example, “The Nutcracker” is terrifying because it’s about an evil forty-headed rat that controls a universe of sightless wooden beings who are forced to skate for all eternity.
“The Little Drummer Boy” is scary because of the lyrics they left out of the song. Most people know that at the end of it, after he expresses his fear that his gift won’t be good enough for the king, the little drummer boy plays his song for the king, and the king smiles. What most people don’t know is that the original version of the song goes on another verse and in it we find out the king smiled because he thought of a suitable punishment for the impoverished whelp that dared play a foolish song on his drum before the king. But many Christmas songs are still scary even in their modern versions. Here below are five such songs:
1. “Hark! The Herald Angel Sings”
This song is not the scariest on the list lyric-wise. Rather, it is scary because of what it sounds like. Whether sung by strange children outside your window, or a bunch of elderly in a church choir, the song always sounds like the beginning of a horror movie. This is reinforced by the recent statistic put out by the Census Bureau that shows that one out of four times “Hark! The Herald Angel Sings” is sung, Michael Myers strikes again.
2. “Silent Night”
Listen to the lyrics of this song: “Silent Night, Holy Night/ Shepherds quake at the sight/ Glories stream from Heaven afar.” So, already a pack of innocent shepherds are traumatized because of unexplained balls of fire erupting in the sky. Then, in the very next verse: “Son of God, love’s pure light/ Radiant beams from thy holy face.” Lasers shoot out of a baby’s face. The radiant beams are obviously high-power lasers—what else could they be? And we all know what lasers do. They can only do two things: Make our Internet stream faster, or blow things like you and me away. And they didn’t have the Internet back then.
3. “Barney the Christmas Demon”
Few people know about this song, written about a popular Christmas icon that was the precursor to Santa. Early Christians adopted Barney the Christmas Demon along with many other pagan symbols, but quickly rejected Barney the Christmas Demon in favor of Saint Nick. Children had a love/hate relationship with Barney the Christmas Demon’s dual policy of bringing presents if you were good, or flaying the skin off of your body and wearing it as a suit if you were bad. Santa was a toned-down version of Barney the Christmas Demon, replacing that whole removing every last scrap of your skin thing with leaving coal in your stocking, which was at the time seen as a more reasonable punishment for misbehaving.
4. “Orenthal James Simspon Can Fit Down a Chimney”
No one is scarier than O.J. Simpson, especially if your name is Nicole Brown Simpson. You’d think this song would have been invented after the O.J. trial, but actually it was originally sung to poor children in the 1930s who had a habit of hiding in chimneys. Parents of that era were often frustrated by this behavior and sang this song to get their children to stay out of the chimneys. Researchers later found out that the children weren’t intentionally being bad, and that they actually crawled into chimneys because they were starving and coal dust had trace amounts of protein, but the song had already been popularized by then.
The history of the song aside, if you think that O.J. Simpson crawling down your chimney and coming for you isn’t scary, try thinking about that for ten minutes, without urinating. I’ve tried seven times today, and trust me, it is impossible.
5. “Yay, Christmas! Also, We’re One Year Closer To Revelations”
Everyone loves Christmas, but not everyone loves the chapter of the bible detailing the end times that must inevitably come to separate the sinners from the saints. A song reminding everyone that Christmas means that we are one step closer to fulfilling the biblical prophecy calling for four skeletal horsemen to reign famine and disease on the world population in preparation for a seven headed Jesus dragon to fly down and breathe hellfire on the wicked can be a bit of a downer. Bible historians still haven’t settled the age-old debate about whether Revelations was written by the Apostle John, or Jim Morrison. One thing they are sure of, however, is that whoever wrote that chapter was tripping balls on some pretty heavy shit.
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