Bird Brain

You never know what's going to connect with the zeitgeist of American culture. It's obvious that as a world superpower, the United States is working through the various stages of decline into a significantly less powerful nation. It's not the end of the world, it's just something that happens to empires. Empires are unsustainable, and none of them have ever lasted for more than a few hundred years.

Where are they now? The empires of Sumeria, Akkadia, Babylon, Persia, Macedonia, Rome, China, Mongolia, the Ottomans, Great Britain, and Japan? Most are forgotten outside of a college Ancient History course. China, Japan, and Britain are all economic powers, but they hardly match the scope of their imperial days. The American Empire is falling apart as well, both internally and internationally, and the culture of American entertainment reflects this accordingly.

So it's not really a surprise that another end-of-the-world supernatural thriller like Netflix's Bird Box has captured the imagination of millions here at Christmastime in Trump's hate-and-rage-filled America. It's a hyper-violent suspense thriller with good acting by a talented cast. It's also completely undeserving of high acclaim due to yet another terrible, lazy, ridiculous script. It's as if since Carrie Fisher died, the entire profession of "script doctor" in Hollywood has died with her.

If you haven't seen the movie yet, and you want to, do not let my criticism deter you. My family and friends who have seen it have truly enjoyed it. For me, it was a serviceable (albeit slow and completely predictable) piece of throwaway entertainment. But I'm going to spoil the shit out of everything, so please, if you're planning on watching it, stop reading, and don't come back until you've seen it.



So, what's my beef? Plenty...

Apocalypse By-the-Numbers Plot
Stop me if you've seen this...an unexpected global catastrophe kills billions of people worldwide, ending organized, technological civilization as we know it. Our main character manages to join forces with a few survivors—most of whom represent factions of the culture who hate each other (e.g. a black guy and a racist white prick)—to try to figure out how to steer clear of the catastrophe as well as the danger posed by other survivors (most of whom are psychotic murderers...evidently Sunday School teachers have a low survivability rate). The decision is made to try to travel to a location that is supposed to be safe from catastrophe and vicious survivors, but of course, the journey is fraught with all kinds of peril. One by one, our survivor group dies off, until only the protagonist and maybe one or two others finally make it to safety (or find out safety no longer exists). These plot points are as predictable and regular as the outline for a Greek tragedy, and no movie is more by-the-numbers in this way than Bird Box. It's as original as a box of corn flakes. I knew exactly what was going to happen long before it happened; there were no surprises to be found.

Boring, Two-Dimensional Characters
This is Fiction Writing 101, people. You have to give your audience a reason to care about your characters. Bird Box gets by almost exclusively on Sandra Bullock's popularity and personality. I think Bullock is wonderful in just about everything she's ever been in. Here, I never knew who her character was supposed to be. Okay, she's an artist, but that doesn't affect her character in any way. Many character points are alluded to—she and her sister don't get along with her mother, Bullock's baby daddy is out of the picture, she's worried about being a mother—but they don't inform us about who these people are in any way other than keeping score. I found Bullock's character to be such a cipher that I wasn't emotionally invested in whether she lived or died. The other characters are mere cardboard cutouts of the actors who play them. Sarah Paulson is acerbic, John Malkovich is loud and angry, and the others (lady cop, punky white guy, chubby black nerd, hunky black dude, gay Asian) are stereotypes taken straight from the diversity plot wheel. Bullock's children are literally named "Boy" and "Girl," a projection of how generically these characters are developed.

What the Fuck is Killing Everybody?
When your main point of conflict is a fucking Macguffin, I must conclude that you're too goddamned lazy to write a compelling story. The Nerd gives us a perfunctory explanation of what it might be, but it's the last word. The catastrophe is driven by an invisible entity that causes humans who look upon it to immediately kill themselves (in the most violent and horrible ways possible, of course). Why? For what purpose? Some humans don't die, however. Those who are mentally ill worship the entity and travel around forcing others to look, which almost always results in that person's death by suicide. To make things even more fucking stupid, this entity, which has the power to turn a normal human mind suicidally insane, cannot enter a human-made building. Are you kidding me? Do you have any other idiotic plot holes for me to drive a Sherman Tank through? How about if those who are just neurotic, but not fully psychotic, don't commit suicide but are overcome by an overwhelming urge to disco dance? That would make just about as much sense. It's not "cool" to create a deadly entity and never explain it; it's just a lazy, undeveloped idea. And yeah, this movie is based on a book, and the entity isn't explained in the book, either. That makes this whole thing doubly lazy.

Five Years Later? Bitch, please...
I suppose I should blame AMC's The Walking Dead for this, as two years into a zombie apocalypse, yards are still mowed and trimmed and houses are intact, but it's even worse in Bird Box. Five years later, everything inside and outside looks exactly the same. Most houses are intact, and in the most ridiculous scene of the movie, Bullock and her partner, Tom (Trevante Rhodes), scavenge a house and find a box of strawberry Pop-Tarts...and they eat them! And the kids smile at their first taste of strawberry! Are you fucking serious, people? A simple Google search will tell you that Pop-Tarts are edible from no more than 6-12 months past their sell-by date. Five years later, assuming they hadn't been scavenged by animals, they would have been completely inedible and probably cause for food poisoning. I almost stopped watching the movie at this point. Also, take a look at just one episode of the History Channel's wonderful series Life After People to see just how quickly nature takes over human constructions after we leave. This website details what happens in just a few years to an abandoned home. It's an unforgivable sin of writing to not include details that can be discovered in less than a minute with a simple Internet search.

I Can't See Where I'm Going!
Bullock and Rhodes are contacted by walkie-talkie by Rick, who gives them directions to the safe sanctuary. I'm not going to fuss about batteries, since they do have a shelf-life of 5-10 years, but I am going to gripe about where this sanctuary is located. It's in the middle of fucking nowhere, so much so that it's only accessible by a dangerous river journey and then a walk through the woods (woods where, mind you, there are clear and open paths for Bullock and her children to walk along, because nothing grows in these kinds of movies) to get to a school for the blind, a convenient place to be, since sighted people must wear blindfolds outside to avoid the entity, which only has power over the sighted. I guess supernatural murder abilities don't extend to hearing or telepathy. Again, when you don't explain the power at work, that's a gigantic plot hole. Can someone please explain to me why a school for the blind would be so absolutely inaccessible? It seems that it would need to be especially easy for people to find, seeing as they are BLIND! Let's add to the stupidity that the river journey goes through rough rapids that require someone to take off their blindfold and look outside, which is the one thing that will FOR SURE kill your ass dead. Since Pop-Tarts are still good, I'm going to assume cell phones and GPS systems are still functional, too. Just give me your address and I'll walk there.

Shut the Fork Up!
I've intentionally laced this post with profanity, including the ever-versatile "fuck" in several places to make a couple of different points. First, I'm no shrinking violent when it comes to vulgar language. In fact, most of my friends, especially those from college, would tell you that if there was a Mount Rushmore for foul language, I'd be immortalized in stone. But here's the rule I follow in my own writing as well as advice I give to others: don't use it unless you have to. If you can take it out, and the sentence still has the same meaning and emotional effect, then take it out. It makes the times that you use it so much more impactful. Netflix, being immune from FCC regulations, uses it so gratuitously at times that it becomes monotonous. Also, real-life people (outside of junior high boys) don't talk this way. Yes, we curse and use profanity, just not seven times in every sentence. Once again, it's lazy writing that supposedly instills "street cred" in a story or makes it sound tough. It's not. It's boring, and it tells me that you don't have anything more clever to say. Aaron Sorkin knows how to use profanity properly. Watch this clip from HBO's The Newsroom. Jeff Daniels only uses three curse words, but look at the emotional power they generate. This is how it should be done. I'm not calling for no profanity...I'm asking for smarter, more intelligent profanity.

So what's the final verdict?
Look, most of the people I know really liked Bird Box. I consider it a C-minus at worst, a C-plus at best. I'd probably watch it again if a close friend who hadn't seen it wanted me to watch it with him or her. It's not a terrible way to spend a couple of hours, but it's also indicative of how entertainment could be so much better if writers, directors, and producers would take the time to think about the script in a critical way and fix these systemic defects before they make it onto the screen. As a writer, I would have demanded so much more of myself than to turn in a script with this many obvious problems. And you can't blame the streaming services, either, because Amazon Prime gave us The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which is one of the best-written, smartest, funniest, and most linguistically fucking profane shows in recent memory. Print may be dying, but good writing never goes out of style.

Twelve Songs of Christmas: #1—"Do They Know It's Christmas?" by Band Aid

My favorite Christmas song since I first heard it in 1984, this is not only a great song, it's a great sentiment for what Christmas should really be about, and it's a landmark in that it kicked off the modern wave of celebrity-driven charity fundraising events such as Farm Aid and Comic Relief. This particular effort led to the 1985 Live Aid concerts in London and Philadelphia, one of the greatest events in modern musical history.

Inspired by television news reports of the devastating famine in Ethiopia, Boomtown Rats frontman Bob Geldof and Ultravox lead singer Midge Ure were inspired to write a song to try to raise funds to help with international relief efforts. They recruited most of the top performers in the UK and Ireland at the time.

Here's the lineup: Bananarama, The Boomtown Rats, Culture Club, Duran Duran, Genesis, Heaven 17, Jody Watley, Kool & the Gang, Paul Young, The Police, Spandau Ballet, Status Quo, The Style Council, U2, Ultravox, Wham! David Bowie and Paul McCartney couldn't make it to the recording session but provided a spoken message on the B-side (that's vinyl records, kids!).

The video is as basic as you can get: the studio recording session for vocals, and it looks like most of the talent just rolled out of bed, got in the car, and arrived at the studio. Here's who you get before the first chorus: Paul Young, Boy George, George Michael, Simon LeBon, Sting, Tony Hadley (Spandau Ballet), Bono, and Phil Collins (on drums). The rest of the singers appear on choir risers for the chorus.

The song debuted at number one on the UK charts and stayed there for five weeks. Geldof originally hoped to raise 70,000 pounds; the initial 12-month tally was eight million pounds. Their efforts culminated the next summer with the Live Aid concerts, the highlight of which was Queen's legendary performance, acknowledged by many to be one of the greatest live performances in rock history.

But more than that, the song captures the true spirit of Christmas—Christ came to give good news to the poor and to give hope to those who have no other hope. These British and Irish musicians didn't stop famine and poverty in Africa, but they did what they could at the time, and they made a difference. Can you imagine what kind of world we could live in if every person did what little they could, every day, to try to make someone else's life a little better and a little easier?

Is that what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown?

Twelve Songs of Christmas: #2—"Mary, Did You Know?" by Mark Lowry

The only truly Christian Christmas song on my list, "Mary, Did You Know?" has been a staple of the Christmas season in churches across America. It's gained mainstream success from a number of great renditions, notably by Pentatonix and, strangely enough, Cee Lo "F*** You" Green. In searching for the perfect version of this song to capture the emotion this song should rightly convey, I found a 2016 recording by an acapella group called Voctave singing with the song's author, Mark Lowry, on lead vocals.

Lowry is an unlikely candidate as the author and singer of one of the most popular Christmas songs in Christendom. He's a Christian comedian (another rare bird in its own right) whose shows emphasize the importance of laughter and joy in the Christian life. I like his act; while he's not as funny as most secular stand-ups, he is hilarious for those of us with an extensive church background, and he's a welcome antidote to what I call "the soul-crushing joylessness of Christianity." (If you don't know what that means, look at a picture of Vice-President Mike Pence.)

I really love the dichotomy between the divine theology and the human practicality expressed in the lyrics. When I try to understand the Bible, I think about it in terms of real people with real questions. You have to know that Joseph cried "bullshit" whenever Mary told him she was pregnant and God was the father. Yeah...right...that happens! We make this couple so holy that we miss the fact that they were real human beings with doubts and questions and fears.

Let's assume the truth of the nativity story, and let's think about Mary of Nazareth...a teenage girl giving birth to the Son of God. Don't you think she would have some serious, deeply troubling questions about what it all meant? Wouldn't you? We also need to think about Mary as one of Jesus's disciples, because she was. All those things that Lowry writes in the lyrics were things that Mary witnessed as she followed her son through his ministry. She was there at the end, too, witnessing his death and marveling at his resurrection.

This may be one of the most philosophically and theologically challenging Christmas songs ever composed. It's also one of the most beautiful, and if you can listen to this version without crying tears of joy, then I'm afraid your heart may be even smaller than the Grinch's was.

Twelve Songs of Christmas: #3—"It's the Most Wonderful Time of Year" by Andy Williams

Whenever I hear this song, whatever the venue or medium, I know that it's really Christmas time. Written in 1963 and recorded by Andy Williams, this song is a celebration of all the fun events associated with the end-of-year holidays. Some of the traditions are admittedly dated (scary ghost stories? A holdover from Victorian traditions), but the sentiment still holds true.

The song itself also holds a special place in my memories because it was the title of the first play that I acted in. It was the late nineties, and I had only been married for a little while. I had joined our church choir, faking my way through tenor parts by ear because I couldn't read bass clef (still suck at that part, truth be told).

This was a huge Christmas production, with sets and costumes, and taking place over several nights with city-wide publicity. We actually permanently modified our church sanctuary, cutting out a hole over the baptistry big enough for adults to walk through. My oldest daughter, Lydia, appeared with me in the opening scene, and it was the first theatrical production we did together. There would be many more with her after I assumed direction of kids' choir; she was one of my best actors and singers that I ever had.

My favorite part of the song is how it ends, with the orchestra crescendoing toward that final note as Williams and the chorus repeat the line, "It's the most wonderful time..." I'm so overcome with the Christmas spirit by the conclusion that I'm even willing to hang up Christmas lights. In fact, this song makes me feel like this:

Twelve Songs of Christmas: #4—"Christmas Baby Please Come Home" by U2

I didn't even have this song on my list when I first began to compile it. Then I did a few internet searches to make sure my porous memory didn't leave out a favorite. (As it turns out, many of the songs my Blog Club colleague Jeff South has posted could have made my own list.) This one was listed under its original version by the inimitable Darlene Love, a worthy version in its own right.

But when it comes to U2, I'm an unabashed fan of just about everything they've ever done. I will argue until I'm blue in the face that they absolutely deserve to be in the top five greatest rock groups of all time (but that's an argument for another day, another time...), and their version of this song gives me chills every time I hear it.

Bono's voice is the perfect blend of plaintive and hopeful for the lyrics of the song, wishing for his lost love to return, the most unlikely yet wonderful gift the singer could receive. Maybe it's my own journey this year, reconciling with my wife after one unhappy Christmas apart, that makes this song resonate so strongly with me this time around.

Regardless, U2 is always a treasure for me, and this song is always on heavy rotation this time of year. It's also the fourth and final selection from the 1987 album A Very Special Christmas, which would easily top my list of favorite Christmas albums, should such a list ever come up.

Twelve Songs of Christmas: #5—"Christmas in Hollis" by Run-DMC

I turned 50 years old this year. One of the things I like best about being born in 1968 was that I was a kid in the seventies, a teen in the eighties, a young adult in the nineties, a dad in the aughts, and now a grandpa in the tweens. I've seen a lot of remarkable changes that my kids and grandkids take for granted without a second thought.

One of those changes in the pop music arena is rap. It's ubiquitous on pop radio stations today, and for me, quite infuriating in most cases. The lyrics are mumbled over a monotonous, repetitive, computer-generated beat. This is what passes for music, and for my two youngest kids, rap and hip-hop are all they listen to.

I'm so old I can remember before rap was even heard of, much less commonly listened to. Like most new music forms, it was hated by my parents as much as I hate my own kids' music today (some things never change...). But in the eighties, it was new, something we had never heard before, and one of the pioneering voices of this new music was Run-DMC.

They were big enough by 1987 to warrant a spot on the first A Very Special Christmas album with this original song about Christmas time in their childhood neighborhood of Hollis, Queens, in New York City. Like all good art, we find something that either appeals to us or that we can relate to. They sing about the anticipation of presents, Mom's awesome holiday cooking, snow, fellowship...it's actually the perfect Christmas carol. The completely cheesy eighties video is an extra present!

Twelve Songs of Christmas: #6—“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” by The Pretenders

Originally written in 1944 by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, and sung by Judy Garland in the movie Meet Me in St. Louis, this is one of the most-performed classic Christmas songs, and also one with many different lines. The original was far more melancholy, and through the years, lines have been changed to try to make the tone a bit more upbeat.

Balderdash. Leave the song alone. I like a little sadness with my eggnog. You see, you can't experience joy without a little sadness, too. (Don't understand? Go watch Pixar's InsideOut and then come read the rest of the blog.) Christmas comes at the end of the year. It gets dark at 4:30 in the afternoon. Everything is gray, bare, and dead. Winter and night are both metaphors for death in poetry. Are you getting the theme here?

Christmas, at its heart, is deadly serious business. God, the creator of all things, is coming into this shit-stained, murderous, greedy world as a baby. Worse, a Jewish peasant baby to an unwed couple controlled by the Roman Empire at the macro level, and more locally, a homicidal tyrant collaborator. He's being born into poverty and homelessness, and his life is going to end with an unjust, brutal public execution. Sing a happy tune about that, boys and girls!

Human life is just like that. We rejoice at a birth at the same time that we're celebrating a death. We love to spend time with family and friends during the holidays, but when you've lost someone you love, as my family has this year, the absence is overwhelming. Christmas reminds us of what we've lost. In one way, that's good, because it reminds us to be grateful and to cherish the moments we have with those around us, but to ignore the melancholy of the season is to deny its reality and its purpose.

That's why I love this song so much. It embraces the inherent sadness of the holiday and reminds us to find our happiness in spite of whatever it is that we've lost. For me, no other voice does this sentiment justice as much as Chrissy Hynde and The Pretenders from the 1987 album A Very Special Christmas. It's a beautiful interpretation of the ambivalence that the season brings.

Twelve Songs of Christmas: #7—"Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" by MercyMe

I still love the Brenda Lee original, and it's a guaranteed sing-along for me every time it comes on, but I have a special affinity for this modern update of the Christmas classic by contemporary Christian rock band MercyMe. Their version brings a new energy to an old favorite.

My personal affinity is heightened by the fact that during my last time through the Christmas season as the drummer for the praise band at Fellowship Church in 2016, this was part of our Advent song rotation. Led by singer/guitarist Robert Monroe, the Fellowship band was, IMHO, far and away the best praise band in southeast Missouri. I've had the honor to play with a lot of great musicians through the years at Fellowship, and they all made me a better drummer for the experience.

Most Christmas songs, even for praise band, are pretty routine, even boring in a lot of cases. Not this one. It was a straight-out rocker for us, even more edgy than the MercyMe recording that we based our cover on. I'm pretty self-centered as a drummer; to me, a good song is one that gives me something interesting and fun to do. "Rockin'" was the best of all the Christmas songs we ever did in that regard...no holding back, no "Silent Night," just play it loud and fast.

I haven't decided if I'm retired or just in hiatus from worship music at this point. I don't have a gig that's opened up yet, but I'm certainly open to possibilities. I guess you could call me a free agent at this point. Make me an offer. But I did have 13 good years with a great band. Not bad for a mediocre drummer like me!

Twelve Songs of Christmas: #8—"Jingle Bell Rock" by Hall & Oates

Oh, don't get me wrong, I love the original 1957 recording by Bobby Helms; it has classic Golden Age of Early Rock feel to it that sounds so much like the soundtrack to a Stephen King movie set in the America of mid-twentieth century. That be-bop shuffle, the swing rhythm in the lyrics, the break in the middle of the chorus...they're all classic oldie standards.

No, today's version goes to one of the most outrageously eighties videos ever made for any reason, the Hall and Oates version from 1983, and yes, people actually dressed like that and wore their hair LIKE THAT back in the early eighties. Candy coated and egregiously goofy on purpose, this is about as much fun as you can have at Christmas without spiking the eggnog.

I don't know if the eighties were a better time to be a teenager than it is today, but there are a lot of similarities. Communication and entertainment were changing rapidly with new technologies, there was a lot of social anxiety about national and world events, our national leader seemed likely to start a nuclear war because he had a bad hair day (actually not true—Reagan's hair was lacquered in place and never moved), and forces of diversity and inclusion fought against narrow-minded bigotry in many venues. On the bright side, we had simple, silly diversions such as this one.

Twelve Songs of Christmas: #9—"Holly Jolly Christmas" by Burl Ives

This song is as traditional as they come for me, and an absolutely essential song for my list. I grew up marking my calendar every year for the various Rankin-Bass stop-motion animation Christmas shows (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer; Santa Claus is Coming to Town), and "Holly Jolly Christmas" is sung in Rudolph by his character Sam the Snowman.

Hearing this song today transports me back to the 1970s, when a Christmas list was formed in the fall with the advent of the Christmas catalogs from Sears, JCPenney, and Montgomery Ward, and sealed with a letter to Santa Claus (with a copy for my parents, too, of course). Once Thanksgiving had passed, you checked the local TV listings to see when the Christmas shows would air.

This was long before streaming video, before DVDs and satellite television (unless you were super-rich), even before VCRs, and in a lot of places, cable television. You had one chance to see the various Christmas specials, and if you missed it, you had to wait AN ENTIRE YEAR before they aired again.

Needless to say, part of a child's prayers back in the day included no bad weather to interfere with the TV signal, and for the sake of the Baby Jesus, no presidential address to pre-empt the show. Back to the song...it's nothing special musically, but the memories associated make it a must to include for me.

Twelve Songs of Christmas: #10—"Santa Baby" by Madonna

Before everyone has a conniption fit about me choosing Madonna's version over the Eartha Kitt, original, just remember that Lee Meriwether, Julie Newmar, and Michelle Pfeiffer were ALL better versions of Catwoman than Ms. Kitt.

<heads explode in rage>

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's talk about Madonna's rendition of the playful Christmas classic composed by Joan Javits and Phillip Springer in 1953. Recorded in 1987 and part of the remarkable "A Very Special Christmas" album, Madonna's version channels a combination of Betty Boop and Marilyn Monroe for this Material Girl's wish list for Santa.

Backed up by a lush orchestra, "Santa Baby" is perfect ear candy for the holidays. It's a timeless song that has been covered by Gwen Stefani, LeAnn Rimes, and Kylie Minogue, but other than Kitt's original, this is the one to listen to. And really, who wouldn't want the deed to a platinum mine?

Twelve Songs of Christmas: #11—"Feliz Navidad" by Jose Feliciano

Since I was little, as far back into the 1970s as I can remember, this song has made me happy. Even before I was old enough to understand that "Feliz Navidad" was Spanish for "Merry Christmas," this classic tune has always made me smile.

There's something exotic about hit songs in other languages. Some of the most notable were sung in German (go figure), such as "99 Luftballoons," "Rock Me Amadeus," and "Der Kommissar." I mention those three because their English-translated versions are just awful. It really loses everything cool about the song in translation.

Jose Feliciano, however, bridges the transition between Spanish and English perfectly, blending the two languages together in a singular message of peace and prosperity at Christmas time. This message is sorely needed in today's world. In a time when we pray for peace on earth, maybe we could start by not being such giant assholes toward our southern neighbors. It's not much, I know, but at least it's a start.

Twelve Songs of Christmas: #12—"Sleigh Ride" by The Ronettes

The song that kicks off my countdown is the perfect tune to kick off the Christmas season. "Sleigh Ride" was written in 1948 by Leroy Anderson, with lyrics added by Mitchell Parish in 1950. There have been countless versions of the song throughout the years, all of which I enjoy every time, but this 1963 version by The Ronettes is head-and-shoulders above all the rest for me.

I know that in retrospect, Phil Spector is a human reptile, but in spite of that, his signature "Wall of Sound" technique build musical layers that best feature Ronnie Spector's lead vocals as well as the "Ring-a-ling-a-ling, ding-dong-ding" of the background vocals that drives the song forward.

The holiday season is almost always a busy rush for most people, but especially for those who embrace Christmas in either its religious or secular activities (and often both at the same time). The up-tempo joyfulness of this song keeps my spirits light and my feet moving, especially when there is so much to do before the 25th. Giddy-up, giddy-up, giddy-up, let's go!

Twelve Songs of Christmas: Honorable Mentions

Because it's the Christmas season, we here at Blog Club would like to commemorate the festivities with our take on the classic carol "The Twelve Days of Christmas" by posting, over the next twelve days, our twelve favorite Christmas songs. Like most of the things we do, we had a conversation about the boundaries and parameters of what this would entail. Upon conclusion, I'm guessing that we're all going to do our own thing (go figure!). Anyone who's read our previous efforts in movies and music could have guessed that already.

So how am I approaching it? For me, it's the twelve essential Christmas songs that I love to listen to repeatedly during the holidays. These are the ones I don't get tired of. In some cases, it will be a particular version by an individual artist that makes it special, and in some other cases, the song itself is a beloved favorite, and multiple interpretations just make it better. Most of my songs are secular; my comrades may or may not have more traditional church carols included.

As always, these are personal and subjective choices, and even if you hate the song or the version that I chose, remember two things: 1) You are free, invited, and encouraged to create your own blog, join the Blog Club (easiest membership ever...just post something!), and post your own favorites, making sure in your own prose to point out my numerous errors of taste; 2) Remember that some people like Hawaiian pizza—there's just no accounting for tastes, and besides, that's what makes the world go 'round. (And gravity, or something, I think...you know, science...)

We're running the official twelve beginning tomorrow, which will unveil our top choices on Sunday, December 23, wrapping things up right on time before Christmas Eve. After all, even if we wanted to write, you're going to be too busy to read. But before my #12 pick tomorrow, here are the five Honorable Mention songs that I also love...just not enough to put them ahead of the others.

#13—"Winter Wonderland"
I walk around during the month of December singing this as much as any other Christmas song. My favorite rendition comes from Eurythmics and the incomparable voice of Annie Lennox.

#14—"Let It Snow"
Fun to sing along at any time, this Christmas classic also plays during the closing credits of one of the greatest Christmas movies of all time...Die Hard.

#15—"I'll Be Home for Christmas"
I've acted in a Christmas play of the same name twice, and this song always brings back fond memories. It's also one of the best sentiments of the season...being at home surrounded by family and friends is one of the best things about the holiday season. I'm including Frank Sinatra's version, which is smoother than the scotch he was drinking during the recording session.

#16—"Grown-Up Christmas List"
One of the best "new" Christmas songs of the past 20 years, this sentiment is sorely needed in our selfish, materialistic culture today. Amy Grant's voice is as comforting as a warm pair of slippers in front of a fireplace.

Bonus Track—"Carol of the Bells"
Family Guy has totally ruined this song for me, but especially for my wife, since this is the version I sing out loud to her anytime any other version of this song is played: