Homage to Band Aid

Over the past week, I have read two friends' blogs that have celebrated and panned some of the Christmas songs playing on Pandora and our local radio stations. If you haven't been introduced to these two cute girls, you need to read them What's Bakin' and Eat, Drink, and Be Mary Douglass.

My friend at What's Bakin' was lamenting on the songs One Last Christmas and Christmas Shoes. OMW! I am so with her! Call me insensitive and callous, but those songs make me want to gouge my eyes out and just give up. Feeling just a bit depressed this Christmas season, but just not enough? Just play one of these babies and you are good to go! (By the way, "Butterfly Kisses" also makes me want to vomit... just in case you were wondering.)

Cute Mary Douglass, however, I must disagree with on her only panned song: Do They Know It's Christmas?. Now I know you are probably calling me a big hypocrite as this song is pretty sad too. BUT how can you not love it? I have to say I was shocked at Mary Douglass... but then I remembered she is ten to fifteen years younger than I and has absolutely no understanding of the power and presence this song had on our Reagan era lives back in 1984! There are so many reasons it would be way up there on my Christmas song list... if I took the energy to create one.

My Top Ten Reasons to "Let Them Know It's Christmastime"

1. I was fifteen when the song came out and could not wait to race out and buy the 45 from Peaches Records and Tapes in Five Points. My friends and I played it over and over and watched the video on MTV (back in the day when it really was MUSIC television).

2. Also, at fifteen, one feels she actually can save - or at least feed - the world by buying a 45 record. And there's just something warm and fuzzy about remembering that when one is now in her forties.

3. Band Aid was the original "do good" pop group. Live Aid and Quincey Jones didn't come out until much later the following year. American copycats...

4. It was filled with British pop stars of the 80s.

5. It IS happy, what with all the cheerful Brits playing air guitar at the end of the song... "Feed the wor-orld... Let them know it's Christmas time!"

6. Specifically... Bono

7. Specifically... Paul Young (OK, so he's not British, but he WAS the only yank who crossed the pond for this.)

8. Specifically... Sting

9. Specifically... Bananarama (remember them?!?!?!)

10. And last, but definitely not least, Duran Duran. How Merry Christmas-ilicious were they?

This is my list... I'm sticking to it.