Holiday music video countdown Day 18, featuring Low

One of the most common tropes in Christmas songs (the secular ones, at least, and especially the ones aimed at kids) is anticipation for the arrival of a certain chubby gift-giver.

Think about it: “Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane)”, “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town”, “(Everybody’s Waitin’ for) The Man With the Bag”… the list goes on.

Not one of these songs addresses the fact that the entire premise of Santa Claus is kind of creepy. Giving gifts to children is all well and good, but the idea that he somehow knows whether every kid has been good or bad according to his own standards—he’s making a list!—suggests that childhood is a dystopian surveillance state that not even George Orwell could have dreamed up.

Even if you’re in Kris Kringle’s good books, you get rewarded for it when the guy sneaks into your house in the middle of the night. And don’t even think about staying up all night to catch him, because he’s stealthy enough to avoid all detection.

There’s really only one song (and video) I can think of that even comes close to capturing how weird and potentially frightening this entire enterprise starts to seem if you think about it too much: “Santa’s Coming Over” by Low.

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One response to “Holiday music video countdown Day 18, featuring Low”

  1. John Lucas Avatar

    […] already feature Low in this series of blog posts? I sure did! And I didn’t even get around to the band’s two best seasonal songs—which are, of […]

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