The Progressive Boink Holiday Mixtape!

If there is one thing I've come to truly love about my fellow Progressive Boink writers in our 10+ years as collaborators and friends, it's how gleefully uncool we all are. Bill unabashedly loves sugary pop music. Jon once owned Reign of Fire on DVD. I say "once" because that DVD is sitting on my shelf as I type this. Brandon . . . hell, Brandon has built his entire career around celebrating dumb shit. And me? Well I love Christmas.

When I say, "I love Christmas" I don't mean, "I love the feeling of warmth and season of giving and spending time with loved ones," although that too, I guess. I love all of the worst things about Christmas. The parts that make other people HATE Christmas. I love holiday themed junk food. I love tacky light displays that blink out of sequence. I love horrible made-for-TV movies on the Hallmark channel that are all called something like, A VERY MERRY HEART FOR CHRISTMAS and star Joey Lawrence. I love Shrek the Halls. And I really, truly (madly, deeply) love Christmas music.

It is in this spirit, of Christmas cheer and liking things that are terrible, that we bring you the Progressive Boink Holiday Mixtape! (The exclamation point makes it extra festive.) Each weekday, from now until Christmas, one member of our staff will be sharing a song (Christmas or otherwise holiday-themed) that makes their heart grow so big it breaks the machine. Some may be standards (although if you've reached adulthood and need some dude on the internet to tell you to listen to Bing Crosby, I don't what to tell you), some contemporary, and some might be straight-up wackadoodle. Some of the songs might even be good! Probably not mine, though. Mine will probably be horrible.

First up: "We Need A Little Christmas," a song that originally appeared in the musical Mame and was performed by ANGELA MOTHERFUCKING LANSBURY.

I've never seen Mame but apparently the lead character's motto is, "Life is a banquet, and most poor sons-of-bitches are starving to death," so I think she might be my spirit guide.

"We Need A Little Christmas" seems like a happy little ode to putting up your Christmas decorations obnoxiously early until you start to pay attention to the lyrics:

Haul out the holly;
Put up the tree before my spirit falls again

Uh . . .

For I've grown a little leaner,
Grown a little colder,
Grown a little sadder,
Grown a little older,

I have to say, song kind of loses something when you realize it's apparently about an old lady trying to stave off the blackness of Seasonal Anxiety Disorder. If you'd like a version that doesn't make you think of "Murder, She Wrote" being swallowed by The Nothing, check out this super awesome version from A Muppet Family Christmas (which is, for those not in the know, the greatest of all Muppet-related Christmas programming):

Tomorrow: either one of the guys articulates one of their undoubtedly well reasoned choices, or I try to defend the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. WIN-WIN