When making the perfect holiday playlist, there are a number of factors to consider. From Frank Sinatra to Twisted Sister to Phoebe Bridgers, if you can think of a genre, there is at least one holiday album. I haven’t looked, but I promise you that Joan Jett has a cover of ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ somewhere. Now, I know what you’re thinking “That’s great news, Elinor! You’re the Music Director so that means you can make a really cool and woke Christmas playlist and call it quits!”

However, my dear readers, there is just one problem: I think that all Christmas music is extraordinarily boring. In a perfect world, we would be able to merrily wander around America’s myriad malls and listen to Hanukkah rock ballads fit for 80s night at your local roller rink. But instead we’re stuck with the same repetition of generic, overly-religious Christmas dirges. I’m serious, when was the last time you were excited over Michael Bublé?

Therein lies my conundrum, how was I supposed to make a kick-ass holiday playlist with the same rotation of seasonal Bed Bath and Beyond hits?

This does seem like an insurmountable issue, but I am an innovator. And before you ask, no I did not produce or sing a new Holiday Hit. There’s a reason I only write about music. So, instead of practicing or becoming musically talented, I decided to put my bureaucratic skills to the test and tell you about my opinions on the hard work of others.

Before we begin with my analysis, I need you to know that this article consists of just that: my opinions. So, if you’re reading and you go,

“Wow, KBGA is so culturally insensitive and rude!”

I’m going to need you to change that to: “Wow, Elinor Smith, the Music Director at KBGA who is not representative of the station’s beliefs whatsoever, is so culturally insensitive and rude!”

Now that I’ve skirted all future litigation, let’s begin. In analyzing these songs, I wanted to make sure that I could rate every culture’s holiday songs equally. Comedians will tell you not to punch down, but I’m an equal opportunity puncher-downer. And this fact leads me to exhibit A: the spread sheet of various holidays and their subsequent songs that I chose to be a sample size of the festive season.

The image to the left is unfortunately totally unreadable and serves only as proof that I actually made a spreadsheet. So let me walk you through my thought process. Starting with holidays, I chose five different December holidays to represent an even cut of the holiday season: Kwanzaa, Las Posadas, Winter Solstice, Hanukkah, and Christmas.

The songs go as following:

For Kwanzaa: Seven Principles, Seven Days of Kwanzaa Song, Kwanzaa Dance and Lift Every Voice and Sing.

For Las Posadas: Las Posadas, Ven a Cantar, Navidad sin Ti and 24 de Diciembre.

For Winter Solstice: The Solstice Carole, Twas the Moon of Wintertime, Gaia’s Lullaby and The Year is Born Anew.

For Hanukkah: 8 Days (Of Hanukkah), Dreidel Dreidel Dreidel, Ma’oz Tzur and I Won’t be Home for Chanukah.

And Finally, For Christmas: Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), Silent Night, It’s Beginning to Look a lot Like Christmas and Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.

In hindsight, 20 songs is a lot of songs. But I was duped by the formatting of Google Sheets and I thought it would be fine because the list looked short when I made it. This took me three days to do.

The ranking system, starting with bops to flops and moving to secular to religious.

But, with this I began my analysis. Going in, I planned on rating all the songs on a series of factors and then finally comparing the various comparisons to make an ultimate ranking, but that’s just as convoluted as it sounds. And who am I to be the voice of reason regarding holiday hits? So I decided to put them into a bunch of little boxes instead, which now doesn’t seem that different but it made me feel better when I was working out the concept.

I ranked each song on a spectrum of Bop v. Flop and Religious v. Secular in order to ultimately make a diagram of where each holiday song lies. In order to do that, I made up two different ranking systems of 1-10. The first being flops to bops and the second being secular to religious.

I would write the ranking system out for you like I did with the list of songs, but this one is also 20 items long and legible in the picture above.

Once I had established the ranking system all that was left was to sort each song into its place, and that’s pretty self-explanatory.

And so voila! The ultimate holiday song ranking system, and simple guidelines for how you can apply it to your favorite holiday hits.

Festivus for the Rest of Us: Seasonal Song Smackdown