Below The Beltway

The Washington Post lists the most-loved and most-hated Christmas songs according to radio listeners:

A little advice: When friends and relatives come visiting around Christmas, don’t haul out those old CDs with Madonna’s rendition of “Santa Baby” or Barbra Streisand’s “Jingle Bells?” And by all means, avoid “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.”

Unless, that is, you want to drive people away.

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This isn’t just our frankly subjective opinion. It’s the frankly subjective opinion of representative samplings of radio listeners, which makes it sort of, kind of scientific. Not one, but two research companies — Edison Media Research and Pinnacle Media Worldwide — independently surveyed listeners to divine their most loved and loathed holiday songs. (Both companies asked review panels — consisting primarily of women — to rate hundreds of Christmas-themed tunes, sorting them into such categories as “love,” “like,” “dislike” and “hate.”)

So, what’s on the most-loved list ? Not surprisingly, it’s the classics:

The most beloved songs in both surveys were often standards: Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” (he first recorded it in 1942); Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)” (1946) and Burl Ives’s “A Holly Jolly Christmas” (1965) turned up at the top of each company’s lists of favorites.

Three other staples, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” (Brenda Lee, recorded in 1958), “Jingle Bell Rock” (Bobby Helms, 1957) and John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” from 1971, scored consistently well in research conducted by California-based Pinnacle.

And the most hated ?

Among the most-hated Christmas songs, according to Edison’s research, are Streisand’s “Jingle Bells?” (too “acrobatic,” Ross ventures); the Jackson 5’s “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” (Ross: “I wonder if it’s a vote about Michael Jackson”); Elmo & Patsy’s “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer”; and “O Holy Night,” as butchered by the cartoon character Eric Cartman (voiced by Trey Parker) from Comedy Central’s “South Park.”

And the No. 1 most-hated Christmastime recording? That would be “Jingle Bells,” as “performed” by the Singing Dogs. This 1955 Danish record (reedited and rereleased in 1970) is just what the name and group say it is: a bunch of dogs woofing out the familiar tune, one bark at a time.

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“Santa Baby” by Madonna, “Merry Christmas, Darling” by the Carpenters and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” by Bruce Springsteen popped up repeatedly among the despised (Springsteen? Despised?).

The only song that bobbed to the top of both most-disliked lists is “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.”

I’ve got to say that the Christmas playlist around here definitely tends to be on the tried-and-true side of things. Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole. You really can’t go wrong with stuff like that.