Worst Christmas Songs: Part II

Song: Christmas Shoes
Artist: Newsong
Released: circa 2000

There's a known philosophy struggling musical "artists" tend to abide by in terms of their own success: When all else fails, appeal to the lowest common denominator. For the self-described "contemporary Christian music group" Newsong, this of course means packaging up the most sappy and puerile storyline imaginable, setting it to a four-chord Garage Band melody template, and selling it to the bleeding heart masses of the world.

Christmas Shoes satisfies this criteria in high fashion. Written from the first-person perspective of a nonplussed holiday consumer waiting in line at a store, Christmas Shoes tells the story of an impoverished boy who pleads with the cashier to rapidly complete his point-of-sale transaction of some shoes he's buying for his sickly mother at home who is nearing death's door.

Observe the little boy's epic address to the cashier as detailed in the chorus:

Sir, I want to buy these shoes for my Mama, please
It's Christmas Eve and these shoes are just her size
Could you hurry, sir, Daddy says there's not much time
You see she's been sick for quite a while
And I know these shoes would make her smile
And I want her to look beautiful if Mama meets Jesus tonight.

After this emotional display, the cashier must have been annoyed with this little kid "hurrying" him, because immediately following this heart-wrenching monologue:

He counted pennies for what seemed like years
Then the cashier said, "Son, there's not enough here..."

This cashier is one cold-hearted bastard! He doesn't care about this kid's dying mother, he's still pissed about this kid telling him to speed things up. Though it is never disclosed what was taking the cashier so long that the boy would ask him to hurry up, it is the boy who does not abide by his own sense of urgency as "he counted pennies for what seemed like years..." I'm also fairly certain there was an omitted portion of this verse in which the cashier explains that he cannot accept food stamps as a legitimate form of payment for the shoes.

Moving on...

He searched his pockets frantically
Then he turned and he looked at me
He said Mama made Christmas good at our house
Though most years she just did without
Tell me Sir, what am I going to do,
Somehow I've got to buy her these Christmas shoes.

Something tells me this kid is no stranger to the art of bilking strangers out of their money. At this rebuttal, typical children would have either run off crying or bluntly asked the person behind them for the cash straight up. But not the unfortunate son of this tale; he understands the subtlety and nuance required to prime a wayfaring bystander for a charitable donation. (More likely and much more obvious is that these few lines were needed to carry superfluous exposition in the song.)

So I laid the money down, I just had to help him out
I'll never forget the look on his face when he said
Mama's gonna look so great...

...I just had to help him out.... I just had to. I'm not sure what it is about the use of the words just and had in this line that infuriates me so. Perhaps because it somehow implies a sort of reserved moral obligation that would have otherwise failed him in similar circumstances with slight variations in regard to the specific situation (i.e., if the boy had been buying a pack of cigarettes for his dying mother). Perhaps because it instantly thrusts the storyteller from the role of random observer to the apparent "hero" of the story, then we're left to guess if all this unnecessary foofaraw is for the own self-serving glory of the narrator.

Then the song is wrapped up in an awkward bridge:

I knew I'd caught a glimpse of heaven's love
As he thanked me and ran out
I knew that God had sent that little boy
To remind me just what Christmas is all about.

As much as I would have hated to suffer through it, something inside me wishes he would have expounded on exactly "what Christmas is all about." Poverty? People dying? Impatient kids? Jaded cashiers? I am obviously being overtly fatuous, but the point is, who cares?

The song is a few lines of mere fiction, not remotely told well, intended to tug violently at the emotional heartstrings of its audience, so they may rush out and purchase related paraphernalia in large quantities. Not convinced this song enjoyed rampant commercial success? After its release, not only was it a #1 single, it also spawned a book, The Christmas Shoes and a made-for-TV movie by the same name "starring" Rob Lowe.

In lieu of posting the actual music video, as originally planned, I found this much more hilarious and very poorly made film-student version: