Christmas Countdown Day 3: Last Christmas

There are many time-honored Christmas traditions. Mistletoe, family dinners, snuggling up with a loved one by the fire. Today I'm going to touch on the less popular tradition of re-gifting.

The song today is about that very subject, Last Christmas by Wham!.

The chorus talks about how last Christmas George Michael gave some dude his heart but the very next day (boxing day to my Canadian friends) he gave it away. Someone re-gifted George Michael's emotions like it was a fruit cake. So one day George Michael is fawning over some guy on Christmas, goes to bed and then wakes up in love with someone else.

We've all been there. We've spent Christmas with the family and had to leave to go to another party. Before you leave you find out that everyone else is bringing a gift. You were certain the e-mail said no gifts, but if everyone else is doing it you don't want to seem like a cheapskate. But it's Christmas and every thing's closed. You frantically look around the house for something to pass off as a gift. It has to be something new in box or it'll just seem like you grabbed the pot off the stove and wrapped it up.

Well, with the exception of all the new gifts nothing really fits that description. So you begin to go thorugh the gifts to see what you could do without. Not the Atari (it's the '80s, mind you)! Even one of the games would seem okay but you waited so long for the ET game to come out you're NOT going to just give it away. And the Chia Pet always looked cool in the commericals and you really want to see what the big deal is so you can't give THAT away.

Then you see it, out of the corner of your eye. Is that? Oh that'd be perfect! George Michael's heart! You re-wrap it and throw a tag on it marked to: ? and put it in the present pile at the new party. Who ends up with this gift of George Michael's heart? Why it's senator Larry Craig! Glory hole! Glory hole! Hallelujah!

Seriously though, I'm not entirely sure why this song is played so frequently on the Christmas station. Because let's be perfectly honest here, it's not a Christmas song. It's a song about how George Michael got dumped, disguised as a Christmas song. It's really rather pathetic. And to think Andrew Ridgeley had a hand in it.