Before hearing of Weird Al Yankovic or “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” I helped pull a former on the latter. Just for kicks, in October of my first-grade year, our teacher had us compose and perform “The Twelve Days of Halloween.”
Only the last five gifts from the unspecified true love have stuck in my memory bank. They included five scary spooks, four skeletons, three black cats, two trick-or-treaters and an owl in a dead tree. I would like to think there was also a combination of bats, vampires and witches, but the tallies escape me.
I might have remembered the rest had I known the source of the parody at the time. But strangely, I never encountered “The Twelve Days of Christmas” until second grade. To the best of my recollection, our teacher did not even tell us what we were basing our Halloween song on.
Regardless, it was not half-bad for amateurs, and I retroactively appreciate our beating the Christmas creep at its own game. Granted, that was an easier task at the time. This was in the mid-’90s, when the creep was comparatively tame. Its most egregious enabler then was Tim Burton, who had elongated his poem, The Nightmare Before Christmas, into a full-length film.
That flick may not have originated the definitive December holiday’s encroachment on October. But the habit has practically crossed its point of no return, therefore damage control is in order.
Weird Al, or at least someone like him, is our best bet in this endeavor. An album of Halloween-oriented Christmas-song parodies can help return mid-autumn to the definitive harvest festival.
If 20 grade-school children and their teacher can create one decent takeoff, then one seasoned songwriter could easily make a dozen-plus.
It should be noted that Weird Al is adamant about ignoring fan submissions. As the FAQ page on his website explains, “he’s got plenty warped ideas on his own!” Therefore the odds are he will eschew the suggestions in this column, regardless of who it reaches.
Nonetheless, some holiday standards and their would-be Halloweenized clones are perched on a pumpkin-spice platter. Surely someone can hone an appetite for a “Hay Ride” to the tune of “Sleigh Ride.”
Just hear those dead leaves rustling, crunching, crackling oo-oo
Come on, it’s lovely weather for a hay ride together with you
Outside the wolves are howling and owls are calling who-who
Come on, it’s lovely weather for a hay ride together with you
And then there are the potential ways to laughably lament a new neighbor’s trick-or-treat offerings versus those of their preferable predecessors. The subject of that song can be asked to move back to the tune of “(Christmas) Baby Please Come Home.” (Pending Darlene Love’s blessing, of course, if this were to be a Weird Al project.)
They gave us popcorn balls
But that’s not like candy at all
I remember when you were here
And all the chocolate you gave last year(Candy) if there was a way
(Candy) I’d hold back this TP
(Candy) ’Cause it’s Halloween
But assuming Weird Al will stand pat on this, there are plenty of other humorists in his alley. Of particular note, longtime Seattle radio jockey Bob Rivers has released five Christmas parody albums. Four years ago, Richard Cheese & Lounge Against the Machine churned out Cocktails with Santa.
Naturally, though, each of those compilations stayed within the boundaries of the December holidays. Some of the tracks did not even stray from the original lyrics.
Halloween has its own (though paltry) allotment of direct and de facto anthems. Weird Al himself has had his “Nature Trail to Hell” filed under that heading.
Elsewhere, the German group Helloween alludes to a time-honored Peanuts special in “Halloween.” Taking care not to unlawfully name the Great Pumpkin, it mentions Charlie Brown, Linus and their exploits on that night.
The passing reference appeared in one verse of the 1987 track. That came 20 years after The Royal Guardsmen vaguely evoked It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown in none other than a Christmas track.
Snoopy’s fantasized feud with a German fighter pilot in World War I was not solely a Halloween item. It just made a natural choice of costume for the dog. And arguably the most famous of his imagined battles came in the 1966 Halloween TV special.
The Royal Guardsmen released a wholly holiday-free song, “Snoopy vs. The Red Baron,” one month after The Great Pumpkin premiered. The next year, they honored the 1914 Christmas Truce with a story of each character’s involvement in the brief ceasefire.
There was nothing wrong with that song, and 50 years later it is still fine. But it will only be so if radio stations have the common sense and courtesy to reserve “Snoopy’s Christmas” for the window between Black Friday and Boxing Day.
As it is, Halloween is hurting for its fair share of the media calendar. The day for frightful figures has let the Christmas creep rob its real estate, and neither holiday benefits from that. The appetite for a winter wonderland gets harder to hold up for its proper date by the year.
With that said, there is no reason one cannot lend an extra meaning to the “share” in “fair share.”
It has been more than three decades since “Nature Trail to Hell” and “Halloween” came out. The utter dearth of pure Halloween entertainment underscores either a lack of incentive or an epidemic of autumnal songwriter’s block.
As long as the Christmas creep is kicking off its boots, we might as well enlist it to solve that standstill. Weird Al or a Weird Al wannabe would be the logical negotiator in bargaining to borrow the melodies the creep brings and repurposing them to a more month-appropriate effect.
What we need now is a Weird Al-type album under a banner along the lines of Happy Holiween. We need someone to pull a better Jack Skellington by Halloweenizing the imperious yuletide.
If the creep is to keep asserting itself in October, it should assimilate. It should learn to laugh at itself as we learn to laugh off its side effects. It needs a Halloween mask, and music is the most abundant, quality mask material it can bring to the party.
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