Christine the Christmas Tree

Lilly insists on turning on 93.9 WLIT at times, a station that's all Christmas music pro tem, though as a mark of her development into a person that has some sense, she will also turn it off if she hears a song played only a few hours earlier -- which is often, considering the station's unimaginative, heavy-rotation approach. Good for her. Of course, I encourage this behavior with disparaging remarks about the station and its dumbing down of the Christmas music canon.

Just how many versions of "The Little Drummer Boy" are there anyway? I'm hard-pressed to like any of them. The song's always rubbed me a little wrong. A kid wants to beat his drum near a newborn and a presumably exhausted new mother. Sure, kid, they'll like that. Naturally, I'm missing the "Christmas miracle" of the song, in which a newborn and a presumably exhausted new mother appreciate the poor boy's only gift, etc. Call me a cynic.

On the vastly superior 90.9 WDCB on Saturday, I heard a Christmas song I'd never heard before during its old-time radio show Those Were The Days. That's good. I like to do that every Christmas season if I can -- at least one old song previously unfamiliar. Even if it's an awful song like "Christine the Christmas Tree," sung by Jon Arthur fairly late in classic radio, 1955. "Christine the Christmas tree, half as tall as a tree should be," it begins, and tells the story of an anthropomorphic tree who wants to be cut down, but who is bypassed by the woodsmen every year because of her shortness. In its weird way, the song foreshadows Charlie Brown's runty tree, and Charlie the Tuna as well, who is disappointed by missing out on being canned for food. In the end, however, all is well for Christine, because the king and queen come along and decide she would be perfect next to their throne -- that year and ever after (and what kind of preservative are we talking about here?).

I googled "Christine the Christmas Tree" and got six results, three of which have nothing to do with the song. That's not quite the gold standard for obscurity in our time, which would be no results. But it's close. Google "Solar System Simon, Santa's Supersonic Son" -- another song I heard on 90.9 one year -- and you'll get two results, including this one. Seems like it was a real record, perhaps by a fellow hoping that a novelty hit would turn his career around.