fairytale of new york

this is my favorite christmas song ever. (it may be my favorite drinking song as well but that's another post for another day.)

what i like about it is this is not the happy christmas song one expects, the trite platitude offered as if real emotion and sentiment accompanies it. this instead is a song for the down-and-out, the drunk drinkers who spend the holiday in a tavern, the screw-ups who are unwelcome amongst their family and who hurt so much they are given to numbness.

shane macgowan, the pogues' singer, may be chief among those who numb. in fact, the documentary movie 'if i should fall from grace,' has got to be one of the most heartbreaking accounts of a man's life one can find. the fact that macgowan is still alive is not short of amazing. so when he sings in his inimitable style, through teeth that seem to play goalie with the escaping words, knocking them down and causing a guttural echo to play on them as they depart, his voice is poignant on fairytale because he knows of what he speaks, (the pettiness and the beauty.)

fairytale of new york is yet another of the tracks included on my holiday cd.