It's the holiday season and nothing much is going on before bowls start up, so let's do an old fashioned blog tradition where one kind of thing is compared to another kind of thing. This time: which holiday song is your SEC football team?
Alabama: Sleigh Ride
"Sleigh Ride" is objectively one of the best holiday songs ever written. If you were to make a list of everything you'd want in a holiday song, it would check nearly all of them off. And yet, it's also very easy for "Sleigh Ride" to get old for people who aren't dedicated fans of the song. Can we please listen to something else for a change?
Arkansas: I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus
I feel like Bret Bielema is the SEC coach most likely to get condemned by the Catholic church over a misunderstanding.
Auburn: O Holy Night
"O Holy Night" is one where you tend to either get really great or really awful renditions of the song without much in between.
Florida: All I Want for Christmas is You
Some people love this song, some people hate it, and it didn't exist before the 1990s.
Georgia: Joy to the World
"Joy to the World" is one of the better holiday songs, but if you look at its melody, it's basically just moving up and down the major scale. It's effective, but it's not all that creative. (For maximum Georgia, make it the Third Day version.)
Kentucky: The Dreidel Song
Kentucky will be polite and attend your Christmas party, but deep down, it's celebrating a different holiday altogether.
LSU: Jingle Bells
"Jingle Bells" was the first popular song about riding in a horse drawn sleigh through the snow. It's a good song, too. But then "Sleigh Ride" came along and stole that theme and did it better. In comparison, "Jingle Bells" sounds simplistic, even though there really isn't anything wrong with it. It's OK that it's a slight step down from "Sleigh Ride", but there are some people out there who will never get over that fact.
Ole Miss: O Come Emmanuel
It's a song about the coming good times, but its dreary minor key setting makes you doubt whether those good times will ever come.
Mississippi State: Carol of the Bells
Hark! How the bells
Sweet silver bells
All seem to say
CLANGACLANGACLANGACLANGACLANGACLANGACLANGACLANGACLANGACLANGACLANGACLANGACLANGACLANGACLANGACLANGACLANGACLANGACLANGA
Missouri: Silent Night
Even at its best, the song is understated. And when things go wrong with the song, it tends to just end up boring rather than flame out spectacularly.
South Carolina: Baby It's Cold Outside
The song had a brief heyday decades ago, but it fell away for a long time until a mid-2000s revival thanks to the movie Elf. Steve Spurrier is Will Ferrell in this analogy.
Tennessee: Santa Baby
It's clearly a song from another time, no matter how many people try to modernize it.
Texas A&M: Feliz Navidad
The song gets you excited at first because it's upbeat and peppy. After the third time through the same exact verse and chorus, you begin to wonder whether it has anywhere to go from here before the audio engineer pulls the plug.
Vanderbilt: Do You Hear What I Hear?
It is possible to do a good version of this song, but it's really, really hard.