“Jack Frost roasting on an open fire
Chestnuts nipping at your nose ….”
Yes, my Hordeling, it’s that time of year when Christmas songs are in the air. There’s no getting away from them. There are even radio stations devoted entirely to Christmas songs.
It also means that we are in the time of Whamageddon 2025.
The game goes as such – starting on December 1 and going until the end of December 24, you must not hear the song Last Christmas by the duo Wham! If you do, you lose. That’s it.
There is one very important rule clarification – it must be the original version by Wham! to count as a loss. It seems that covers and other versions can be heard and not be considered a loss. That is fortunate as at the beginning of December Scottish actor and playwright Kenny Boyle, who posts short videos about Scottish mythology on Facebook, made a video about a Scottish Christmas myth. It was a story about a girl who gave her physical heart to a faerie for one year on Christmas Day, who in turn gave it to the Faerie King to pay off a debt. A year later the girl’s brother was ill and needed a new heart. She waited for the Faerie to return her heart so she could give it to her brother, and the Faeirie did, but he requested it for another year. She said “Last Christmas I gave you my heart, but the very next day you gave it away. This year, to save me from tears, I’ll give it to someone special.” The stinker.
Personally, I’m of a mind that listening to any version of Last Christmas is too much so I’m generally a fan of playing Whamageddon.
This year I did fairly well. Aside from Kenny Boyle trying to put one over on everybody, I heard a cover version once while the wife was shopping in a store.
Things were going well. I avoided the dreaded song everywhere I went.
Last Friday, I had to run a quick errand to the grocery store to pick up a few things for dinner. The store is only a few minutes away. I put the radio on to my favorite station but they were doing a football game broadcast. I hit scan and tried to find another station to listen to. I finally settled on a station playing Carol of the Bells. I like it as a piece of music, especially the version by Transiberian Orchestra, but it always seemed a little ominous to be a Christmas song for my tastes.
I went in the store, grabbed the stuff we needed and hopped back in the car. It seems I landed on the all Christmas music station because they started playing Jingle Bell Rock on my short drive home. It was ending just as I drove up the hill to our house.
Then it happened. The opening strains of Wham!’s Last Christmas came on. Arrrgh!
It’s my own fault. I should have turned off the radio in the first place especially as Christmas music was playing.
I did much better this year than last year. I think I lost on December 3 or somewhere close to beginning of the month.
If you’re playing, my Hordeling, I hope you make it to the end. Good luck.
If you’d like to support my efforts, why not buy me a chocolate chip cookie through my Ko-Fi page? https://ko-fi.com/jhusum
Wham is still making music? I started actively not listening to them back in the 1980s.
The Beatles broke up after only 10 years. Wham is still making music over 5 decades later.
There is something very, very, very, very, very wrong with this world.
I’m not entirely sure if Wham! is making music or not. I think not, most likely. That hasn’t stopped the Internet from dragging their song from many years ago back into the limelight and making a silly game out of it. I don’t particularly like the song, but I do like silly games, and as this game is for people who don’t like the song, it works for me. YMMV.