Pet Shop Boys: "Doesn't Often Snow at Christmas"

The sun is shining, the grass is green,

The orange and palm trees sway.

There's never been such a day

In Beverly Hills, LA

But it's December the twenty-fourth,

And I am longing to be up north...

With climate change, "Last Christmas" could start to take on a new meaning. Until then, however, it will be a rich man's whinge, particularly when it includes the above verse which is often excised from recordings. Bing Crosby even knew better than to include it. It's more than a little hard to swallow the concept of wealthy Californians bemoaning the holidays due to the weather being too good. Surely Bing or Robert Goulet would have been able to afford a cabin on Lake of the Woods or a ranch just outside of Boise, Idaho where he could have escaped just to try to have a shot at this white Christmas he so cares for. Aren't there more important things he could have worried about?

"Doesn't Often Snow at Christmas" is not exactly "West End Girls" or "Left to My Own Devices" or "Being Boring": it isn't one of their classics and even the deepest PSB follower likely wouldn't be too bothered if it was suddenly erased from existence. Like XTC's festive single, it's the kind of thing I like mainly because I've always been a fan. Nevertheless, it's a Christmas song that only they could have written and one that desperately needed doing.

Use of irony in Pet Shop Boys' songs has always been overstated but it's hard to deny that it doesn't play a part in their work. Where earlier songs like "Opportunities" and "Shopping" display pure spitefulness for its own sake, they later began to show some empathy with the subjects they were dunking on, such as in "Miserablism" and "Shameless". "Doesn't Often..." describes a typically lousy Christmas full of obnoxious family members, uninspired presents, boring conversation, crappy food consumed off of tacky TV trays and pitiful jokes inside Christmas crackers. Yet, it's a nice holiday because it's spent with someone special. I'm not quite as willing to forgive all the rotten aspects of Yuletide but I can appreciate the sentiment.

"The Christmas message was long ago lost / Now it's all about shopping and how much things cost": I'm not there has ever been much a message to the Christmas season — A Charlie Brown Christmas certainly doesn't clear up the matter in my mind — but commercialism doesn't ruin it. The holidays being increasingly secular means that there are more opportunities for everyone to do their thing and bring their own meaning to it. As long as we're all happy then we needn't worry about any bloody message.

We also have the main difference between American and British Christmas songs. While Bing Crosby and Mariah Carey and Frank Sinatra all deal in Xmas fantasies that can never be attained, Slade and John Lennon and the Pet Shops manage to squeeze in some realism - even if it happens to be as manufactured as their American counterparts. "Do the fairies keep him sober for a day?", "So this is Christmas and what have you done?", "Nothing on the TV that you want to see": these don't capture the Christmas you dream of but the Christmas, in the immortal word of Greg Lake, "we get we deserve".