About the WonderCafe Advent Calendar.

Here’s a song that will get in your head and stay there… whether you like it or not.

 

This one is for my younger sisters. Because they loved this song—loved it. They were devoted to that song in that freakishly fixative way that only pre-adolescent girls can get. There was a time around 1982 when I spent half my life trying to escape the Boney M Christmas album—which was nearly impossible because they played it all… the… TIME!

 

It’s not that I objected to to overproduced disco-era combos that bordered on being camp: I loved ABBA (though increasingly more privately the further into junior high school I went). The song simply pushed all the wrong buttons for me. It was loud. It was mind-numbingly repetitive. Child prude that I was, I balked at the contradiction of Boney M’s sexed-up album covers with a song so affirmatively pious. If I had known that several singers lip-synched as precursors to Milli Vanilli I probably would have added that to the list as well.

 

And yet…my sisters loved it.

 

Eventually, my sisters hit the age where they discovered top 40 pop music and turned their obsessive impulses over to Madness and the Spoons and whatever was being played on CFMT Video Singles. And yet, every Christmas they would say “Let’s put on some Boney M.” We’re now all adults, married and my sisters have kids and I’m still dreading them finding the Boney M CD that replaced the tape that was “lost” sometime in the mid-1980s.

 

Years later, I was chairing the organizing committee for a work Christmas party and I suggested “the Tacky Christmas Amnesty” as a theme. The whole committee’s faces lit up like Christmas trees.

 

“We can bring Boney M!” They gushed enthusiastically.

 

Thus it is that today on the WonderCafe Advent Calendar we have Boney M singing “Mary’s Boy Child”. Because, let’s face it, every Christmas there’s at least one song you can’t stand and don’t want to hear but everyone else loves.

 

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