Toronto rocker DANKO JONES recently launched a column at Canada's Huffington Post. Following is an excerpt from his latest article:

Halloween is my favourite holiday of the year. It's the only time when you can publicly sport an upside down cross on your person and nobody bats an eye. For the rest of the year, you have to keep that sort of crucifix tucked inside your t-shirt and it gets quite uncomfortable, especially during summer heat waves when it sticks to your skin, but I digress...

When all the skulls and odes to Satan are quietly put away for another year, the dreaded ramp-up to Christmas begins. In the States there's still Thanksgiving and Black Friday to contend with to keep the Yuletide at bay, but up here in Canada it mushrooms overnight. In the blink of an eye gone are the pumpkins and witch's wands and in come the stockings and pine trees. It's enough to make even the most staunch Christmas carolers feign laryngitis.

We're all more than aware that the good intentions behind Christmas died long ago. When Ebenezer Scrooge was supposedly converted by The Ghosts of Christmas, Dickens failed to give us the final chapter of the story where Scrooge discovered that maintaining a jolly, disingenuous disposition is monetarily better for business and can yield greater dividends that'll tide you over during the slower months like January and February.

For a lot of people, besides the inevitable last-minute shopping, black ice, -30 degree weather, unending darkness and general malaise, Christmas music contains just of that special grating something to make people wanna commit holiday harakiri. The last thing we need to hear is some overly-peppy voice thankful for all the goddamn snow while we watch our savings dwindle in order to please some bratty nephew.

Most people rightfully knee-jerk into a hateful diatribe about Christmas music. Still, it never stops anyone from buying more Christmas records every season with the newest crop of celebutards taking a stab at it each year from the cast of Glee to Lady Antebellum.

Of course, there's always the ironic hipster twisters who always assume their job is to take something unhip and turn it cool like some Pitchfork Martha Stewarts. Zooey Deschanel's She & Him Christmas album A Very She & Him Christmas, Bright Eyes' A Christmas Album and even Scott Weiland's The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year all come to mind.

All of this is fine by me.

Surprisingly, I've never hated Christmas music and I've always felt the more the merrier. That said, everyone must understand, there's only one Christmas album that matters. To my ears, all other Christmas albums sound like third-rate Chipmunks knock-offs, and that includes the impervious Bing Crosby!

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