Christmas music is kind of a weird thing. For ~1 and a half months out of the year, everyone in the country decides that it's now acceptable to play music from the 50s and 60s in every public place and on half of every radio station. Course, a lot of people are sick of hearing pre-Rock and Roll easy listening hits from 70 years ago dredged up and blaring in every K-Mart and Taco Bell in the country, especially if you work at one, but it gives Christmas as a time of year a very defined sound. It's its own genre, even though Christmas songs span myriad different artists, styles, and eras.
This inspired me to see what people think of these songs. Are they unimpeachable classics, or overplayed garbage? What song will stand victorious at the end? That's what the CLASSIC CHRISTMAS SONG THROWDOWN aims to accomplish.
Obviously when it came to picking out a list of songs for this bracket, it was gonna be impossible to satisfy everyone. So I opted to use someone else's list as a baseline, to shift the blame. This bracket is based on Billboard.com's "100 Greatest of All Time Holiday Songs". I'm not completely certain how they came upon this list, it's not based on the actual Billboard charts so it was probably just a random listicle thrown together by an intern. But the choices made enough sense that I decided it was a good starting point (Although it regrettably meant my personal favorite Christmas song, Christmas Wrapping by The Waitresses, had to be left out).
The list did need a bit of processing to work, though. First, since this is the Classic Christmas Song Throwdown, I decided to remove all songs released after the turn of the millenium. That seemed like a solid cutoff point to me, I knew I had to include 90s songs since All I Want For Christmas Is You being excluded would've felt incredibly wrong. I also removed any duplicates, i.e. the same song being performed by two different artists/groups. In these cases I only included the higher-ranked version. After dropping songs that didn't fit these criteria I added the top 32 songs of the list to the bracket, with seeding based on their position in Billboard's list.
