Spice Girls in 1997, and Kylie Minogue (Photos: Shutterstock)
Who remembers The Waitresses?
Even if you’re a child of the early 1980s, you might not. However, you will recognize the one song for which the new wave outfit is best known — even if it wasn’t a big hit at the time of its release.
“Christmas Wrapping” appeared at the tail end of 1981 and has returned to haunt the festive airwaves each year since (thanks to a little help from the Spice Girls and others).
The Waitresses were formed by musician and writer Chris Butler in the late 1970s. From Akron, Ohio, he was actually in another band at the time (Tin Huey), but he created the Waitresses as a New Wave side project with a friend, Patty Donahue (also known as Patty Darling).
The duo recorded a track called “I Know What Boys Like”. It got them signed by ZE Records in New York and became an underground hit in 1980.
Butler set about recruiting further musicians to create an actual touring band and then released a debut album, Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful? in early 1982. A re-release of “I Know What Boys Like”, through Polydor, reached No. 62 on the Billboard Hot 100.
A Christmas request
ZE approached Butler and its other post-punk acts in the summer of 1981 and asked each to come up with a festive song for a planned holiday compilation, A Christmas Record.
Butler did so begrudgingly. The Waitresses were in the middle of a fractious and punishing tour of small venues. Butler ignored the request as long as possible, but when pressed by the label boss, he relented. On a hot August day, he put the song together using a bunch of half-finished riffs he’d been working on and completed the lyrics on the way to the recording studio in Greenwich Village in New York City.
“I go back and I try to think of what the original inspiration was. I think it was just very much that for years I hated Christmas,” Butler later said.
“Everybody I knew in New York was running around like a bunch of fiends. It wasn’t about joy. It was something to cope with.”
He later told the Guardian, “I hated Christmas. I always had to work when everyone was having an eggnog. So I poured my sourness into this song.”
The lyrics reflect this. Singer Donahue sings about a crazily busy year, which includes several missed romantic opportunities with a dude.
“So deck those halls, trim those trees, raise up cups of Christmas cheer, I just need to catch my breath, Christmas by myself this year.”
And then the decidedly unfestive first chorus: “Merry Christmas, merry Christmas, but I think I’ll miss this one this year.”
Later in the song, she hooks up with her elusive paramour at the grocery store while buying last-minute provisions for dinner and realizes her holidays will be special after all.
“It’s about two people alone at Christmas who meet while buying cranberry sauce, and get together. Of course, it had to have a happy ending – it’s Christmas! – but it was tongue in cheek,” Butler says.
“Good Times”
Musically, it’s a Frankenstein’s monster of a tune that lurches around with inebriated energy. Somehow, it works and it’s impossible not to nod along to the “Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas…” refrain. It’s held together by a dancefloor-friendly bassline, provided by backing vocalist and bass player Tracy Wormworth. She later said she’d been inspired by Chic’s “Good Times”. There’s also a nod to Kurtis Blow’s “Christmas Rappin’” which had come out the year before.
If “Christmas Wrapping” was only released on the ZE compilation, it might have disappeared. However, Island released it as a single in the UK in late 1982 and it peaked at a lowly No. 45 in the charts.
Unfortunately, a lack of mainstream success and pressure to deliver a second album added to friction within the band. Donahue quit in 1983 and the Waitresses crumbled. Donahue died from lung cancer in 1996 at age 40.
The Spice Girls cover the song at their peak
Despite never making it big, “Christmas Wrapping” has furnished Butler with welcome royalties every year. It got a significant boost in 1996 when the Spice Girls requested permission to cover it.
Butler was initially unimpressed.
“I winced,” he recalled to The Star in 2011, when he found out the British girl band wanted to do it. “At the time, I was working in experimental music with Television’s Richard Lloyd, and the most commercial band of the day covers this 290-year-old song? Talk about a mind [expletive]. Is it any good? Probably not. But who cares? They did it, I’m grateful, and it’s going to buy my kid the greatest associate’s degree money can buy.”
The Spice Girls released the track as a b-side to “Goodbye” at the tail end of 1998. They altered a few of the lyrics to reflect the tumultuous year they’d had. Victoria Beckham and Mel B were both pregnant and taking time off at the time so only Emma and Mel C sang on it. (Geri Halliwell had left the group in May of that year.)
They weren’t the only ones to pay tribute to the track.
It was sung by the cast of Glee (with lead vocals by Heather Morris) on the 2011 episode, “Extraordinary Merry Christmas.” Other artists to cover it include The Saturdays, Martha Wainwright, Haim, Bella Thorne and the Donnas.
One of its most unusual covers came courtesy of Kylie Minogue and Iggy Pop. It appeared on Kylie’s holiday album, Kylie Christmas, in 2015.
Despite being written quickly and under duress by a songwriter who initially thought of himself as too cool for Yule, “Christmas Wrapping” has taken on a life of its own. Long may it continue to sparkle.
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