Yule Blog: We Wish You a Merry Gift-mas

It's a sound that comes every Christmas time. No, it's not the sound of reindeer hooves stomping on the rooftop. Nor are we referring to the sounds of carolers on our door step. We're not even talking about the jingling of bells or those disturbing noises some people make when they are sucking face under the mistletoe or the scraping of plates as people try to quickly give the dog a piece of fruitcake off their platter or the chatter of family members as teenagers complain about YET AGAIN being at the kiddie table when they are 16, MOM, and are adult enough to drive to and from the grocery store to pick up last minute details. These are, for most people, a lot of the traditional sounds of the Christmas season but for us here at the Majak Kingdom, nothing quite symbolizes that the season is upon us than the string of complaints that come the moment the first decoration is put up at retail stores.

"Christmas has become way too commercial," a chorus of voices sing together. Nine times out of ten this is being said while somebody is busily maxing out their credit card because nothing honors the birth of baby Jesus quite like financial ruin. Maybe? Anyway, it's the most common complaint about how NOW Christmas is a holiday completely focused solely on the giving and receiving of presents and no longer about the values of peace, love and harmony that it once did in that magical time of indeterminate date called "back in the day."

Now, we'll admit that Christmas time is really a consumer-driven holiday. Most retail places make a bulk of their income from this time period. We just think it's funny how people act as though this is somehow some recent development. Last time we check, the tacky-fest that is "Santa Baby," a song so gleefully materialistic it makes "Material Girl" look Mother Theresa-esque in comparison, is not some new song. People have always been sort of greedy or O.Henry wouldn't have to write morality tales like "Gift of the Magi" to get across the "true" spirit of the season.

Anyway, we here at the Majak Kingdom are really shallow people so we embrace the commercialism of it all because presents=love.

Yule Blog - Christmas Episodes Heard on High

Ho, Ho, Ho everybody! Welcome to another stunning, flawless, amazing, decking the halls better than your favorites edition of Yule Blog, where we celebrate the season with a warm blanket of sarcasm. We've done a lot so far with odes to teen pop, hip hop and gay Christmas as well as helping you survive the holiday party season, the magic of crappy Christmas tunes and yesterday songs battled for Christmas tune supremacy. Whew! We've just been blogging our little hearts out.

Today we turn our attention to television. Oh TV, how we love thee, particularly during the holiday season. All across network and cable television, shows scramble to piece together holiday specials that are high on the cheese factor, low on the plot points and somewhere in the middle in terms of overall quality. "It's a Wonderful Life" and "A Christmas Carol" plotlines are trotted out on the regular so the nice characters can learn how important they are to the show while mean/bitchy characters get to learn the spirit of Christmas and change their evil doing ways for about five seconds at the end of the show before reverting back to their normal nature for the rest of the season because isn't that the message of Christmas? Maybe?

Anyway, we're going to take on our personal favorite holiday-infused episodes of shows including everything from "The O.C." to "Fairly Oddparents" to "Tales of the Crypt." Oh yeah, nothing says "HAPPY HOLIDAYS" quite like serial killers dressed as Santa Claus.

Yule Blog: Christmas Songs Death Match

The holiday season is the time of year where people are supposed to come together for peace and joy across the land, which we find excruciatingly boring because we are terrible people and are OWNING THAT. Why come together when we can needlessly turn trivial things into competitions? It's the American way isn't it? How else do you explain almost every game show in existence like "Silent Library" on MTV, where the crux of the show is people having to stay silent in, you guessed it, a library. Or the game show "Minute to Win It," hosted by Food Network D-bag du jour Guy Fieri, which we think his abysmal hair deserves its own co-hosting title as it does probably more work than Guy does on the show, where people try to complete all sorts of mindless tasks within yet again you guessed it, a minute.

And think about it, flip through any gossip magazine or scroll through any fashion blog and you will see the red carpet turned into a fashion throwdown as fashion writers constantly do "WHO WORE IT BETTER" polls. And really? Let us be honest for a second. 80 percent of the time the poll shouldn't be called "WHO WORE IT BETTER" but instead "WHO LOOKED LESS A MESS" since so many of the things that make it to the red carpet are a DISASTUH because everybody nowadays is aiming for edgy and forgetting that edgy is just ugly with a bigger budget and better public relations.

Since we as a society just are simply fascinated with turning even the slightest thing into a knock down, drag out competitions, we here at the Majak Kingdom wondered why we shouldn't do that to Christmas tunes? Not all Christmas tunes are made equal, that's for sure, and since some songs most definitely seem to be perennial favorites, you might as well pit them against each other in a CAGE MATCH TO THE DEATH.

Yule Blog - Carol of the Basics

Oh Christmas music, one of the most divisive genres of music out there which is surprising due to all of the alleged good will and joy it is supposed to bring about for folks. In one corner, you have those people who simply adore every note, every chorus, every bridge of Christmas tunes. They usually start secretly playing it around Halloween time and then turn it up around Thanksgiving and then blow out their speakers the moment it's Black Friday. They thrill in all of the harmonies, find the abundance of sleigh bell noises to be the audio equivalent of a cashmere sweater wrapped around them and find the lyrics to be filled with a depth and earnestness sadly devoid in modern pop tunes.

In the other corner, there are the people who would gladly enjoy becoming deaf when the holiday season approaches. For them, Christmas music is music at its most nauseatingly twee, filled with empty sentiments, forced good cheer and lyrics that are mind-numbingly stupid. A segment of these people may have started out as Christmas music supporters but soon had all of that stomped out of them when they had the misfortune of working retail during the holiday season. For about a week, they probably were excited to hear their favorite Christmas tunes piping through the ceiling speakers of their workplace but soon it became like Chinese water tortue put to cheery music as songs endly repeat themselves day by day.

So these are sort of diametrically opposed groups right? Absent of any sort of common ground? Right. Wrong. Good Christmas music won't bring them together but god awful songs can raise the ire of even the most jolly. And trust us, there is a lot of crap Christmas music as every record company forces artists to put out albums to make a little chunk of change, every has-been/never-was cobbles together some tunes to make an album due to relative small expense since most traditional Christmas tunes are public domain at this point and every Disney/Nickelodeon star seemingly puts out a Christmas album in their short tenure of popularity before their respective company takes them somewhere in Kansas and shoots them when they get too noticeably old (we emphasize NOTICEABLY since the dude that play's Miley Cyrus' older brother on "Hannah Montana" is like somewhere between 30 and Shady Pines Retirement Home in age).

For us, we love all things tacky and terrible. I mean, we saw "Burlesque" AND "Sex and the City 2" in the theatres based simply on the fact that awfulness in that large and glittering proportions needs to be enjoyed a screen large enough to capture the full breadth of a trainwreck. In some ways, we enjoy a terrible Christmas tune more than a good one since so many, even of the best Christmas tunes, are dry as white toast. At least with a bad song, you can spend time marveling at all of the bad decision making that went into recording, producing and music video-ing these three to four minutes of self-respect-free audio brilliance.

So that is why we are devoting today's "Yule Blog" to the bad, the worse, and the truly basic when it comes to Christmas tunes. Let's get to it because we are ridiculously excited for this, expressed below in the following .gif:

Yule Blog: Hark! The Herald Angels Drink

Welcome to Yule Blog, the Majak Kingdom's special feature taking on all things about the holidays. The past three weeks we've taken on teen pop Christmas tunes, the hip hop community's attempts to honor the season and we decked the halls with balls of fierceness as we had a big gay Christmas celebration.

Oh the holiday season,

We here at the Majak Kingdom function under the chief belief that there is no better way to honor the divine birth of Our Lord and Savior than getting drunk on vodka and gorging on hors d'oeuvres all while dressed in an ugly sweater. Tis the magic of the holiday season where, in between celebrating the birth of Jesus, we also celebrate the death of any attempts at dieting, sobriety or chastity as we dash from one holiday function to the next all across the region with not the thoughts of sugar plum fairies dancing in our head but the fizz of champagne.

So being the fine guests we are, we want to help you host and hostesses out there throw the most flawless, stunning, amazing, more yuletide than your favorite's, kind of a holiday party with our own tips, tricks and rules for both surviving throwing the party as well as attending all of those various work, family and friend functions that can be just a minefield.

We, of course, are not going to do this alone and have sought at help from a bevy of fabulous women who are the hostesses with mostest. Roll up your sleeves and let's get to work.

Yule Blog: Make The Yuletide HEY GURL HEY

O come all ye Majak Kingdom faithful for yet another stunning, flawless, amazing, sleigh riding better than YOUR FAVORITE edition of the "Yule Blog," our celebration of all things holidays. We took you back to high school/junior high with Christmas music from the likes of NSYNC, Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears in our teen pop "Egg Nog Me One More Time," proving that you can EuroDance pop for the Baby Jesus. The following week we took it the ~streets~ with a mix of hip hop tunes from the likes of Run DMC, Kurtis Blow and TLC in our mix "Ho Ho Hos in Different Area Codes" because the "Three Wise Men" desperately needs to be a name of a fly ass rap group.

This week we're taking you to the gay bar!

That's right lovelies. Come to the gay bar this holiday season where Santa Claus has six-pack abs and a spray tan, "Jingle Bells" has a house beat underneath it, the carolers have donned their best Express apparel while singing "It Came Upon the Midnight Queer" and Rudolph's nose is so red from the rampant misuse of poppers.

Politically incorrect stereotypes aside, we thought it'd be a glorious idea to celebrate a big gay Christmas, especially with the gay community being all up in the headlines the past few weeks with the House of Representatives recently voting to repeal the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy that prohibits gays and lesbians from serving openly in the armed services while over in the "Glee"-verse you had Blaine and Kurt singing "Baby, It's Cold Outside" with each other. And if that wasn't enough to plant a rainbow flag at the North Pole, you had the whole John Travola-is-maybe-gay scandal getting a whole other, well we'd normally say second wind but this has been going on for seemingly forever, life as actress Carrie Fisher pretty much outs him in an interview, shamefully not in "Out," with "The Advocate." Just for that, we heard that John Travolta is going to make Fisher atone by sitting through multiple screenings of "Battefield Earth."

And keeping with this week's theme of male celebs and the questioning of their sexual preferences, "American Beauty" actor Kevin Spacey sat down to be interviewed about his film "Casino Jack" and somehow found himself being asked about his sexual orientation by a Daily Beast reporter who actually asked Spacey, "We gay men have always proudly claimed you as a member of our tribe, and yet you don't proudly claim us back. Why?"

Yule Blog - Ho Ho Hos in Different Area Codes

Ho, ho, ho, my lovelies. Welcome to another stunning, flawless, amazing, better fruitcake than your favorite edition of Yule Blog, where we tackle Christmas music so you won't be distracted from buying lots and lots of cardigans for Christmas.

Last week we tackled the teen pop explosion of the 1990s and the resulting Christmas that came from it. We whispered/moaned with Britney. We added infinite amount of syllables to words with Christina Aguilera. We did some of our best choreographed booty shaking with NSYNC and Backstreet Boys and hung tough with the New Kids on the Block.

This week we shift our Christmas cheer to the STREETS or as street as rappers can be when they are discussing the joys of miseltoe, decking the halls and the birth of Jesus. We have to admit, Santa, in a lot of ways, is pretty gangsta. Think about it, he's traveling around the world, sneaking into people's houses, doing what he pleases while people nervously await him and give him baked goods. He got the peeps shaking in their Timberlands about whether or not they are going to end up on the naughty or nice list while has his own posse of elves and one tricked out sleigh. And you KNOW that he's got a different girl on every continent while Mrs. Claus holds down the fort at the North Pole. He's like a White Notorious B.I.G.

(Unsurprisingly we found this lovely image on MySpace, the projects of social networking sites now)

Yule Blog - Egg Nog Me One More Time

Happy Friday everybody. It's December, which means it's time for Christmas music. Except if you work retail, you've probably been assaulted by jingling bells since right after Halloween.

Anyway, we've fully embraced the yuletide spirit, ironically of course because are skinny jean wearing douchebag hipsters here.

So in honor of the holiday season, every Friday we're going to be decking the blog with the sound of holiday music of the both the awesome and awesomely bad quality because there really isn't a middle ground when it comes to the season. For every Mariah Carey or Phil Spector album, there is a Jessica Simpson or Ali Lohan Christmas.

Join us on our journey through the winter wonderland that is the holiday album section of the music world as nothing says HAPPY BIRTHDAY JESUS quite like the crass cashing in on a holiday season to help make some quick cash because you're going through a divorce or your last album tanked. The whole thing makes our heart grow three times as big.