Five Christmas Song Characters You’ve Never Heard Of

You know Dancer and Prancer and Rudolph, and Santa and the Little Drummer Boy and the Partridge in a Pear Tree. But do you recall the most obscure references of all?

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1. MR. PINKLEY (“Santa’s Special Friend”, 1903)
A lively tune that tells the tale of Santa’s wardrobe assistant, who “When his boss is busy and is losing his head/He goes into the closet and finds Santa’s gayest threads.” Even back in the innocent turn-of-the-century era, people had the feeling that something funny was going on.

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2. KRANK (“Krank the Spitting Camel”, 1957)
This tune tells the story of the Three Wise Men, one of whom sits atop a camel that spits on the concept of a savior. Verse Three says it all: “Krank spit on God/ So Balthazar cut him in two/and Baby Jesus had a fourth gift/delicious camel stew.” The song was eventually made into a largely unwatched 1971 cartoon, which isn’t yet on DVD, and probably never will be.

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3. FLAKY (“The Ballad of Flaky”, 1966)
Penned by a college chemistry professor, this 12-minute long carol goes into great detail about what’s really going on inside snowflakes, such as “My complicated morphology/derives from the six-fold symmetry/Initially forming around -10 C.” And it just keeps going on and on like this.

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4. JIGGLING JANA (“Jiggling Jana”, 2004):
The phrase “Give me a J-A-N-A, and jiggle, jiggle, jiggle all day” is repeated constantly in this poignant story of an NBA cheerleader who tries to provide comfort to players who have a game on the 25th and are missing their families. Released on the poor-selling album An Emo-Rap Yuletide.

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5. FREDDY THE FALSE MESSIAH (“Christmas Magic”, 1928): Jaunty ragtime piece about a stage magician who claims to be Christ, and gains a disturbingly large group of cult followers. The whole venture ends, predictably, in mass suicide, but the second verse sums things up nicely:

He’d fool the folks with coin tricks, and rabbits from a hat,
At first there didn’t seem too much was odd,
But then the brainless idiots, enthralled by all of that,
Said “Let us follow him, he is our God!”