If you’ve ever shouted at your car’s radio, Grinch-like, “NOT AGAIN!” during the happiest of seasons, this one’s for you.
Christmas music can get you into the holiday spirit. Or it can annoy the heck out of you.
We rounded up data on California’s most-hated Christmas songs. And the results are as fascinating as they are counter-intuitive.
The Most Annoying Songs
Interestingly, the “most annoying” Christmas songs aren’t the same as the “most disliked” ones.
A national poll by YouGov found that certain songs consistently annoy people from the first listen, including “Santa Baby”, “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” and “”I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.”
In another poll of 1,250 American adults, “The Chipmunk Song” sat near the top of the annoying list, too. Those are national polls, but since California is the most populous state and there’s fairly little variation in the data by state level, it’s safe to say those are among the songs that annoy Californians the most.
The One Song Californians Love to Hate
That’s not the end of the story, though.
If you ask Americans broadly and Californians specifically which Christmas song they dislike the most, there’s a clear winner: Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You.”
The same survey of 1,250 adults found Carey’s song topped the list of songs that Americans hate the most, and that result is consistent across the YouGov pole and polls specific to California.
But here’s where things get weird. “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is also among California’s most-loved Christmas songs.
How can a song be both one of California’s most-loved and most-hated?
Decades and Decades
Easy. Although “Feliz Navidad” is California’s most-played Christmas song, Carey’s song consistently ranks in the top 5–and has done so for years.
That means most Californians have heard “All I Want For Christmas Is You” blaring from shopping mall speakers, playing at church banquets, popping up in streaming playlists and dominating the radio every year since it came out in 1994.
For some people, that’s now 30 years of hearing the same song over and over again each holiday season.
People love the song. But they’re thoroughly sick of hearing it.
And it’s a bit of a self-reinforcing loop. The more Californians say they love the song, the more it’s likely to get played. That makes people even more annoyed by hearing it.
In short, then, patently annoying songs like “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” will always annoy all humans the instant they’re played. For that reason, they (blessedly) don’t get played very much.
But even classics that people love–like “All I Want for Christmas Is You–can start to grate after years and decades of play.
This season, then, feel free to listen to Carey’s song a few times. But then try moving on to something new–perhaps a reinterpretation of an old standard by a new artist, or something entirely different and (gasp) not seasonal.
Carey’s iconic song will still be there when you’re ready to return to it. But by then, perhaps you’ll be ready to listen to it again, and it won’t anger you quite so much.
