Christmas has an ambience like no other holiday; every year just after Thanksgiving, when we are weak and lazy from food and revelry, it comes thundering down from the North Pole like a jolly blitzkrieg on our senses. People erect trees in their houses, surround any static object with colorful lights, and bake wonderfully hearty dinners and tasty sweets. The delicate smells of pine, mint and ginger hang in the air for weeks on end. The sounds of Christmas are also unique; in fact, Christmas music is inescapable this time of year, like it or not. Sadly all that jingles is not gold, and some artists attempt to hide nightmarishly bad songs behind a holiday label. So should be forgive these terrible songs their trespasses given the time of year? Absolutely not! Christmas does not preclude criticism, and with this in mind, I now present the two worst Christmas songs that I have ever heard.

The Christmas Shoes- An unbelievably cloying and nauseatingly sappy dirge about a boy trying to buy his dying mother a pair of shoes. If by some Herculean feat of mental fortitude you make it to the three and a half minute mark in this pathetic festival of corniness called a song, your remaining strength, along with any doubt that the track deserves more criticism than the English language is capable of leveling at it, will immediately be evaporated by the most heinous of saccharine inclusions: a children's choir. My investigation unearthed that soul-chilling fact that the song was adapted first into a book and later that a movie had even been made based solely on this woefully terrible song.

Wonderful Christmas Time- Just as bad as the last, but for completely different reasons. This song attempts to sound "happening" and "fun", but comes off as obnoxious, disoriented and despondent. Techno beats and meandering synthesizers punctuate each mislaid bar of music as the vocalist provides all the mournful enthusiasm of drugged patient about to have his spleen removed. I'm also pretty sure that when Paul McCartney realized that this abomination sounded like an amalgam of half-baked Garageband themes and nothing at all like a Christmas song, his brilliant solution was to shove sleigh bells into the background of the whole freaking song. Worst of all, it's almost impossible to shop in December without being assaulted by the concentrated tripe that is Wonderful Christmas Time.

During my visit to Lexington these past few days the area was stuck (not in the aluminum bat sense, more like with a pillow half-filled with down) by a snow storm. We got about 4 inches of very powdery flakes. By the way, it just occurred to me to see if Eskimos really do have lots of words for snow: they don't! It kinda smelled like one of those popular things people just hear and repeat with no one fact-checking along the way. I'm glad my senses did not deceive me.

Today's villain will be a bit of a non-sequitur, so throw your train of thought to the winds and examine with me the fascinating personage of Don Paolo!

He sports handlebar hair as well as a handlebar mustache (so evil!), and as Professor Moriarty is to Sherlock Holmes, Don Paolo is to Professor Layton. Paolo's genius is second only to Layton's, and he possesses the engineering prowess of Da Vinci (emulating his designs) and his mastery of disguise surpasses even that of Lupin III (in that one is only safe if he assumes at all times that everyone around him is Don Paolo in disguise). Lupin will certainly be the subject of a later post. Strangely, beyond his appearance and obvious desire for the label, it's unclear precisely why Don Paolo is considered evil.