Kooky Christmas Countdown: #22 and #21

Continuing our Kooky Christmas Countdown of strange and wonderful holiday songs.

Number 22: "Five Pound Box of Money" by Pearl Bailey

Here’s a heartfelt plea from a practical woman.

Hey, Santa Claus!
You want to make me happy this year?
Listen to me honey.
Give Pearl something that’ll be of some use to me,
Like a five pound box of money.

Now there’s a little gift
That’s loaded with
Lots of sentiment
See, whenever I get blue, Santa,
I’m gonna think of you,
And at the same time I’ll have the change to pay my rent.

Money isn’t everything.
There’s no two ways about it.
But while we’re here,
Santa dear,
It’s much better with than without it.

You can listen to the song on YouTube. (If you find a video of her singing it, please let me know.) Or find it on Hipsters’ Holiday, one of my favorite holiday compilations.

Pearl Bailey was an award-winning Broadway performer, and as best I can tell she’s the only person who’s ever recorded this song.

If you’re interested, check out Miss Bailey on the Muppet show, in a particularly surreal clip made up of parodies of songs from musicals, thrown together in a Muppet version of Camelot (although none of the songs comes from the musical Camelot).

Number 21: "Christmas Wrapping" by The Waitresses

Either you like this song, or you hate it, or you liked it the first couple of times you heard it and now you hate it, or you liked it and then hated it and now you’re back to liking it again.

I fall into that fourth camp. I think it’s the line "A&P has provided me / With the world’s smallest turkey" that does it for me.

Not sure if you know the song? Listen to it on Last.fm: "Christmas Wrapping."