The Little Drummer Boy
“The Little Drummer Boy” has always been my least favourite Christmas song.
I have vivid memories from my childhood of being escorted to my elementary school’s gymnasium to sing Christmas carols. Teachers would pace up and down the aisles of students to ensure that everyone was singing along and that no horseplay was taking place (reindeerplay if we’re being seasonal, perhaps). A sheet of lyrics was crudely displayed off of an overhead projector onto a giant portable screen, accompanied by low-quality MIDI instrumentals of various Christmas songs.
During my first few years of school, I enjoyed the tradition of singing these songs with my peers and friends, but then there came a point where singing along to the Christmas music just wasn’t considered “cool” anymore. To combat this and to appear cool to our classmates and the extremely impressionable kids in the lower grades, we started to change the lyrics of these songs. Any moment a teacher let their guard down, we would begin to sing various parodies of these carols. Screaming the words “Jingle bells, batman smells” during Jingle Bells, or inappropriately editing the lyrics of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Clause” to “I saw mommy screwing Santa Clause” until the teachers caught wind of it while we played dumb. But most notable in my mind is the version of “Little Drummer Boy” that everyone sang while holding in their giggles.
Except for some strange reason, I hated the parody my friends would sing, and I refused to partake — mouth shut, eyes straight until the song was over and I could continue to make a joke of “Hark! The Harold Angels Sing” or something. The sixth-grader version was no cruder than any of the other renditions we so gracefully sang, but in my 12-year-old brain, it was just immature and stupid. The parody in question simply changed the verse ending “... me and my drum” to “me and my bum.” Innocent enough. But I believed I was beyond that, that I was entering Junior High in a mere nine months, and it was time for me to begin to shed into a more mature version of myself (spoiler: I didn’t).
Looking back on these carol-singing assemblies, I begin to question whether my school should have even had them in the first place. Despite Canada being a largely multicultural country, the area I grew up in rural Alberta was far from that. There were very few kids at my school who didn’t come from a Protestant background, so it just kind of made sense that we were singing these carols. But for the kids who didn’t have this background, and the small but considerable Muslim, Jewish, and other religious demographics of the school, it seems assimilating in retrospect. To be told that you have to sing songs of praise about a holiday that you don’t practice to a God you don’t believe in is cruel and feels like we were trying to indoctrinate these kids into the prominent religion in my area. Maybe this is looking way too deep into it, and it was just innocent fun, but it’s something I think about often around Christmas. Though with some recent changes to Alberta’s education curriculum, it wouldn’t surprise me if there were a more sinister intent behind it.
My thoughts of those days spent leaving math class early to pack into the gymnasium and sing carols are mostly vague memories at this point. However, whenever I hear “The Little Drummer Boy,” Sufjan version or not, I’m transported into a vivid scene where I’m sitting with my peers, straight-faced and mouth zipped shut. I don’t particularly enjoy it, but I reminisce — tapping my foot and reluctantly singing “me and my bum” in my head.
Matthew Herring is a 19-year-old Geography student at the University of Calgary. You can catch him writing for the Canadian Indie Rock Canon on the Indieheads subreddit, where he explores essential Canadian albums, relating them to his own experience living in the sprawl of rural Alberta. You can also find him on Twitter @mattygherring for tweets that try to be funny.