If It Doesn't Snow On Christmas

As some of you may know, every year in December I post an unusual holiday song on the Spook Central blog. Well, I'm not gonna let one bitch of a storm prevent me from continuing with the tradition.

I have a small surplus of unusual holiday songs on my computer from which to choose each year, but obviously I don't have access to that data for the time being. While I don't remember all of the songs, I do remember one of them. Luckily, the always awesome Matthew Jordan found me the MP3s online so that I'm able to make my usual Unusual Holiday Song post as usual. Thanks also to Raffaele Ruffaldi for helping out by uploading the MP3s.

Actors who also sing are not an uncommon thing. Heck, it's damn near a requirement if you want to be a tween star on the Disney Channel. Sometimes actors sing well (Anne Hathaway is a good recent example) and sometimes they don't (see Don Johnson, whose singing career is still looking for a heartbeat). Today we discuss an actor who falls into the latter category.

Joe Pesci, best known for his roles in Home Alone and Goodfellas, released an album in 1998 entitled "Vincent Laguardia Gambini Sings Just for You". If you don't recognize the name in the album title, then you've probably never seen the film My Cousin Vinny.


The album, which is available in Explicit and Clean versions, includes a variety of songs that Pesci sings in-character. One of those songs is called "If It Doesn't Snow On Christmas", in which the singer waxes philosophically about how problematic it might be for Santa to deliver presents if there isn't any snow on Christmas.

Below are the "clean" and "explicit" versions of the song. The explicit version has lots of forced profanity that really doesn't fit in the song. It doesn't even sound natural either, which makes that version a pain to listen to. I'd suggest sticking with the clean version.


Now this is where I normally would have ended this post, but thanks to some research done by the incomparable Matthew Jordan, I learned that this song has a little history.

You see, the only versions of "If It Doesn't Snow On Christmas" I've ever heard were the ones Joe Pesci sang, so I thought it was written specifically for his album. It turns out that the song was originally sung by the singing cowboy himself, Gene Autry, with his group The Pinafores way back in 1949. The song was the b-side to Autry's hit single "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" (maybe you've heard of it) and was written by Rudolph composer Johnny Marks, along with Milton Pascal.

---

For the complete list of Spook Central's holiday song posts from years past, click here. Thanks to Matthew Jordan for making the "Unusual Holiday Songs" title banner that appears at the top of this post.