This Christmas, 2006, I am boycotting “Fairytale of New York.”

I told you you’d be shocked. Allow me to make myself very clear: I take this action not through boredom, sickness or dislike of said heart-of-gold drunken yuletide anthem. Quite the opposite. I’m doing this because I like it far too much to see it meet the fate of every other Christmas song: overplayed, irritating, redolent of tired, forced fun.

I remember when “Fairytale” first came out. The first time I heard it, I hated it. I was eight, for heaven’s sake; I wanted synths, beats, and preferably a little mini-rap for the middle eight. I really wasn’t ready for MacGowan’s lazily anguished snarl, or MacColl’s lilt for that matter. And yet, after my first listen, something stayed with me. By the next day I’d listened to it several times, learned the words, and put it on a tape I was making for a friend (along, if I remember correctly, with “Pump Up The Volume” by M/A/R/R/S, which must imply something).

For a long time, “Fairytale” remained, if not a secret passion, at least a pretty cliquey one. In the oh-so-ironic 90s, unashamed party ‘classics’ like Slade’s “Merry Christmas Everybody!” went down better than dark old “Fairytale.” I heard that it was kept from video appearances on Christmas Top of the Pops specials by the word “faggot,” but I’ve no idea if that’s true. Certainly, it was a badge of honour to admire the song over the array of Christmas crap out there. This, after all, was the decade when the coveted slot of Christmas number one was competed for almost entirely by novelty acts - from Mr. Blobby to Bob the Builder. I’m not saying that liking “Fairytale” made you some sort of musical guru, but it was a marker of discrimination. Like Radiohead, nobody who was really interested in music would dismiss it, and nobody who was basically more interested in football could really enjoy it.

I remember exactly when I realised that things had started to change: when, in 2000, I heard that likeable-but-dull Irish warbler Ronan Keating* was recording the song as a B-side to his single “The Way You Make Me Feel” - not, regrettably, a Michael Jackson cover, but a cliche with lyrics so mind-meltingly clichéd I’ve often wondered if they were the product of some drunken songwriter dare. Although I’ve never heard Keating’s actual version (with Clannad harp-n-vocalist** Maire Brennan), just the news of its existence made me sad to my core. The one genuinely meaningful Christmas record - the only one that portrays the contrived optimism of the festival in its true context, the misery and bitterness of winter - softened, made saccharine, safe, granny-friendly. Never mind that it’s about an elderly, drug-addicted couple whose dreams have been crushed into dust. It’s about Christmas! Let’s turn the violins up in the mix!

Then, even as Ronan’s cover was bothering the charts - and the ears of Radio 2 listeners - Kirsty MacColl died. Amidst the heartfelt (and well-deserved) tributes that flooded in from fans who’d long loved Kirsty for her tragic sensibility, unique voice, and sometimes biting wit, there were many who talked as if all she’d ever done was “Fairytale” (I’m talking about you, Duncan Connors). From that moment, the song began a quick ascent towards national treasure status. It topped a VH1 poll of the greatest Christmas song in 2004, and has done so every year since. When a colleague in my office recently started a poll on a popular gay networking website about the best Christmas song, it shot to the top. It’s just been re-released for the second time, and is currently at no. 10 in the charts. There are 64 versions of the song on YouTube, ranging from the official video (starring, incredibly, Matt Dillon) to a version by the parents of someone called Sam.

Perhaps I should be happy to see such a great song so popular. But I’m not. “Fairytale” was an aquired taste for a reason: it’s dark. It’s difficult; it contains a vision of Christmas that isn’t dominated by food and things.

He’s an alcoholic shambles, who spends Christmas Eve in a police station. She’s a bedridden junkie. The only hope on the horizon comes from his recent gambling victory (”Got on a lucky one / Came in eighteen to one / I’ve got a feeling / This year’s for me and you”). We all know he’s going to piss it away; that his cheerful Christmas optimism (”I can see a better time / when all our dreams come true”) is a grotesque annual ritual. And the song’s final verse, while it initially seems to bring resolution, in fact offers the protagonists only a weary resignation:

I could have been someone
(Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you)
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can’t make it all alone
I’ve built my dreams around you

In the end, their complete dependence on each other is all that holds them together: their dreams may be dead, but they huddle, shivering, warming themselves over the ashes.

This is an odd candidate for a feel-good Christmas anthem. And yet, in the words of one EMI staffer,

Fairytale Of New York is an adult answer to Jingle Bells. It’s difficult to remember a Christmas party without a drunken singalong with The Pogues.

Is it too elitist to suspect the millions of people who round off every Christmas party with a “drunken singalong” haven’t fully appreciated the dark bitterness of the story? And of course, there’s the depressing irony of watching drunk people imitate MacGowan’s alcoholic drawl.

And the Pogues aren’t helping, cheerfully performing the song with any passing female singer, not to mention Shane’s mum. And, of course, re-releasing the song any time they’re short of beer money. Think I’m being harsh? Note that Warner encouraged the single’s current re-release “because a whole new generation of fans have heard Shane through his association with Kate Moss and Pete Doherty.”

Now look, I’m not unrealistic. I understand that when fine things become hugely popular, a little of their meaning is inevitably lost; and to stand in the way of it is not only Canute-style arrogance, but pretty close to snobbishness. But that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it, and it doesn’t mean I have to take part. Hence, the boycott. Before I’ve heard it once too many; before it conjures up images, not of postwar Manhattan with its dazzling lights and freezing tenements, but of work colleagues puking on my shoes; before I learn to associate it with that heady mix of plastic packaging, junk food, cheap wine and lazy nostalgia that is Christmas for childless adults. Before I see it on a bloody advert for holidays in New York, I’m having this Christmas without “Fairytale.”

It hasn’t been easy so far. It was mercifully forgotten at the work Christmas party, but when we had people round for an early festive dinner on Sunday, I had to smilingly ignore several requests. Several times, when Christmas shopping on Saturday, I felt myself bolting a shop without my planned purchases when I sensed the festive soundtrack CD was drifting Pogues-wards. Just today, a colleague put it on on his computer towards the end of the day, minus headphones, so the whole office could enjoy it crackling out of tinny, tiny speakers. I quickly stuck in my earphones and shoved on anything else.

I don’t, to be honest, know how much longer I can last. But I’m going to keep trying. “Fairytale” is a disarming, mature, evocative story, a real adult Christmas song, not to mention one of the most eloquent ever portrayals by an Anglo-Irish writer of the Irish-American urban immigrant experience. It deserves better than to be a drunken singalong, an afterthought, “even better than Slade.”

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