Here’s a polarizing bit of music for you! The last time I saw this song on a holiday countdown, it was on AVClub’s list of the 30 worst Christmas songs of all time, and Stephen Thomas Erlewine listed it as the second worst ever! Second only to “The Christmas Shoes!”
People my age have strong opinions about “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer,” because a) it was everywhere in the 1980s and b) even the people who loathed it couldn’t always stop it from getting stuck in their heads. The melody is very singable! And the lyrics are very memorable, albeit bonkers: the singer’s grandmother, who is both off her meds and overindulging on eggnog, wanders out into the wintry neighborhood just as Santa’s team passes through and it doesn’t go well.
It’s not exactly “Winter Wonderland,” yes, but then novelty songs have always been a part of Christmas. And this one is just subversive enough to catch people’s attention, but not so subversive that kids couldn’t belt it out in front of their own grandparents at the family Christmas party. And while few of us have dealt with reindeer-based tragedies at the holidays, thank goodness, having tipsy relatives on Christmas Eve is actually pretty relatable. The songwriter, Randy Brooks, said he got the idea for the song from an inebriated family member; no account I’ve read names which family member, though Randy was related to Foster Brooks, the comedian who got famous with a routine about how he was really drunk all the time.
It was so goofy that Brooks’ own band didn’t want to play on it, at least at first. So he offered it to a friend, veterinarian and bluegrass musician Elmo Shropshire, who had a lounge act in California with his then-wife, Patsy Trigg. Shropshire figured the self-released Elmo and Patsy record would be a gag gift for friends. But the drummer on the “Grandma” session gave a copy to his friend Gene Nelson, a DJ at KSFO radio in San Francisco. When Nelson put the song on the air, people kept calling in about it. Most of them asked that he not play it again (see? Polarizing!), but he did anyway, and word eventually got to Dr. Demento, who put it on his radio show. Between that and the music video Shropshire made ending up on MTV, the song took off like a reindeer fleeing the scene of an attack on the elderly.
Speaking of which, there’s a bit of a mystery around grandma’s fate. The song’s lyrics say “it’s not Christmas without Grandma/All the family’s dressed in black” and then goes on to ask whether the family has to return grandma’s presents or send them back. Brooks said in an interview that “so many of the country songs at that time introduced a beloved relative only to kill her off in the third verse… I figured if I could kill off the relative in the first verse and still hold a listener’s attention, that would be an unconventional song.” Shropshire wrote a sequel to Brooks’ work called “Grandpa’s Gonna Sue The Pants Off Santa.” Grandpa’s is a wrongful death suit.
All of which sounds pretty morbidly cut and dried. And yet the animated TV special from 2000 that’s built around this song (and features Elmo Shropshire as narrator) lets Grandma live! The catch is that she’s knocked so silly by the reindeer that she develops amnesia, and the family mourns not knowing that Santa Claus has taken Grandma to the North Pole to recuperate, which is something Kris Kringle apparently does.
I guess you get to choose for yourself what’s canon and what isn’t, but I know this: you won’t ever find a song about Elmo Shropshire getting run over by a reindeer. He took up running as he got older, and won quite a few races at senior-themed competitions. https://nsga.com/december-2016/
If a reindeer started racing in that guy’s direction, he’d be quick enough to get out of the way.
