My Quest to Find a Version of 'Frosty the Snowman' That Doesn't Suck
Ihappen to love Christmas music, but I sympathize with those of you who don’t. And in this season of harmony and good will, those of us who treasure our playlists full of Vince Guaraldi and Sufjan Stevens and those of you who suffer PTSD every time you walk into a Walgreens and hear “All I Want for Christmas Is You” can unite around a venerable truth: “Frosty the Snowman” is the worst Christmas song ever.
I should have specified above: I love adult Christmas music, whether sad, like the World War II-haunted “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” or saucy, like Eartha Kitt’s unimprovable saunter through “Santa Baby.” But children’s Christmas songs? There is something irredeemably cringe-worthy in hearing a great adult vocalist sing jejune lyrics such as, “Thumpety thump thump / Thumpety thump thump / Look at Frosty go.” It’s as if someone stuck Sean Penn in an elementary school holiday pageant. (Actually, I would like to see that.)
I recently tasked myself with listening to every version of “Frosty the Snowman” on Spotify to see if there is even a single tolerable rendition, and there is-from a group I would not have expected. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first a further elucidation of why “Frosty the Snowman” deserves to be called the worst Christmas song ever-worse even than Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime,” which was aptly described several years ago on this site as “a love affair between a middle-aged man and the new Casio keyboard he got in his stocking,” though being McCartney it does boast a few stray bits of melodic and rhythmic interest, and some passingly pretty harmony singing.
But back to “Frosty”:
Do you want to build a snowman? No.
There are so many interesting Christmas characters to write songs about-Santa Claus, the elves, reindeer, Jack Frost, Jesus-why pick a snowman, a homunculus made of packed snow and ice, a thing that has no personality almost by definition? Moreover, building a snowman is one of the least fun allegedly “fun” activities in all of childhood. In cartoons, kids push balls of snow around and quickly accumulate white boulders with diameters of several feet, which they then fashion into towering snowmen. Try that with actual snow: building a real snowman larger than a foot or two in real life is full morning’s or afternoon’s strenuous work.
Okay. We built a snowman anyway. Frosty is still boring.
When people do create snowmen characters they tend either to be maudlin (Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale about a snowman who falls in love with a stove), evil (the film Jack Frostand numerous Calvin and Hobbes strips), or irritating (Olaf, from Frozen). Frosty, as a personality, is at best insipid.
Frosty promotes unrealistic snowman body images.
Even on its own terms the song is implausible. According to the lyrics, once a magic silk hat (a lame deus ex machina) is placed upon Frosty’s head, he begins to “dance around.” The song then has him “running here and there / All around the square / Saying, ‘Catch me if you can.’” One might think that, being magic, Frosty would be capable of initiating a more creative game than tag. Regardless, what kind of movement would a snowman, no matter how animate, truly be capable of? “Dance around” and “running” are surely euphemisms for “wobble” and/or “waddle,” unless perhaps he has developed some kind of stabilized rolling mechanism, like BB-8 in the Star Wars sequels. Even so, there is no way a snowman would go “thumpety thump thump” as he traversed “hills of snow.” The sound would be more like a creepy, icy hiss. Or a glacier scraping its fingers on a chalkboard. (Animated Frostys have been depicted with legs and feet, but I refuse to accept them as canon. Proper snowmen only have arms.)
Frosty digs coal.
A product of a less enlightened time, Frosty is not an appropriate character for 21st-century children. With his “corncob pipe” and “two eyes made out of coal,” he encourages smoking as well as irresponsible fossil fuel consumption. Then again, given his ultimate fate at the hands of the sun, his tale can perhaps be viewed as an instructive allegory about global warming denial.
Frosty is a sell-out.
“Frosty the Snowman” was born not in the true spirit of Christmas giving but rather as an attempt to profit on holiday tradition. I realize that is now a narrow, even non-existent distinction, and probably was as well in 1950, when the song was written by Walter “Jack” Rollins and Steve Nelson and given to Gene Autry in the hopes of cashing in on his self-written hit of the previous year, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” (In a similar vein, Rollins and Nelson also gifted Autry with “Here Comes Peter Cottontail.”) It worked: imagine the hellish soundscape where, as was often the case with hit songs in that era, no less than three different versions of “Frosty the Snowman” jostled on the charts in late 1950 and early 1951: Autry’s, Nat “King” Cole’s, and Jimmy Durante’s.
Frosty is a plagiarist that is only liked by big babies.
As generations of music snobs have noted, “Frosty the Snowman” borrowed part of its chirpy, up-and-down melody from “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee,” Irving Berlin’s 1932 hit. (Berlin redeemed himself in the Christmas department by subsequently writing “White Christmas.”) The melody's sing-song quality and the banal, implausible lyrics have throttled the best efforts of vocalists from Ella Fitzgerald to Fiona Apple to fashion something listenable to ears older than six or seven years. Phil Spector and the Ronettes work to overpower the song with wall-of-sound oomph; Willie Nelson tries to goose it to life with a Texas-swing arrangement; Fitzgerald teases it with her usual rhythmic playfulness; Jackson 5-era Michael Jackson sings as if enraptured by a middle-school crush, which is both endearing and disturbing. And yet all of these efforts, no matter how well intentioned, cannot escape the sing-along aura of a December children's concert. Perhaps this is Frosty's real magic: a Christmas curse that drags great singers down to the level of Raffi.
But as I said, I’ve listened to every extant version of “Frosty the Snowman,” or at least several dozen, and the lone not-all-that-awful rendition is by none other than the Partridge Family, the made-for-TV “band” that starred in an eponymous ABC sitcom from 1970 to 1974, led by Oscar-winner Shirley Jones (Elmer Gantry) and her real-life stepson, David Cassidy. (For millennial readers, Cassidy was the Harry Styles of his era.) The Partridge Family’s take on “Frosty the Snowman” works because whoever arranged it understood that the song is, at heart, a kind of murder ballad-the narrative of a beloved’s death. Moreover, the character is cursed by the knowledge of his own doom: “Frosty the snowman / Knew the sun was hot that day / So he said, ‘Let’s run / And we’ll have some fun / Now before I melt away.’”
The arranger honors this unlikely metaphor for the human condition (possibly stolen from Andersen?) by slowing the song down and scoring it with a forlorn cocktail-style piano, some melancholy strings, and a gentle pop rock beat, broken up by the occasional intrusion of a poignant flourish on flute or oboe. Cassidy was a capable enough ballad singer, and he approaches “Frosty the Snowman” with a palpable ache in his voice, as if he were singing about a girlfriend with terminal cancer (or with foreknowledge of his own 2017 death from liver failure brought on by alcoholism). He alters the melody, too, sanding down the tune’s bounce, rendering it less jaunty, more blue.
I know this sounds ridiculous, but the Partridge Family “Frosty the Snowman” succeeds by the counter-intuitive strategy of taking this dumb song seriously rather than trying to breeze past it. The coup de théâtre is the final verse (the arranger has wisely omitted the “thumpety thump thump” coda): “Frosty the snowman / Had to hurry on his way / But he waved goodbye / Saying, ‘Don’t you cry / I’ll be back again some day.” Cassidy slows down even further on those last six words, elongating them as the instruments drop out, with a long pause before the final a cappella “day.” The strings then return for one last, funereal chord. The implication is clear: Frosty will not be back.
And maybe that’s why I like this version so much! Except, alas, Frosty is coming back. Every time you walk into Walgreens between now and December 25 and Mariah Carey isn’t playing instead.
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