Christmas music. It starts sometime between Labor Day and Columbus Day, when the trees have yet to shed their leaves and Dartmouth students can still comfortably wear sandals. So ubiquitous that it is obnoxious, the genre quickly becomes overplayed, overly sappy and beyond annoying.
In the dark and murky underground of Christmas music, however, there exists a sub-genre so terrible and horrifying that not even the Grinch could expose someone to it in good conscience: Jingle Cats Music.
"What is Jingle Cats Music?" you blithely ask, still happily unaware of the terrors that exist in our cruel world.
Since the early 1990s, Jingle Cats Music has distributed the recordings of notable "artists" like the Jingle Babies, Jingle Dogs and, of course, the label's namesake, the Jingle Cats themselves. These animal and baby covers of Christmas classics even spawned knock-off label Dick Keysser Records' "Happy Clucking Holidays," which features a delightful choir of ducks singing (or quacking) tunes such as "Ode to Joy" and "Silent Night."
According to Wikipedia, a veritable fount of infallible knowledge, "the Jingle Cats began their recording career in December 1991, when a precocious kitten named 'Cheesepuff' crawled into a Hollywood studio recording booth and began meowing along with the song Jingle Bells."
"Singing cats?" you ask. How extraordinary! This tale is more myth, however, than an episode of VH1's "Behind the Music." In truth, the Jingle Cats are, again according to Wikipedia, "the real sounds of cats which have been meticulously edited to create the illusion that real cats are singing."
Perhaps this is merely a brazen attempt to capitalize on the success of the infamous "Meow Mix" commercials that began in the 1970s. Or maybe there truly was, at some point in the distant past, an extraordinary cat endowed with the gift of song. Whatever the genesis of the Jingle Cats and all its subsequent bastardizations, however, the true mystery is why a relatively large market for this musical detritus exists.
Consider this: After its eponymous debut release, the Jingle Cats went on to release "Meowy Christmas" (1993), "Here Comes Santa Claws" (1994) and "Rhythm and Mews" (2002).
Maybe this can be explained by the presumably low production costs associated with these musical endeavors. After all, how pricey can it be to have some nerd sit at a synthesizer and play cat sounds set to spunky, low quality backing tracks?
Either way, I'm over the Jingle Cats. Should they decide to release another album, I'll simply give the jaded reply, "They're old mews."
