Disturbing Snowman Song By Bing Crosby's Sons

Three Decembers ago, my family and I were starved for Christmas entertainment. It was the first December of the COVID times, and we were looking for some different Christmas music on YouTube.

My husband, my Gen Z daughter, and I are big fans of oldies, and I don’t mean just from the 1970s and 80s. I mean waaaaay back as early as The Charleston and ragtime. We settled on a video of a Bing Crosby Christmas album.

For those who don’t know, Bing Crosby is the man who sings the most famous classic version of “White Christmas”. Did you know Bing got his entire family involved in his Christmas albums and TV specials?

I remember watching some of his later 1970s TV specials featuring his second family, including wife Kathryn Crosby, daughter Mary Francis (who grew up to shoot J.R. on TV’s Dallas), and sons Harry and Nathaniel. Here is a number from Bing's 1973 NBC TV Christmas special, Bing Crosby's Sun Valley Christmas Show, in which he sings and dances with a snowman:

You wouldn't know, having watched that duet with the snowman, that over twenty years before this performance, a Bing Crosby album featured a song about a different snowman that suffers a much graver fate than getting a bit smaller in the sunshine.

The earlier song has a happy, jaunty feel, until you listen carefully to the lyrics. It goes by so fast, you could miss the words, and think it's a fun little tribute to one family's friendly snowman. But no child should listen to this song.

So here is the video you’ve been waiting for….the worst Christmas/winter song ever (that I know of) performed by the Crosby family. It is a recording of a 1950 album on the Decca label entitled, Bing Crosby, the Voice of Christmas. The song is, “The Snowman”, written by Johnny Burke and Jimmy van Heusen.

Please keep small children out of the room if playing this song, or they may never be the same!

It is the first song in this video. When Bing introduces “the twins”, he means Dennis and Phillip, two of his sons from his first family, whose mother was Hollywood actress Dixie Lee. TRIGGER WARNING: the snowman is not alive at the end of the song:

Did you catch the part where the snowman happily sacrifices himself for the children?

When my family and I sat around the dining room table listening to this song on YouTube, we were only partially aware of it as we chatted, until this line seemed to jump out of the computer:

“He threw himself across the burning floor!”

What???

Yes, the happy snowman with no name throws himself onto a fire to put it out and save the house of the children who built him!

It is disturbing, and also makes no sense because if the snowman could put out a porch fire with his body, how is it that he "couldn't knock" and "couldn't ring the bell?

And he doesn’t even come back to life like Frosty does after he melts in the famous TV cartoon!

HE’S JUST PART OF A DAMP PORCH AT THE END OF THE SONG!

And Bing just laughs it off afterward, saying he’ll never forget that happy snowman. I wonder if he even heard the lyrics.

If you're getting tired of the holiday season and want to add some drama to a boring winter evening, play the song of the happy snowman in the funny fedora for your family and friends.

See if anyone notices the lyrics, but again, I say, DON’T LET SMALL CHILDREN HEAR IT!

Happy winter, everyone!

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This story was originally published on Medium.com.