Elmo's Christmas Countdown "Countdown/I Hate Christmas"

My wife asked my 2 year old son if he wanted to write a letter to Santa.  His big sister had already done one, and he feels left out if you don't invite him to do whatever she does.

"I'll start," my wife told him.  "'Dear Santa . . .' Okay, now what do you want to tell him?"

"I hate Christmas!"

!!!!!!!!!!

Both my wife and I did a double take on this one.  Hate Christmas?  A 2 year old?

Then it clicked, and we kinda cracked up.

Of aaaallllll the Christmas specials my kids have viewed, their favorite is something I'd never heard of, prior to receiving it.  It's called "Elmo's Christmas Countdown."

I can't say that I've ever seen it on TV.  Or heard another person mention it.  But we've got it memorized in our house.

It stars the voice of Ben Stiller as Stiller The Elf and is chock full of mid-2000s stars (Ty Pennington!  Kevin James!) and mid-2000s references ("Heckuva Job, Brownie" and the Sopranos famous "fade to black" moment) and a slew of great songs from Sheryl Crow and Anne Hathaway and Jennifer Hudson.

And there are plenty of repeatable, Christmas-y quotables from the show, including:

"Elmo is making a Christmas Wish on a Christmas Star for a Christmas miracle!"  and "It's like Alicia Keys said, 'When things are at their darkest, that when you have to believe the most!"

But for whatever reason, my son latched on to the song sung by Stiller The Elf and Oscar The Grouch.

It's a classic back and forth style argument song, where Stiller tries to convince Oscar that he should be the one to "Count-down-Christmas" but Oscar sings back, using the same melody, "I-Hate-Christmas."

So that's where he got it from, and we think it's cute and it's silly and hopefully he won't repeat it outside the home, because if he did, that would be, to borrow a phrase from Oscar, a "pain in the King Wenceslas."



Hear the song on Youtube.