There’s a rich vein of naturalistic fallacy in the Christmas canon, with “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” making this list (and checking it twice). While Band-Aid were well-intentioned but disturbing, the moral philosophy of most Christmassy classics is utilitarian at best. Bob presumably was yet to hear of the Congo or the Nile. We could call it a fallacy of composition, in which the properties of a part of a thing are mistakenly applied to the whole, but really it’s a case of extreme negative stereotyping backed by a colonial mindset. There’s a whiff of mistaken attribution of causation here, too, as if Bob feels that it’s the snow that makes Christmas festive, rather than the association with festivities that has rubbed off on the white stuff.Īs for “nothing ever grows” and “no rain nor rivers flow”, we know that Band Aid wanted to draw attention to crop failures and famine conditions, but the idea that Africa is barren and desertified is disturbing and reductive. But the effects of climate change are taking their toll on this snowy peak, so maybe soon this lyric will see a new and more accurate meaning. But I can promise there will be snow in Africa this Christmas time: at the very least, the tip of Kilimanjaro is a permanent glacier. A white Christmas is particularly unlikely in the south of Africa – given that south of the equator, Christmas falls at the height of summer. There are some areas of Africa that rarely experience snowfall at all. Bob Geldoff may have recruited a horde of celebs, but they still fell victim to a failure of imagination and hasty overgeneralization. No rain nor rivers flow “Do they know it’s Christmas?” – Band AidĬharitable intentions don’t excuse fallacious reasoning – or straight-up ignorance. There won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas time … Not content with creating this (ahem) *abominable* lyric, Wood then has a chorus of children chant the line over and over as the song reaches its conclusion, thus both giving us a classic argument from repetition, along with an attempted indoctrination of the youth of the 1970s… One cannot make a snowman and expect it to start snowing! Yes, snowmen and snow are often observed together. This is a straight-up dose of reverse attribution of causation. Perhaps Wood would have been better to claim: “I wish it could feel like Christmas every day”.īut it’s the line “When the snowman brings the snow / Oh well he just might like to know / He’s put a great big smile on somebody’s face” that prompted the creation of this list. It could be Christmas every day, but that would be terrible. For then, it would lose its lustre – while all the world’s systems and economy crashed down around us. We surely cannot wish for constant Christmas for everyone. Immanuel Kant, too, surely would dispute Wizzard’s claim that one can “wish it could be Christmas every day”. This song’s fundamental premise is deeply flawed, overlooking the problem of diminishing returns. Not content with traumatising children and multiplying z’s beyond necessity, Roy Wood’s Wizzard offered up I wish it could be Christmas every day in 1973 to universal revulsion yet eternal radio airplay. When the snowman brings the snow… “I wish it could be Christmas every day” – Wizzard What better way, then, to teach errors in reasoning than to dissect these Xmas classics? Humbug!
But stuffed with pigs-in-blankets and addled on mulled wine, festive pop lyricists seem particularly prone to fallacy. When the nights are long and the days short, there is some solace in the familiarity of classic Christmas songs.
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