Alan Cross: How do we solve a problem like Mariah?

My God, she’s even telling people on the London Underground that all she wants for Christmas is for them to stand back from the yellow line.

With radio stations flipping to an all-Christmas music format earlier and earlier — this year’s first-mover was a station in Ohio that started with holiday music 24/7 on Oct.

According to MRC Data, the company that tracks radio airplay across Canada and the U.S., reports that AIWfCiY has been played 5,700 times so far this year in Canada and more than 73,000 times since the company started tracking songs in 1995.

A quick bit of extrapolation indicates that AIWfCiY will be streamed 71 million times in 2021 — and that’s just in the United States.

Canada, the U.K., and a dozen other countries are also under the spell of this song.

Therefore, as a public service, I offer some holiday songs to act as Naloxone and Narcan to AIWfCiY overdoses.

If you’ve ever dreamed of finding a new guitar under the tree, Hawksley understands.

But while the Police were working in Quebec on the Zenyatta Mondatta album in 1980 they took some time to head the slopes in Grey Rock for a little snowmobiling and Santa skiing.

For over a year now, King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp and his wife, Toyah Willcox , have been posting performances from their kitchen every Sunday.

Their thinking is that if Spotify only pays once a song runs for 30 seconds, why bother writing anything longer? They’ve set that aside for this track which runs for 100 hours.

Back in high school and university, I worked in a grocery store where the Christmas music was the same 15-song, 8-track tape played over and over and over and over again.

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