Won’t Someone Please Think of the Children?: Tiny Tim’s Christmas Album

By Hanna

The first reaction most people have when confronted with the reality of Tiny Tim, in song and especially video form, is “That’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.” Or simply speechless horror. Imagine my glee when I found out he’d made a Christmas album. Fun for traumatizing all the family!

Of course, seasoned Tiny Tim fans get past the fear quite quickly, and then move on to appreciate his amazing vocal range, obsessive knowledge of early twentieth-century music, and comic acting. But a wider knowledge of him means knowing about his less wholesome aspects: his repressed homosexuality, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and vehement sexism rooted in religious extremism, for instance. When his radical views were combined with his appearance, Tiny Tim could embody the opposite of wholesome. Physically, he was unattractive: fat and androgynous with long, wavy hair Sonically, he resembled a mad cross between Shirley Temple (in his falsetto) and Bing Crosby (in his baritone). His image, playing into his androgyny, followed the film-based comedic stereotype of the sissy, utilizing his passivity, appearance, and singing style to maximum effect.

BOO! I mean, Ho Ho Ho.

Given the camp quality of his image, his strong religious convictions, and especially his stage name—taken from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—it’s a little astounding Tiny Tim did not make a Christmas album earlier in his career. In fact, Tiny Tim’s Christmas Album was recorded at the start of 1996, and only released after his death at the end of that year. The posthumous release adds the first note of gloom. The production is awful to mediocre, and his voice, because of his age and illness, is not in top form, but this is only really noticeable to fans. Newcomers will sit frozen in fear too much to notice, anyway. The whole thing has a suitable feeling of general decay to it, which judging from reviews, depresses the serious fans, but is good for the rest of us.

Of course, with Tiny Tim none of the kinds of quality demands that bind other artists particularly matter; what is most important is what he does to the songs. His real talent has always been remembering old songs, and turning them into something new. So what does he do to Christmas, and how scary does he make it?

The album opens with “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which is like listening to a “Classic Features of Tiny Tim Songs Bingo.” It has it all: terrifying falsetto, choir of children in the background, a very camp spoken word intro, and a dialogue Tiny Tim acts out between himself and Santa. All in all it’s pretty great and will make anyone you play it for wonder what exactly is singing this song. The next song is “All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth,” a Shirley Temple novelty song. Two minutes in and Tiny Tim’s already pretending to be a small girl. It’s everybody’s favorite song on the album because it’s hilarious, and shows Tiny Tim’s genius for unearthing songs everyone else wants to forget.

The next five songs (that’s “What I Want For Christmas,” “I Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Claus,” “White Christmas,” “The Christmas Song,” and “O Holy Night”) continue much in the same vein, with him showing off his vocal range, using both his baritone and his soprano. I do have a soft spot for the kissing noises he makes at the end of “I Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Claus,” though.

His version of “Silent Night,” however, is all you could ask for in a Tiny Tim Christmas album. It’s over-the-top at first, and then he starts into a long, spoken-word rant about the hypocrisy of the way most people celebrate Christmas: putting on a good face while being horrible and criminal. “Those fornicating with children, and professing His name.” Nothing like a casual mention of pedophiles to get you into the Christmas spirit. A guy on Amazon.com wrote in a review that this album might work with “enough eggnog,” but, seriously, there’s not enough eggnog in the world to make this not horrendous.

The hymn medley following it is the sort of melodramatic camp-fest I had been secretly hoping for when buying this album. It has an orchestra, synthesizers, choirs, and church bells. . . basically everything. Sadly, there are no more rants, although Tiny Tim does pretend to be dying in “Amazing Grace.”

After this, the album offers three more typical Tiny Tim songs, “Rainbow On The River,” “What A Friend We Have In Jesus,” and “Mission Bell.” Except that in the last of these, there’s an interval where he starts rapping. I think. It’s hard to tell beyond the overwhelming feeling of trauma.

To summarize the experience, this album features a man in his sixties pretending to be a small child in two songs, and a three-minute rant about pedophiles and hypocrites. Not family-friendly or harmless, but it will make any Christmas at the very least interesting. Even if you’ll need an enormous quantity of eggnog to get through it.