Nobody does despair like the Irish, and nobody does Irish better than the Pogues.

They're not actually Irish. The entry in Wikipedia refers to them as a Celtic punk band from London, but their name comes from <em>pog ma thoin</em>, loosely translated from the Irish as "kiss my arse."

I had heard of them before, but I had never bought anything of theirs until I got their version of Eric Bogle's "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda" off iTunes. Then yesterday I discovered their great Christmas song, "Fairytale of New York." Viewers on VH1 Great Britain voted it the best Christmas song of all time, although it's like no other Christmas song I've ever heard.

[caption id="attachment_1477" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Shane Macgowan and the late Kirsty MacColl"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/pogues_2085282b.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1477" title="pogues_2085282b" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/pogues_2085282b-300x187.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="187" /></a>[/caption]

It's a story of an aging alcoholic who finds himself in the drunk tank on Christmas Eve, remembering happier times with a woman he knew. The song turns into a back-and-forth between Macgowan and MacColl, in which they insult each other lovingly.

<em>You're a bum</em>
<em> You're a punk</em>
<em> You're an old slut on junk</em>
<em> Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed</em>
<em> You scumbag, you maggot</em>
<em> You cheap lousy faggot</em>
<em> Happy Christmas your arse</em>
<em> I pray God it's our last</em>

<em>The boys of the NYPD choir</em>
<em> Still singing Galway Bay</em>
<em> And the bells were ringing out</em>
<em> For Christmas day.</em>

There actually is no NYPD choir, but it hardly matters. There haven't been many Christmas songs that look at the other side of the holiday, at people who don't have families to visit and won't be getting any gifts they don't buy for themselves. Christmas is the time of year when more sick people die and when the suicide rate spikes. Christmas may be for the family, as Dennis Day sang in one of my mother's favorite Christmas songs, but if you have no family -- if you have no one at all to share it with -- Christmas is anything but the happiest day of the year.

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The YouTube version of the song from St. Patrick's Day 1988 has been viewed nearly 7 million times, and as much as any song I've ever heard, it's a reminder that while there are people dressed to the nines for Midnight Mass or waking up early to look at the presents under the tree, there are people freezing in the streets, detoxing in the drunk tank and just living without any hope of happiness of the kind we grow to expcet.

Two miles outside the gates of the retirement community in which I live, there is a trailer park. It isn't even a particularly nice trailer park.  Several of the units visible from the road are broken-down and abandoned, but if you look a little farther, there are at least two or three not-so-mobile homes decorated very tastefully with Christmas lights.

These folks don't have much, but they believe.

<em>The boys of the NYPD choir</em>
<em> Still singing Galway Bay</em>
<em> And the bells were ringing out</em>
<em> For Christmas day.</em>