“Do They Know It’s Christmas?” “Do They Know What Christmas Is?”

Back in 1984, British musician Bob Geldof put together “Band Aid,” a “super-group” of pop singers, to do a benefit for the famine in Ethiopia. The pop stars recorded a song “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” This time last year, Lutheran Satire put out a send-up of that project to address the famine of the Word of God. A different kind of super-group recorded “Do They Know What Christmas Is?” As my Christmas gift to you, I post it below.

First, a little background. The Band Aid project was well intentioned. Ethiopia was indeed starving, due largely to the policies of the explicitly Communist government that it had in the 1980s. And Band Aid’s song did sell lots of records, raising some $27 million for Ethiopia relief.

But the song, Do They Know It’s Christmas, is just awful. Geldof himself, who wrote it, called it one of the two “worst songs in history.” (The other, he said, is “We Are the World,” which he also wrote.) And the performance is just embarrassing. Watch the video, if you can.

The lyrics include the immortal lines:

And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas time
The greatest gift they’ll get this year is life
Where nothing ever grows
No rain nor rivers flow
Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?

Nothing ever grows in Africa? No rain in Africa? Africa doesn’t have any rivers? Africa, according to the song, is “a world of dread and fear” where “the Christmas bells that ring there are the clanging chimes of doom.” And the hearers of the song are piously exhorted to pray: “thank God it’s them instead of you.”

The song was quickly condemned, including by Africans, as racist, stereotyped, and ignorant. To be fair, there was lots of misery and drought in Ethiopia at the time (though not “Africa” as a whole). But Ethiopians, whose Christian roots go back farther than any other nation (and which currently has the largest Lutheran church) certainly knew what Christmas is, even though the Marxist government forbade its celebration in 1984.

Last Christmas, Rev. Hans Fiene and his collaborators made a parody of the Band Aid song, along with all of the other vacuous holiday tunes that say nothing about Jesus and what Christmas actually means.

“Do They Know What Christmas Is?” counters Bob Geldorf’s super-group of pop stars with a super-group of his own: the characters that appear in all of the other Lutheran Satire videos!

They are all here: Marty Luther, Frank the Hippie Pope, Donal and Conal, St. Patrick, those Victorian-era Anglicans Mr. Thompson and the Vicar, John Calvin, Preacher Jeff, Horus, Bart the Patriarch, Pastor, and C. F. W. Walther, among others, with a cameo by Simeon the Ethiopian Eunuch.

This time, instead of arguing theology and making fun of each other as they usually do, the Lutheran Satire gang is united (except for Horus) in affirming “what Christmas is”; namely, the celebration of the birth of Jesus and the gift of salvation.