The majority of Christmas music is hateful. Bah humbug.

There, we’ve got the elephant in the room out of the way. The simple truth is that much like how some of us tolerate sprouts at Christmas, for some curious reason, we inflict ourselves with some of the most malignant screeching set to music because it has the word Christmas in it.

If you’ve ever been on a visit to a supermarket near Christmas and find that the usually cheery shop assistant looks a bit crestfallen, then the reason why is likely to be Christmas music.

Because while you’re only in the shop for perhaps half an hour, enough time to hear a couple screechy songs, fallen asleep in the bread aisle to the monotone whining of Coldplay and woken up again to the panicked screaming of fellow shoppers when ‘it’s the most wonderful time of the year’ begins, for the poor helpless shop worker, it’s the musical equivalent of the torture known as waterboarding.

That’s due to the fact that while you might have heard it once, for the aforementioned shop assistant, it’s the seventh time they’ve heard it as one of the eight holly jolly Christmas songs on loop.

By the end of the 12th day in a row of work, as well as enduring the usual ‘customer jokes’ any Christmas cheer they may have begun the month with has evaporated faster than a carton of milk orbiting the sun.

Let’s be clear. Some “Christmas songs” are alright and at this point we give an honourable mention to a few that aren’t awful. Fairytale of New York by the Pogues, Last Christmas by Wham, A Winter’s Tale by Queen (although we’re not sure if it’s actually a Christmas song) and I wish It could be Christmas every day by Wizzard to name three of several.

But the simple fact is this. Most of them are. I mean, even Justin Bieber and the Crazy Frog have released racket with the word Christmas in it, and while they are perhaps more akin to a five-minute wonder than repeated every year like the genuinely hateful Greek mythological monster like screeching of Mariah Carey, it is a demonstration of how insipid the industry for Christmas music is.

But then again, we’re told that listening to such horrors is what makes Christmas special, right?

It could be argued that ‘Christmas music’ is a legacy of the once-vaunted battle for the festive number one spot, which, like the rest of the charts has been obliterated since the advent of streaming services.

After all, there isn’t much to shout about since the turn of the millennium. First, came the years where the Christmas number one wasn’t so much a race of which song it would be, but rather which X Factor contestant would win.

Then, in 2009 came the rebellion in the form of Killing in the Name Of. Only to be followed by four years of genuine horror in the form of “Lad Baby” and the half-arsed blatherings about sausage rolls.

Bring back Mr Blobby.