Bob Dylan / Must Be Santa - Single of the Week / 2009
Must Be Santa
gleeful, chaotic, tongue-in-cheek
Video: BobDylanVEVO on YouTube
Dylan's version of the polka novelty song plays it almost entirely straight as a call-and-response Christmas romp, building through cumulative verses until it detonates into a surreal roll call of eight American presidents standing in for the reindeer. The recording, all accordion and stomp, treats the absurdity with total deadpan commitment.
holiday tradition Americana kitsch absurdist humor accumulation/list-making satire of authority
Who's speaking
A collective folk voice asking riddles that another voice answers, in the tradition of call-and-response children's songs; Dylan sings it without winking, letting the incongruity do the work.
What happens
The song builds Santa piece by piece through a series of question-and-answer verses -- beard, suit, nose, laugh, sleigh -- each new detail folded into a growing cumulative refrain, until the reindeer names arrive and are abruptly replaced by a list of U.S. presidents, after which the song returns to its refrain and ends on the same shouted conclusion it's been building toward the whole time.
How it's built
Strict cumulative-verse form borrowed from folk tradition: each verse adds one attribute of Santa, and the answer-tag from every prior verse gets restacked before the title hook repeats. The presidents verse breaks the pattern only in content, not in form -- it's slotted into the exact same reindeer-naming slot, which is what makes the joke land as structural rather than just verbal.
Section by section
Opening verses (beard, suit)
The song establishes its riddle structure with the most conventional, expected details of Santa's appearance, easing the listener into the call-and-response pattern before complicating it later.
Nose and laugh verse
“big red cherry nose”
The description tips from generic into cartoonish specificity, signaling that the song is aware of its own kitsch and is playing it for comic exaggeration rather than earnest description.
Reindeer verse into presidents list
“Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon”
The expected reindeer names are yanked away and replaced with a chronological run of presidents, delivered in the same singsong meter as everything before it. The effect depends entirely on deadpan delivery -- no line comments on the substitution, so the joke is purely structural, a bait-and-switch inside a children's song template.
Second presidents verse
“Carter, Raegan, Bush, and Clinton”
Continuing the sequence up through the presidency current at the time of Dylan's recording anchors the joke in a specific moment, turning a nonsense children's song into an odd little time capsule.
Closing refrains
The song retreats fully back into its stacked refrain and title hook, as if the presidential detour never happened, letting the absurdity sit unresolved rather than explained or moralized.
Craft
- call-and-response
- Each couplet poses a riddle-question and immediately answers it, mimicking children's sing-along and campfire song conventions, which reinforces the song's communal, participatory feel.
- cumulative form
- Like 'The Twelve Days of Christmas,' each verse restates all prior descriptive fragments before adding a new one, so the song literally accumulates Santa's image piece by piece as it plays.
- incongruity/juxtaposition
- Substituting a run of presidents for reindeer names yanks the song out of its fairy-tale register into blunt political reality, generating humor purely from the collision of registers rather than any explicit joke or commentary.
- nonsense refrain
- The repeated 'ho-ho-ho' and fragment-stacking choruses function almost as scat or percussion, prioritizing rhythm and sound over semantic content.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as pure performance mischief: Dylan, known for deadpan reinvention of old material, takes a genuinely goofy novelty song and pushes its built-in absurdity slightly further by swapping reindeer for presidents, exploiting the fact that the cumulative folk-song form can absorb almost any list without breaking. A secondary reading might look for satire -- grouping decades of presidents under Santa's sleigh as arbitrary, interchangeable figures pulled along by tradition -- but the song offers no editorializing to support a pointed political reading; the humor lives in incongruity and rhythm, not commentary.
Context
"Must Be Santa" is a novelty polka song originally recorded by Mitch Miller in the late 1950s. Dylan's version appeared as a single tied to his 2009 holiday album 'Christmas in the Heart,' with all its proceeds directed to charity; the music video for this recording depicts a chaotic house party. The presidents substitution is unique to Dylan's rendition and is generally understood as a comic embellishment rather than a scripted feature of the original song.
Listen for
- The tightening stack of fragments in each refrain, which makes the song feel like it's physically accumulating weight verse by verse
- The tonal seam where the reindeer names should be but presidents appear instead, delivered with zero change in vocal inflection
- The polka/accordion arrangement pushing the song toward deliberate, cheerful cheesiness
- Dylan's rasping voice against such a chipper, childlike melody, which itself creates a low-key comic friction
About Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter. Described as one of the greatest songwriters of all time, Dylan has been a major figure in popular culture over his 69-year career.
b. 1941 / United States
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