Just why did Low choose to release such a terrifying Christmas song in 2008? Was it the endless Iraq War? The worst stock crash since 1929? The sheer exhaustion of surviving the George W. Bush administration? Or just the sheer existential exhaustion of surviving our mortal probations in general?

Because Low could’ve easily just recorded a long-belated follow-up to their 1999 Christmas EP instead, which even then was already considered an Indie-Rock classic. It would have been easy for them to capitalize on that record’s growing good will. Nor had they lost their ability to record a lovely Christmas song: 8 years later in the equally dark year of 2016, they released the tender “Some Hearts (At Christmas Time),” which I’ve mentioned before was the one Low song that finally won over my wife.

But she has very much never been won over by “Santa’s Coming Over,” to say the least–and given how much lesser known this song is even in the Indie world, she’s not alone. Low made the very Punk Rock decision to antagonize and terrify their audience that Christmas, not woo or win them over. The naively sweet lyrics, sung as though by a child eagerly hiding and waiting for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, only amplify the dissonance and dread of the menacing music itself, which defamiliarizes Santa to sound like some looming, apocalyptic cult-leader, a stalker, a demon, or an eldritch god.

Or even just plain old God Himself.

Here again it is relevant that Alan and Mimi were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, meaning that they are among those purportedly looking forward to the imminent Second Coming of Jesus Christ, whose return is repeatedly described in scripture as “Great and Terrible:” Great due to our long-awaited deliverance at the hands of the Messiah, Terrible due to the awful destructions to be visited upon the wicked–whom in our more honest moments we worry includes us. We had discussed just earlier this month, with Run-DMC’s “Christmas in Hollis,” how Santa Claus is in some ways a type and shadow for the coming of the Lord Himself, when He will at last reward the generous and the selfless in the Last Day; Low here reminds us of just how terrifying that same coming of the Lord will be as well.

The music-video itself features a simple montage of close-ups of children’s faces against a black background; this somehow adds to the terror of the song, because we are put in mind Christ’s warning that “whosoever shall offend these little ones, it were better that a millstone be hung from his neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea”–and we have indeed been offending children, yea verily, even down to the present day. We persistently and stubbornly refuse poor children affordable healthcare, charge them for their own school lunches, extort from them outrageous college tuition, excuse child molesters in high places, and overall punish not the powerful but the children for the poverty of their parents–as though to be poor were a sin. When Sparhawk pleads for Santa to remember “that some of them have nothing,” it is a damning indictment against our society that allows so many children to be left penniless and helpless in the first place, all of which must and will be held to our collective account at the Judgment Bar of Christ.

Indeed, the Christ to come (whom Santa Claus feebly symbolizes) will execute vengeance against those who offend children specifically; and as we prepare for the return of the “child separation policy” at the border, the animal cages, the ICE raids on families and worse, there is reason to fear indeed the coming justice of an offended God, especially on the eve of Christmas–which also but feebly symbolizes the eve of the Second Coming.