We’re all hanging up our stockings by the wall, walking in a winter wonderland, rocking around the Christmas tree and telling Rudolph to run. The seasonal imagery is familiar and reassuring and maddening. It becomes strangely comforting when placed alongside more astringent takes on Christmas experiences.

Which of these three great acerbic Christmas anthems gets your vote?

Fairy Tale of New York by The Pogues

The Pogues’ rousing hymn to lost hopes and failed dreams has been acclaimed as the best Christmas song ever, yet it doesn’t have an ounce of recognisable Christmas cheer.

Instead of Santa’s sleigh we have the drunk tank in a police station, into which people are thrown to sleep off their inebriation.

Instead of the exchange of presents we have the exchange of bitter insults between Shane MacGowan’s character and Kirsty MacColl’s, taunts which arise from their awareness of lost hopes and dreams caused by their descent into drugs and alcoholism.

The song’s timeless context is part of its appeal. It evokes America in the 1940s, when Sinatra was swinging and Bing Crosby’s version of Galway Bay was a big hit, its title comes from J P Donleavy’s 1973 novel, and The Pogues released the record in 1987.

Also timeless is the lure of cars big as bars and rivers of gold, the promise of the good life which comes to nothing. The couple’s call and response is tough and uncompromising: I could have been someone – well, so could anyone. There’s just a hint at the end of reconciliation at the end of the song, no more than whisper.

But what lifts it out of gloom is the melody, the slurred piano, the fast paced harmony which gains momentum and turns us all into the the boys of the NYPD choir as we belt out the lyrics, united in our experience of love, loss, melancholy, nostalgia and hope.

Christmas Card From a Hooker In Minneapolis by Tom Waits

Here is a whole life encapsulated in a message written in a Christmas card.

The title is a bit of a giveaway, as is the song’s inclusion on Tom Waits’ Blue Valentine, his 1978 album which creates a world of sadness and desperation, of predators and victims, of losers and hopers.

Romeo staggers with a bullet in his chest. A girl who arrives in town with just t$29 and an alligator purse loses them (and half a pint of blood) in an attack, a man weighed down with guilt is reminded of his bloodstained past every Valentine’s Day. No, we are not in happy hooker territory here.

The first line blurts the news that she’s pregnant and the harshness of this opening is softened a little when she says she’s quit drugs and alcohol. She has a husband who is good to her, who doesn’t mind that the baby isn’t his.

We have a glimpse of a modest, happy life.  He’s got a job and he plays the trombone. They go dancing. She wears the ring that belonged to his mother. Her dream of being rich is to buy a used car lot and drive a different car each day, to suit her mood.

But she still thinks about Charlie. She cracks a joke that filling stations remind her of him and of his hair, full of grease. They would listen to Little Anthony and The Imperials on her record player and spend a lot of money on dope. The theft of her record player hints at the darker, more complex world into which we are pitched.

The details then become more vague, in keeping with her rackety life. There was someone called Mario, a boyfriend maybe, and he got busted. She refers to an accident she had. She fell to pieces and went back home for a while but her old friends aren’t around. They were either dead or in prison, so she has landed back in  Minneapolis.

Then comes the twist. She has to tell Charlie the truth. She made it up, all that about the husband, and his trombone. Nice touch, the trombone. She’s sending the card and the message to Charlie because she needs money to pay a lawyer. The last line tells us where she is. She will be eligible for parole by Valentine’s Day.

It’s a sad and powerful ending which raises more questions than it answers. We feel that Charlie is her last hope, the only one with the money she needs, and there is also a hint that she would like them to get together when she comes out of prison. Is there going to be a happy ending? Not likely.

Christmas in Capetown by Randy Newman

This is another song, from the 1983 album Trouble in Paradise, with just one voice, that of a white South African addressing his Christmas guest, an English girl who is telling him that apartheid is a disgrace.

He puts her right, and in so doing reveals a self-serving, mean-spirited character, a product of his type. He is full of contempt for the black people who love dancing to  Abba, ‘our music’ and who look at you threateningly with their ‘big ugly yellow eyes’. He tells the girl she doesn’t understand and to get back to her own miserable country if she doesn’t like what she sees.

And yet his complacency is troubled by something he can’t put his finger on. It’s Christmas as usual, but it isn’t the same. He can’t drink like he used to, the beer doesn’t taste right. There is an underlying tension which disturbs him. The repeated line at the end, It’s Christmas in Cape Town, lingers like the unpleasant taste of the beer and of so much else.

And the winner is…

So, one to sing down the pub, at family gatherings or staggering off to Midnight Mass. A card for the mantelpiece alongside the robins and Santas and the mistletoe. A snapshot of the shameful era of apartheid.

In this particular Christmas season, during which the world said goodbye to Nelson Mandela, the hat goes to Randy Newman.