It’s hardly a nostalgic tune, and it certainly doesn’t present the ideal formula for a wonderful family holiday, but “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” is pretty much unavoidable this time of year. The song itself, which details Grandma’s abuse of eggnog and untimely demise under the runners of Santa’s sleigh, was written by Randy Brooks, originally tracked by the husband-and-wife duo of Elmo Shropshire and Patsy Trigg in 1979 (Trigg neither sang nor played an instrument at the session and is actually not on the record at all), and independently released in the San Francisco area on the hastily-created Elmo & Patsy imprint with a song simply called “Christmas” as the B-side. The song was re-recorded in the early 1980s and privately released again, this time on Oink Records, which was really just the Elmo & Patsy label restructured and renamed. The song was re-recorded yet again in 1984 when Elmo & Patsy signed to Epic Records along with a new B-side, “Percy, the Puny Pointsettia.” Unfortunately the couple divorced shortly after the Epic deal, and Elmo, an interesting character in his own right, having been a veterinarian, horse trainer, jockey, and long-distance runner, recorded a fourth and “solo” (but Patsy was never actually on the song in any of its incarnations in the first place) version of the song in 1992 and then did yet a fifth (and second “solo”) rendition in 2000.

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