Day 108: David Hasselhoff - The Night Before Christmas

I love David Hasselhoff. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m from a country where in the early 2000s, daytime television was just American TV shows with a nice, casual 20 year delay. When I was growing up, I was watching so much Baywatch and Knight Rider that my sister and I always joke that David Hasselhoff is our real father. And yet despite this, I’ve never listened to his Christmas album, The Night Before Christmas. It’s high time I give it a go.

Album cover courtesy of Edel SE & Co. KGaA

The King of Christmas is presumably Jesus, but Hasselhoff comes as a close second. I’m choosing to disregard other seasonal characters like Michael Bublé or Sinatra or whoever else has gotten on the seasonal album grift, which I’m sure is very lucrative if your Christmas album is either very good or very bad. The Night Before Christmas has landed on a fair few lists of the worst Christmas albums of all time, and the resulting streams surely puts a bit of money into the Hoff’s coffers during the holiday season.

The record opens with Hasselhoff doing a little skit with his biological children and doing a spoken word “’Twas The Night Before Christmas”-thing. Then, you have a little section of brief respite where you do slightly forget that you’re listening to David Hasselhoff, it just sounds like semi-generic Christmas music that you’d hear at a hardware store. But then the Hoff does ramp it up a little bit in a way that only he could do.

You think you know what you’re getting, but you don’t: Jingle Bells” opens with a casual yelp of “Y’all, Jingle Bells!” and ends with a saxophone solo. “Feliz Navidad”, for whatever reason, has a heavily autotuned chorus. Pretty much after that, the record pivots to being in German, which is no wonder: The Hoff is so big there that he was singing “Looking for Freedom” on the Berlin Wall when it was coming down. There’s even a Hasselhoff museum in Berlin.

Even for us hardcore Hoffheads or Hasslers or whatever he chooses to call his fan community, of which I am a proud member, The Night Before Christmas probably won’t be the most impressive thing they hear all year. But as a curiosity, it is a good listen. If you’re sick of the same old Christmas hits you hear in every single place every year, I’m sure you’re not sick of this. Could you ever get sick of the Hoff belting out the tunes in German? Surely not.

Am I glad I listened to it? Absolutely. Will I listen to it again? Eh. Next Christmas is a week and a year away, you never know if I’ll get the itch. It is the season of giving, and I’m giving this one a generous 6/10 – what can I say, the man raised me. If nothing else, it’s unique.