HO HO WHO: Ivana Raymonda van der Veen, a very thin, very blond pop singer who has about 35,000 YouTube subscribers and clearly would prefer to be more famous than that. She’s Dutch but lives in Germany.

ATTACK OF THE CLONES: The video for “Happy White Christmas” generally looks like an upgraded Blingee, but the real eye-catching element is van der Veen’s dancing, which exists at a very strange intersection of Roaring ’20s pep and exercise-video vacuousness. Look closely, however, at those brunette backup dancers in the “sexy reindeer” costumes: They’re digitally replicated van der Veens. Resourceful!

THE “W” WORD: “Happy White Christmas” was obviously conceived to be a catchy, innocuous, mildly romantic country-pop hit, but let’s unpack the chorus: “It’s gonna be a happy white Christmas/’Cause my baby’s coming home to me.” Hmm. Maybe the narrator lives high in the Alps or somewhere else where a white, snowy Christmas is guaranteed (and the happiness is contingent on outsiders), but the text implies a direct connection between “my baby’s” arrival and the, uh, whiteness of the situation. Unless the beau is Jack Frost himself, the only other interpretation is that he is—-oh, never mind. The lesson here for anybody who writes choruses for Christmas songs: If you’re casually including a word for the sake of maintaining meter and flow, and that word is “white,” you should be wary of people who use the verb “unpack.”

CHEER FACTOR: 5/10. “Happy White Christmas” is perfectly average, whether you think the whiteness is over-emphasized or not.

YouTube video