The greatest 1980s Christmas song you’ve never heard

Once upon a time, in a decade known as the 1980s Frank Stanek and Mark Ahlers wrote a song called "I Want To Be Santa Claus This Christmas." They never did anything with it — but they should have. I'll let Frank tell the story:

Mark Ahlers and I wrote a lot of songs together in high school. He wrote the words and I wrote the music. I have been playing keyboards and singing in bands since I was in 10th grade.

In 1981, Mark was at Rutgers-Camden and somehow he got my band to play at a Christmas rock dance party in the Gym there. We thought we always wanted to write a Christmas song, and this would be a good reason to do it. We played it and it seemed to go over. Sometime after that, we made a demo of the song for some competition, which we didn’t win. So the recording that you have is really that demo from 1982 — just remastered a bit. The whole thing was done in a small studio with just a few takes in a few hours.

All that said, our friends and family like it a lot and are always pushing us to “do something with that song." Finally someone did.

Enjoy!

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