Joe Hickerson is an old friend of our family, and we keep in touch with him.

After seeing him do this in the 70's at a house concert -- the tune haunting me for years as perhaps being unfinished -- I was compelled to finish it off with a second verse moving the joke from ancient history to contemporary times poking fun at today's insane clashes between world religions and cultures.

Being that we now live in the internet age, this newfound parody called for a video parody (vparody??) loaded with awful visual pun-ishment. Not to leave the viewer disoriented -- the video concludes with what most folks do -- enjoy a nice quiet little Christmas (or whatever it is) while pretending that anything on the other side of the front door does not exist.

The video is located at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHZHrkIA1r8 Please enjoy. Joe Hickerson has seen it and got a bang out of it (He did not hurt anything in the process).

Here are the lyrics. The version I got from Joe is from a recording of the house concert -- the words being slightly different than those above.

["A" part of the tune]
Christians roasting on an open fire
Lions nipping at their toes
Pagan carols being sung by a choir
Romans raffling off their clothes
Everybody knows when Nero played his violin
Ancient Rome was all a-glow
One dead Jew, and an Arab or two
Three wise men in starry night.

[the bridge]
You know Osama's on his way
He's got machine guns mounted on his sleigh
And Denny's offering him coupons for a Midnight meal
Two pancakes, one bomblette, what a deal!

["A" part and conclusion]
And so, I'm offering to do Bill Maher
A-Huff, Dan Savage, Micheal Moore
Although its been tried many times, many ways
Hare Krishna, Hare Rama, Hare Krishna to you.