If you like a hearty laugh at Christmastime — and who doesn’t? — there’s this guy named Bob Rivers you should know about.

Thirty years ago this month, Rivers, a veteran disc jockey from Connecticut, was listening to the same old familiar Christmas tunes for the umpteenth time, playing incessantly on the radio, in the mall, at parties, everywhere.  “Enough!” he shouted, and decided he needed to give these seasonal songs a new twist.  Or, more accurately, he wanted to replace the real lyrics with something twisted.

In the tradition of musical comics like Allan Sherman, Tom Lehrer and Weird Al Yankovic, Rivers penned several parodies, using traditional Christmas songs, then gathered a few like-minded friends and studio musician acquaintances and made recordings of his amusing concoctions.  The result, released just in time for the 1987 Christmas season, was an album called “Bob Rivers’ Twisted Christmas,” a collection of Yuletide selections, both secular and hymn-like, with radically different (not to mention hilarious) lyrics. Read More