‘Merry Frickin’ Christmas’: Band members tell the story of their unauthorized 2004 Red Sox holiday anthem

“Merry Frickin’ Christmas – World Champion Red Sox Anthem,” Frickin’ A’s tribute to the 2004 Red Sox, turns 20 this holiday season.

Do you remember it? Did you even know the song – or the band – existed?

“It’s gonna be a Merry, Merry, Merry Frickin’ Christmas,” goes the chorus. “All you New York Yankee fans can kiss this! The tree, the gifts, the mistletoe kiss. Swing, a miss! Steinbrenner’s really pissed! Have a Merry, Merry, Merry Frickin’ Christmas!”

The song ruled the airwaves that holiday season, a constant reminder to Boston sports fans that the greatest gift possible had already been delivered. It may not be in the traditional pantheon of comedic holiday classics with Burl Ives’ “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” and Adam Sandler’s Hanukkah song (and several sequels), but it’s a local treasure. It’s catchy, cocky, and triumphant. It’s anti-Yankee from the Derek Jeter burn in the first verse to the “Yankees suck” chant at the end. For Red Sox fans of a certain age, it’s iconic.

I needed to know the story behind the song. Why did this band from Ohio, whose only previous sports-related work was a promotional song for the Cincinnati Reds (used on their radio broadcasts to this day), parody their own Christmas song for Boston? Were the Red Sox their favorite American League team, or did they just really hate the Yankees? Did they ask permission from Major League Baseball? Was Joe Torre mad? Where are the band members now?

Finding Frickin’ A was a journey. As a pre-social media band – they were founded around 1999 and together for about six years – they’ve been largely buried in the sands of time. They’re best known for their cover of Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl,” which was featured on the 18th edition of the “Now That’s What I Call Music!’ compilation albums. With the exception of their songs, which are available on YouTube, Spotify, and other such streaming platforms, the digital footprint is small. I was only able to get in touch with one of the band members, Jason Short, on Facebook. He put me in touch with bandmate Jason Phelps, whom he credits with the Red Sox rewrite.

“I definitely watched (the ’04 postseason). Obviously we weren’t huge Red Sox fans, we’re Reds and Indians fans, we’re from Ohio, but we were also ‘anybody but the Yankees’ fans,” Short told me over the phone. “The success of the Red Sox was great, we all loved it. Everybody wanted that curse broken. I don’t care who you’re a fan of, as long as you hate the Yankees.”

“‘Merry Frickin’ Christmas’ was something we were just doing over the holidays,” Phelps said. “We didn’t want to do ‘Jingle Bells’ or any of those typical Christmas songs. We had a friend who did radio in Boston at Kiss108 FM and we played it for him, and he goes, ‘This is really great, but you guys should tweak this and make it a Red Sox song, because we just won the World Series.’”

Phelps attributed much of the song’s sublime Sox-related snark to David Corey, the aforementioned radio friend.

“Being from Cincinnati, I’ve always been a big baseball fan, but like the ‘Big Red Machine,’ Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, all those guys, so I was like, ‘Cool but I don’t know a ton about the Red Sox right now,’” Phelps said. “He kind of gave us some of the ‘inside baseball’ stuff that was going on with the Red Sox, the long drought and the ‘Curse of the Bambino,’ and then some of the stuff like the (Jason) Varitek punch, things that we just weren’t really keyed in on.”

Corey put the Sox version on Kiss108 and it snowballed from there. “Other stations started picking it up, and it kind of became a thing for the whole holiday season,” Phelps said. “Radio was a driver back then for new music and breaking bands. We ended up just cutting this version and it got out there and worked pretty well, better than we anticipated.”

“He really took the ball and knocked it out of the park, no pun intended,” Short said of Phelps’ rewrite. “It was kind of a perfect storm.”

The concept of a viral song was drastically different before TikTok, where a popular audio clip can take an artist’s career into the stratosphere, like Olivia Rodrigo’s “Driver’s License” or Doja Cat’s “Say So.” In 2004, success had to be gauged in person.

“My mom and stepdad were on a cruise, and they just happened to get seated at dinner with a family from Boston, so my parents asked them, ‘Oh, you ever hear of the band Frickin’ A?’ And they were freaking out like, ‘They did that song!’” Short said. “So that, and then we got back to Boston, did a couple shows, and that’s when it kind of hit, for me anyway, how far of a reach that song had, how much it meant to everybody up there.”

“I’d love to say it was us, but it was the passion around the Red Sox winning the World Series that was the driver,” Phelps said. “We played Jingle Ball ‘04 with all these big bands of that era, and we got up and played just like, a verse and a chorus, and everybody was singing along. I remember the record company guy, we were in the car with him after and he goes, ‘How does it feel to have the No. 1 song in Boston right now?’”

Could such a song be successful in today’s music industry? “If that stuff had been around when the song came out, it probably would have helped drive it further,” Phelps said of TikTok and Instagram.

“We’re from Ohio and the Browns are the biggest joke in the NFL. If the Browns were to win the Super Bowl and somebody wrote a song about that, I think it would have about the same effect that ours did: it would rise quickly and then fade quickly when the excitement was over,” said Short. “Obviously it would be a big TikTok thing, it would be a big meme thing, but it would be a different environment. But again, I think the success of our version of that Christmas song was just the fact the radio station embraced it and the culture up in Boston embraced it.”

Short think lyrics like theirs might not pass muster today. “There was a big issue with the original song too,” he said. “There were talks of that being on the Christmas edition of ‘Now That’s What I Call Music.’ If I’m not mistaken, it was the same Christmas one Mariah Carey’s big song was on. But they thought the lyrical content was a little too much. So even back then, it was right on the edge of being too much. I don’t know if it would get on the radio now.”

Those iffy lyrics are everyone’s favorites, though. “It’s tough to beat the Speedo, it really is,” Short said of their Torre jab. “It just gives everyone a visual.”

“All you New York Yankees fans can kiss this,” is Phelps’ favorite. “Try a knuckle sandwich and the Varitek punch,” directed at Alex Rodriguez, is a close second.

Despite lobbing such creative insults, Short and Phelps said they never heard a peep from the Yankees or Major League Baseball. Nor did they ever have any communication or interaction with the Red Sox. “We never got to meet any of the players, which was kind of surprising,” Short said.

But Phelps later discovered he had two connections to the ’04 squad. “(Kevin) Youkilis went to my high school, Sycamore, after me. And I played sports growing up, and I played basketball with this kid who was like, the most talented kid that I’d ever been around,” he said. “Later on, after the song was doing well and everything, I realized he was on the Red Sox.”

That would be Adam Hyzdu, who played 29 games for the Red Sox between 2004-05, amidst a seven-year MLB career. “I ended up emailing with him, saying, ‘Hey dude, I didn’t know that you were on the Sox. That was me singing ‘Merry Frickin’ Christmas!’” Phelps said with a chuckle. “I congratulated him on getting a ring. We got a laugh out of it.”

These days, Short owns a music teaching company and plays and writes with a couple of bands. Phelps writes jingles for businesses around the country. For them, Frickin A’ has long been a fond memory that only resurfaces during the most wonderful time of year.

“Once a year, I’ll play the Christmas song for people, just to get a big laugh out of it, but I don’t think about it very often, so this conversation is a nice blast from the past,” said Short.

Unless…

“It might take the Red Sox winning the World Series again for us to get back together,” Short said. “Who knows?”