So you're looking for a way to celebrate Christmas without having to sacrifice your metalhead cred in the process? If the guys from Immortal caught you tapping your foot to Mannheim Steamroller, you'd lose all corpse paint privileges with no questions asked. So to help you save (painted) face, we've put together a few brutal and epic Christmas metal videos that should make your Xmas extra brutal. Here are our top 5 super metal Christmas songs to punish your eardrums:

See also: Top 20 L.A. Metal Albums: The Complete List
The Ten Most Unreadable Metal Band Logos

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MarkScottAustinTX/Flickr

Many so-called Christmas songs don't celebrate Christmas so much as the act of shopping. Other holiday tunes confuse that warm Christmas spirit feeling with that warm feeling in your pants. So, which of these songs are genuinely talking about the holidays, and which are just talking about raking in crap? And ass?

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[Editor's note: Weekly scribe Jeff Weiss's column, "Bizarre Ride," appears on West Coast Sound every Wednesday. His archives are available here.]

If you look outside while reading this, the odds are that it's sunny and mild. You might see green and red lights and tinseled pine trees glowing through windows. But the only winter coat you need is a windbreaker, and the only snow is artificial. You don't need to be a transplant or even Christian to know that L.A. doesn't do Christmas weather.

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​[Look for your weekly fix from the one and only Henry Rollins right here on West Coast Sound every Thursday, and come back tomorrow for the awesomely annotated playlist for his Saturday KCRW broadcast.]

A few nights ago, I finished the last show of a tour that started in January. I have done 188 shows in 19 countries this year. I should be tired of being onstage, tired of the hustle, etc., but I am not. Quite the opposite, actually. The fact that it's all behind me now is the hardest part to deal with.

I was able to buffer my re-entry into our fair city with several sold-out nights at Largo, one of my favorite places to perform anywhere. The last show was a bummer, only because it was the last show.

Los Angeles can be a strange place to come back to, because no matter how many days or even months at a time I am gone, the familiarity of seeing places is too familiar, like I never left. This is why the Largo shows were such a great experience. To be able to connect with real people and not merely the L.A. sprawl was very helpful.

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[Editor's Note: Fuck Guilty Pleasures celebrates the over-produced, commercial, artless, lowbrow music that we believe is genuinely worthwhile. Like, among the best music ever.]

Mitch Miller, musician, record producer, and twinkly-eyed choir master of '60s TV, rules. (Or, ruled. May he rest in peace.) I hold dear and consider one of the greatest Christmas albums ever to be Mitch Miller and The Gang's 1961 Holiday Singalong With Mitch, which my family owns on cassette tape and which gets at least two full play-throughs whenever I'm home for Christmas.

It's fair to say, however, that my loved ones do not share my fondness for it. They probably wouldn't mind if it found its way into the fireplace along with a yule log and some lighter fluid. Why?

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