Who Would Want to Break Up With ‘Last Christmas’?

This year, to save themselves from tears, thousands are trying to avoid Wham!’s perennial holiday hit “Last Christmas.” It’s a game called Whamageddon that’s been happening for the past 18 years, since a Danish man named Thomas Mertz and his friends started noticing the song everywhere. And now, people get pretty competitive about it. Earlier this month, a DJ dropped the song during a Northampton Town soccer match in England, “thinking it would be quite funny to wipe out 7,000 people,” he later told the BBC. Instead, he was met with attacks and disappointment from participants. “I never knew people took it so seriously,” said Matt Facer, the DJ. “I officially apologise to everybody whose Christmas I’ve ruined.”

The rules are simple, according to Mertz’s Whamageddon website: Try to go as long as you can without hearing Wham!’s original version of “Last Christmas” from December 1–24. Mertz told the New York Times his site got over 500,000 visitors last year. And, no, he has no personal vendetta against the song — even admitting that pop is his “guilty pleasure.” “It’s just a funny little thing that a couple of idiots from Denmark did to entertain themselves during Christmas,” he explained.

For what it’s worth, Mertz thinks Facer’s stunt was “funny,” too. And the rest of the world doesn’t seem to be doing much better at Whamageddon this year — “Last Christmas” is currently No. 1 on the U.K. Singles Chart and No. 5 on the Hot 100 in the U.S. Maybe we can try “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” next year?