"Pass Me a Pint" is a Christmas song about a man who is not feeling Christmas. The decorations, the gifts, and the mistletoe are all lost on him. His holiday wish is short: a pint, and the company of the person he loves, and he will take his chances on the season from there. One line sums him up — he turns the rest down because "I found my holiday inside a glass."

The song was written and recorded by Johnnyswim, a modern American duo, and it has become a December favorite in our sets. It earns its place in a pub band's Christmas run for a simple reason: it is built like the pub songs around it. This post says plainly what the song is, where it comes from, and why an Irish pub band sings it every December.

A Modern Song That Sounds Like an Old Pub Christmas Song

Johnnyswim are Abner Ramirez and Amanda Sudano, a husband-and-wife duo who met in Nashville in 2005. They are a U.S. folk-pop act, not a traditional band, and "Pass Me a Pint" is a modern original, not an old song they rescued. It appears on the duo's Christmas releases, A Johnnyswim Christmas and Another Johnnyswim Christmas, and they have performed it for Garden & Gun's Back Porch Sessions, which is a good setting for it: a porch, a small audience, and a song that works at close range.

Listeners hear the pub in it even without knowing the writers. One holiday-album reviewer described "Pass Me A Pint" as feeling "like an old Celtic drinking song, but with a modern twist." That is the song's whole trick, stated by somebody with no stake in it. The structure is the giveaway: a plain-spoken narrator, a short list of things he does not want, a chorus built around a pint, and a sentiment that stays just this side of sentimental. Strip the production away and it sits comfortably next to songs a century older, because it follows their rules.

The grump himself is a pub type, not a Christmas invention. Every bar has the man who announces he is not doing Christmas this year, and every bar watches him soften by the second drink. The song gives him three minutes and a chorus, and lets the pint and his love split the credit for saving his season.

Why an Irish Pub Band Sings a Johnnyswim Song

Our December sets are a cluster, and this song has a defined seat in it. Fairytale of New York is the heavyweight: a real Irish diaspora Christmas song, set in New York, unsentimental in a harder way. "Pass Me a Pint" is an American duo borrowing the pub spirit that "Fairytale" comes from honestly, and playing the two in the same season explains both of them. One is the tradition. The other is what the tradition sounds like when a Nashville act tries it on — and finds it fits.

Auld Lang Syne closes the seasonal run, the song everybody already knows the words to. And the pint-first humor is not seasonal for us at all: Drinking in the Day and Going Out For One live on that shelf the rest of the year. "Pass Me a Pint" is the December entry in a year-round category — the song about the man, the bar, and the one drink that is never just one consideration.

The Grump in Every December Room

Practically, the song works because we play where pints are passed. In December our rooms are full of office parties, home-for-Christmas regulars, and people who have been dragged out and plan to enjoy it anyway. A three-minute song for the one person at the table who claims to hate all of it lands every time, because there is always that person, and everyone else at the table knows who it is. It has become a band and fan favorite around the holidays for exactly that reason.

This is a seasonal post for a seasonal song. Its search life runs through December — people look the song up after hearing it, the way they look up every Christmas song they half-know — so the band resurfaces it each year with the rest of the Christmas cluster rather than expecting it to work in July.

To hear Johnnyswim's own version in a live setting, the Garden & Gun Johnnyswim archive has their Back Porch Sessions performance, and the duo's background is in the Qobuz artist biography.

— hear us play it live (video above).

It is Christmas Eve in a New York drunk tank, and an Irish emigrant is looking back on the life he promised and the one he got. "Fairytale of New York" is the biggest Christmas song in our set, and it contains no tinsel at all — just a couple who came to America with dreams, fell apart, and are still, at the end of it, holding onto each other: “I built my dreams around you.”

The song was written by Shane MacGowan and Jem Finer of the Pogues and released on 23 November 1987, with Kirsty MacColl singing the woman's part. The Pogues were a London-Irish band — second-generation kids playing Irish music in King's Cross pubs — and this is the emigrant Christmas as that generation knew it. MacGowan himself was born on Christmas Day, 25 December 1957, in Pembury, Kent, to Irish parents, and spent long stretches of his childhood with his mother's family in Carney, Co. Tipperary.

How “Fairytale of New York” Was Written: The Bet, the Sailor Song, and Kirsty MacColl

The song took two years to write, and even its starting point is disputed. MacGowan said producer Elvis Costello bet the band they couldn't write a Christmas hit. Accordionist James Fearnley remembered it differently — manager Frank Murray pushing for a Christmas song. Either way, Finer's first version was a song about a sailor in New York missing his wife at Christmas. Finer's wife Marcia called it corny and suggested the plot that stuck: a couple on hard times, arguing their way through Christmas Eve.

The band recorded an attempt in 1986 with bassist Cait O'Riordan singing the female part. She left the band, and producer Steve Lillywhite took the tape home — where his wife, Kirsty MacColl, sang a guide vocal. Her guide vocal is the one on the record. The title came from J. P. Donleavy's novel A Fairy Tale of New York — Donleavy being an Irish-American writer himself.

When we play it, the woman's part is sung by Ryan's wife Janet, who is always up for lending her voice and attitude to it. In 2024 we recorded the song for the Rocking the Suburbs podcast's holiday album Rocking the Holidays — our recording is on the album.

What Is the NYPD Choir? (It Doesn't Exist)

The chorus promises that "the boys of the NYPD choir were singing Galway Bay." There is no NYPD choir, and there never was. For the video, the band used the NYPD Emerald Society Pipes and Drums — who did not know "Galway Bay," so they played and sang the Mickey Mouse Club march instead, and the footage was slowed down to fit. The policeman who throws MacGowan into the drunk tank is actor Matt Dillon.

Inside the song, the drunk tank holds one more of our tunes: the old man sharing the cell is singing "The Rare Old Mountain Dew" when the narrator drifts into the dream that becomes the song. We have a whole post on that one — Rare Old Mountain Dew. The Pogues' other great emigration song is Thousands Are Sailing, and their other song in our set is Body of an American. For the rest of the Christmas cluster, see Pass Me a Pint.

The Lyric Row

Every December, the argument about the song's language comes back, so here are the plain facts. On 18 December 2007, BBC Radio 1 edited the words "faggot" and "slut" from the song — and reversed the decision the same day, after listener criticism. In 2018, RTÉ kept playing it uncensored in Ireland. MacGowan defended the word as belonging to the character singing it, not to himself.

Why an Irish Emigrant Song Became the Biggest Christmas Song

On release, the song reached No. 1 in Ireland, where it stayed for five weeks. In Britain it reached No. 2, kept off the Christmas No. 1 spot by the Pet Shop Boys' "Always on My Mind." It has since become the most-played Christmas song of the 21st century in the UK. And in December 2023, on the day of MacGowan's funeral, it went back to No. 1 in Ireland and was reissued as a charity single for the Dublin Simon Community.

That is the Irish-American story in one song: written by London-Irish musicians, set in New York, sung every December on both sides of the Atlantic by people who know what it costs to leave.

To read more: Wikipedia's Fairytale of New York page has the full history and chart record. The Great Irish Songbook tells the song's story, and Irish Around The World traces MacGowan's Kent and Tipperary roots and the song's yearly return.

— hear us play it live (video above).