Arguably, the most famous rendition of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” is sung by a group of animated children, and even with decades of built-in nostalgia, we can all listen to that song and admit that it doesn’t sound particularly… harmonious.

If you listen to all 100 of Sufjan’s Christmas songs from the beginning (as I often do), you reach a weird stretch in the back half where our he descends into his most electronic, most dissonant, and most eccentric Christmas tunes. There are songs like “A Child With A Star on His Head,” and “Up On The Rooftop,” which are weird in an Age of Adz type way, but then there’s I Am Santa's Helper which is weird in an unhinged and completely unexpected way. The entire seventh EP is packed with bizarre holiday-themed oddities, none of which are more out-there than Sufjan’s very own cover of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”

Most of the songs on this EP hover around the one-minute mark. They’re messy, improvised, and often involve group singalongs. They’re slightly off-key, just a hair offbeat, and maybe not all-there instrumentally. This makes it the most wtf-inspiring stretch of songs on first listen, but when taken in sequence with the other nine EPs, I Am Santa's Helper becomes one of the most accurate portrayals of the Christmas season.

Christmas isn’t always picture-perfect snow, harmonic jingle bells, and flawless wrapping paper; sometimes it’s an off-key group singalong inspired by spur-of-the-moment Christmas spirit. Sometimes it’s a group of carolers that visit your front porch and don’t sound that great but warm your heart regardless.

There’s a different version of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” on an earlier EP that’s only 46 seconds and feels unequivocally picturesque. It sounds as if it’s coming from a music box underneath a perfectly-decorated Christmas tree in a perfectly-organized house sitting in the middle of a perfectly-kept neighborhood. But we all know the holidays aren’t like that.

This later version of “Hark” finds Sufjan offering a more, shall we say, “realistic” counterpoint to his own earlier rendition. Sometimes the holidays are messy. Sometimes things are thrown, and words are said that can’t be taken back. We look to TV, movies, music, and even commercials to see this pristine version of Christmas that’s probably never existed for anyone. It’s not necessarily that pop culture has lied to us, it’s that we’ve lied to ourselves. Christmas can never be perfect because nothing ever can. When we pin all our hopes, dreams, and expectations on a single day of the year, reality tends to fall short of that.

Thanks primarily to Charlie Brown, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” has become a staple of Christmas for many people around the globe, but we’re honest with ourselves, our holiday season probably sounds more like Sufjan’s version.