We rank 20 Versions of ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’

Whatever you think of the song”Baby It’s Cold Outside”, it remains a holiday staple. Here we take a look at some of the best versions of the song.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! The time of year spent shopping, traveling, and baking. What do those things have in common? Well, they’re usually accompanied by the sounds of Christmas music, especially if you’re at the mall or in the car, where it’s pretty much inescapable.

There are the tried and true holiday classics everyone enjoys like “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and “Jingle Bells”. There’s Mariah Carey’s perfect, “All I Want For Christmas is You.” And then there’s “Baby It’s Cold Outside.”

Recently, it has been acknowledged that “Baby It’s Cold Outside” is a pretty creepy song. It is sung as a duet, usually between a male and a female, where the male is trying to convince his lady friend to stay the night while the woman resists. With lines like “Say, what’s in this drink” and “The answer is no”, the song becomes downright unsettling at times.

“Baby It’s Cold Outside” was written in 1944 by Frank Loesser. So looking at it through today’s lens is a little unfair. In thinking about the song in the context of the 40′,s it becomes clearer that it is about a female fearing what society will say about her desire to have premarital sex. The couple is in a relationship and while she does want to stay, she is afraid what people will think, hence her male beau helping her come up with excuses as to why she should not leave. Slay Belle writes a wonderful indepth defense of the song for Persephone Magazine that may help convince you further that this song was not written with anything sinister in mind.

But this article is not an argument about whether “Baby It’s Cold Outside” is offensive or not. Instead, it is a celebration of all of the many versions of this wonderful duet and the ways in which different artists have subverted or changed the words to make it sound a little less awful. Sorry in advance for getting this song stuck in your head for the rest of the year.