"Green Chri$tma$" is a comedy single written and performed by Stan Freberg and released by Capitol Records in 1958 (catalog number F 4097).
The sketch adapts two characters from Charles Dickens' 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge (Freberg) and Bob Cratchit (Butler).
Scrooge, the head of an unnamed advertising agency, has gathered a group of clients to discuss tying their products into Christmas.
"Green Chri$tma$" is a scathing indictment of the commercialization of Christmas, with references of Christmas-themed advertising by Coca-Cola and Marlboro cigarettes, among others.
George Carlin once told Freberg that he was almost fired from a DJ job in Shreveport, Louisiana for playing the record repeatedly.
"[2][3] KMPC in Los Angeles played the record, but some advertisers required that their ads be scheduled more than fifteen minutes away from it.
Similarly, Robert Wood, the station manager of KNXT-TV in Los Angeles (later president of CBS), cancelled a TV interview with Freberg because the record was "sacrilegious" and he did not need to hear it because he had read about it.
Within six months, Coca-Cola and Marlboro, both recognizably satirized in the record without being named, asked Freberg for advertising campaigns.
He turned down Marlboro (Freberg, a devout Christian, was adamantly against promoting tobacco and alcohol products), but he created a campaign for Coca-Cola that was very effective.