The thing that throws "Christmas Shoes" over the wall of irony and into Tear Land is obviously the child trying to buy a pair of shoes for his mother to wear in her casket when she dies and gets buried. A dead mom during the holidays is awful. A kid who doesn't know that corpses are buried without shoes is worse.
So who wins out of the two? If we are going for John Mayer-style emoting, which we almost always are, then we go with "Born To Die. But if we want to remember that our parents are mortal, then it's "Christmas Shoes."
In the end, we want to hear some sort of modicum of history, so it's "Born To Die," plus it's also the title of a mad decent Grand Funk Railroad album and title track.
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