Boston, MA -- Those magazine ads offering people to set their poems to music for a fee may seem like a scam -- but they're also the source of some of the weirdest Christmas carols ever written.

According to music historian Phil Milstein, who researches "song-poems," the often-offbeat tunes written by aspiring songwriters and session musicians, who often record dozens of songs on the fly.

Milstein says the genre has been around for more than 90 years and that Christmas has always been a popular theme.

He's just compiled a new Christmas song-poem CD, "Daddy, Is Santa Really Six Foot Four?" that has ditties like "Santa Came On A Nuclear Missile," "Maury, The Christmas Mouse" and the title track.

Although the golden age of song-poems was the late 1960s and 1970s, "song-poems" are finally getting their due. That's good for Milstein, who says he has enough songs archived for at least a few more Christmas albums.

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