It’s a universal end-of-year experience, and I’ve been right in the middle of it. Every time since, say, October that I’ve dared set foot in a public place, I’ve been subjected Christmas carols playing.
Every year, I have a problem with this.
By the third week of December I’m usually murderous. My problem occurs basically because…all you really hear are like the same half-dozen carols. I don’t care whose version it is—Burl Ives or Aimee Mann or Alvin and the Chipmunks—it’s no different to me, there’s no new thrill to be discovered. Every business on earth is still making me listen to the same six songs 21 times a day. Each.
Yes, there are other, original songs people write about Christmas—if they’re in the same mindlessly upbeat vein as all the standards, I hate them too. When I worked in a record store and the management made us play Christmas music full-time every day throughout December, I thanked God for the mixed tape one employee made of the few really different pop songs that are out there: The Waitresses, The Pogues, The Kinks—those utterly saved my sanity. But now that I’m not trapped with them, I don’t usually feel the need to seek them out. They’ll do in a pinch, and at some point each year I usually make a point of listening to Sting’s “Gabriel’s Message,” an utter favorite that I can’t explain. It’s beautifully arranged and reverent, and it surprises me every year that I love it.
But my other complaint about Those Six Songs is that even though they have different titles, they’re all about the exact same ideas, so following my previous logic, it now means I’m being force-fed the exact same song 126 times a day. It breaks down to this:
- Snow/cold is wonderful. Shoveling, digging your car out, snow chains, frostbite, hypothermia, arriving at work looking like a drowned ferret, skidding on frozen roads and/or black grimy slush will never be an issue.
- Being with others is wonderful, end of story. Even though I can’t tell you how many people I know who agonize over having to be trapped with the drunken, toxic or abusive relatives they fled their hometowns to escape, getting back in the same room with them should be your only goal. Maybe it’s because of #3…
- …the very time of year is completely, faultlessly fantastic because of magic forces “in the air” (?!?). This is undoubtedly why…
- …you will fall in love or enjoy your current significant other immensely. It’s on your schedule.
- And lastly—and somebody PLEASE tell me why this is still the LEAST bit relevant—riding in sleighs driven by horses is the utmost orgasmic pleasure you can experience. That and bells—bells have much the same effect, and in fact when combined with the above-mentioned horse/sleigh thing should make you go out of your mind with happiness until you and everyone else has to change their underwear.
It seems to me that no one has listened to these lyrics and/or pondered their relevance to life on Planet Earth since the turn of the century. Everyone just parrots them mindlessly. I will admit I have a near-compulsion to listen to every sentence ever publicly broadcast, break down the words to test their logic and then point out when said logic is flawed. This makes me very cranky about commercials and bad TV scripts, too. Not everyone is as crabby as me, nor as cynical, nor paying my form of obsessive attention.
But I have to admit…it’s the non-paying-attention that bothers me. Doesn’t it matter to some people what gets fed into their minds?
(Just parenthetically, I know about the Reason for the Season thing. I’m sorry, but I no longer subscribe to the literal Christian doctrine I was raised with. I don’t think God had to birth somebody and then kill him in order to welcome us back when we die—I think he welcomes us all back anyway and actually if we’re smart we probably shouldn’t get into that discussion, yeah? I do like the Winter Solstice celebration idea—a time of getting together and celebrating the fact that the days will get longer and the light will return, and also lighting up everything you can find to tell the darkness to fuck off because together we’re gonna beat it. That’s extra cool—especially since every culture since the beginning of time seems to have had it, and I think Christmas might have just gotten mutated from that. But that’s about the only meaning I can get into, and I don’t think there are many songs about that.)
Speaking of which, back to the music: the ONLY thing I like, which chills me out and makes me happy no matter how many times I hear it? The entire Vince Guaraldi “Merry Christmas Charlie Brown” soundtrack. Love it love it love it. The reasons why feel mostly gut-level, but if I were to break it down it might be because it’s not only original but it’s really original, sounds like nothing else. It’s tasteful and timeless. It’s calming. Not only that but the Peanuts strips practically raised me, so the soundtrack feels like home, AND it reminds me of a quirky, delightfully weird-ass cartoon world that has no problem including the realities of life during the holidays. Perhaps because of the perpetually depressed main character, it never once cluelessly demands that I enjoy myself because of a date on a calendar. It never implies that I’m a left-out freak for feeling that most days are kind of the same and that’s fine, that life becomes grand or small or tragic or miraculous when it chooses to, according to its own logic and own quiet little voice, and is neither bothered nor encouraged by our shrill attempts to make a certain month into a vending machine of magic.
1 Signpost »