Christmas Music

The holiday season is here.

Black Friday has come and gone. Small Business Saturday has passed. Cyber Monday is done. Thus, the spiral toward the gift giving holidays is underway. There are two types of people this time of year; some are excited for the holidays, exuding a seasonal cheer bordering on mania, wearing Christmas sweaters and Santa hats as soon as Thanksgiving dinner is finished, visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads at all hours of the day. Others are humbug curmudgeons, people that make The Grinch seem level-headed, who hear holiday music and react like Regan in The Exorcist. 

While I've improved in leaps and bounds in my humbuggery I'm still less than exuberant when it comes to the holiday season. I like the togetherness with family, the food, eggnog, and giving gifts, but one thing that I can't overcome-- the thing that keeps me on the Scrooge end of the spectrum-- is the music. I loved it when I was a kid, then grew to hate it, then came to accept it, but so much of it is so annoying that it makes me hope for New Years that much more.

Don't get me wrong, not all holiday music is terrible. Have you heard the "A Charlie Brown Christmas" soundtrack? It's fantastic! It's the kind of background music perfect for drinking hot toddies around the fire. Some traditional carols hold a soft spot in my heart too, like "Carol of the Bells" and "Silent Night" so don't think that I'm a total heartless Grinch bastard.

There are a lot more songs, however, that I hate with my entire being.

Take, for example, Peggy Lee's "I Like A Sleighride (Jingle Bells)". It's just "Jingle Bells"-- which is bad enough-- but played too slowly with the occasional annoying, "I like a sleigh ride!" interjected every now and then. To me, listening to it brings out the same emotions as being stuck behind someone with an annoying kid walking too slowly at the grocery store without being able to walk around them. It's irritating and drags on, but it seems to be on every holiday music playlist, probably to spite me.

There's also "We Need A Little Christmas" from the musical Mame. I haven't seen the musical, nor do I know the plot or any other songs from it, but the version I'm familiar with is sung by Angela Lansbury and is tortuous. She sings, "We need a little Christmas/ Right this very minute," to which I reply, "No, no we do not." The over-exuberance and show tune flair suck the life out of me, and even though the song talks about using Christmas as a means of overcoming growing leaner, colder, sadder, and older, it makes me that much more cynical.

Then, of course, there's "Baby It's Cold Outside". A seemingly cutesy exchange between a woman saying she should go home and a man insisting she stay because, well, it's cold outside, in modern context it sounds pushy and like the setup for assault. Because it's an old-timey song with certain nods to romantic norms of the time there's been debate on whether it's problematic or not. Vox did a way better job at dissecting it than I ever could, and they go much deeper into the issues than I intend to, but the song is pretty uncomfortable to listen to from a current perspective.

I could easily go on. There are enough shitty Christmas songs and shitty covers of shitty Christmas songs to play in every shopping mall on the planet every December until the sun explodes. Too many saccharine tunes with empty lyrics get played on repeat in an attempt to make it seem like The Season Of Giving isn't just a final cash grab for businesses before the end of the fiscal year. I'll leave the aforementioned examples to explain why I don't become Buddy from "Elf" every December, though. In the meantime, because I'm trying to grow my heart a few sizes, I'll relent to ugly sweaters, eggnog, candy canes, and Mariah Carey.

But I swear if I hear Peggy Lee I'm going to flip my shit.