I might not mind a war on Christmas, if it meant I wouldn’t be assaulted with Christmas music everywhere I go.
The week before Thanksgiving, I found myself trapped in a cafe where the manager was running a Christmas playlist off her iPhone onto some distortion-prone Bluetooth speaker. It was all the usual stuff: Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” with its sappy choir taking over the middle of the song; Eartha Kitt’s gold-digging “Santa Baby” (that one’s fun, at least); some other Disney cartoon choir’s “Silent Night” (the link is probably not to the same version, but it’s in the neighborhood); and, just my luck, the interminable “Little Drummer Boy” — also by Bing Crosby, the son of a bitch.
The only thing that could have made it worse would have been that other interminable carol, “Do You Hear What I Hear?” in any of its literally hundreds of renditions — probably by Whitney Houston, since hers is most often played.
(And yes, I realize these “interminable” songs are only three or so minutes long, but the mind-numbing repetition seems to stretch the very fabric of space-time. Worse, like any evil earworm, the songs continue long after the recordings finally end….)
I commented — just in passing, for the sake of conversation — that it seemed a bit early for Christmas tunes. “Thanksgiving is late this year,” she huffed. “There’s no way I’m going to lose a week of Christmas.”
Lose a week of Christmas? My local grocery store was erecting Christmas displays before Hallowe’en.
In true Freudian fashion, I like to blame my mother for my hatred of Christmas music. As I remember it — I will admit that my memory may be faulty, but she’s never denied it — she would put on a stack of Christmas albums the day after Thanksgiving and run them non-stop until New Year’s. This was back in the 70s, when record “auto-changers” were the thing: you could pile half a dozen albums or more on the spindle, and it would play through them, one after another. (For the young whipper-snappers who’ve never seen one, check it out.) She’d run the pile, then flip them over and run the second side, then flip them over again, ad nauseam. Every day, all day, Thanksgiving to New Year. Same order. Play, flip, play, flip.
Imagine a playlist without shuffle, run over and over and over —and over. And over. Bah!
Alas, we know that Freud was full of it, so I can’t really blame my mom. Indeed, the effect of this repetition couldn’t have been so bad, given that my old band, The Reign, recorded — with my full participation and consent — not one, but two Christmas songs (“Christmas Day” and “O Holy Night,” for those who might be interested).
What a hypocrite!
The ubiquity of Christmas music, which has shown no signs of abating over the past decades, makes me raise my eyebrows every time the phrase “War on Christmas” comes up. To hear Fox News tell it, Christmas has been under siege — and losing ground! Just a few more years of liberal rule, and Christmas might have disappeared completely — reduced, I guess, to secret handshakes or fishes drawn in the sand.
Lucky for Jesus, Trump and his family have straightened things out for America. We can say “Merry Christmas” again!
I grew up Christian, in a family and church that took Christmas seriously. I don’t mean we were somber or overly solemn. We gave lots of gifts, even when we were poor; we hung our mom’s home-made stockings on the mantle; we decorated a tree, usually as tall as would fit in the room (and we sometimes had really tall rooms). But we understood, and valued, the true “spirit of Christmas.”
Cue Linus’s Christmas Speech:
If there has been a war on Christmas, it started a long time ago, when capitalism co-opted one of the two central Christian celebrations and turned it into an ever lengthening commercial opportunity — a “season” that now starts before Hallowe’en, rips gleefully through Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and presses on through post-Christmas sales. It’s been this way for so long that anything else would feel weird.
But I remember when it did feel weird, when Christmas displays the day after Thanksgiving seemed gauche. And one of the few Christmas songs I’m actually happy to listen to — Larry Norman’s “Christmastime” — was crying out in the wilderness way back in the early 70s:
Santa Claus is coming and the kids are getting greedy
It’s Christmas time
They know what’s in the stores because they seen it on the TV
It’s Christmas time
It used to be the birthday of the man who saved our necks
Yow! It’s Christmas time
But now it stands for Santa Claus, you spell it with an X
It’s Christmastime
Of course, the Culture War on Christmas only vaguely waves in the direction of Christianity. It’s based in fear — the same fear that led to white evangelical support for Trump, Christmas’s intrepid champion — and it’s designed to shore up the power of a (diminishing) majority who is seeing its hegemony fade.
Such a strange contrast to the actual message of Christmas.
Anyway… allow me — yes, godless me, and despite my antipathy to Christmas music — to wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas.
Top photo by Thomas Galler on Unsplash