Oh, Come, All Ye Seasonally Overwrought ...

We are now officially into the Christmas season, which began unofficially in most major retail establishments just after the Fourth of July. Trees twinkle with lights, the streets are draped with garlands of artificial pine, commercials extol the holiday virtues of everything from high-tech toys to ladies' depilatories, and Christmas music blares from every direction.

I don't think I would have liked Ebeneezer Scrooge, but there are days I think I understand him.

Let's talk for a moment about the music of Christmas.

I admit it ... I'm an emotional sucker for Christmas music. I can get teary listening to a good version of The Little Drummer Boy, and I get flashbacks to an earlier and simpler time when I hear the old standbys like White Christmas, Jingle Bells, and Adeste Fideles. But there are also the holiday clinkers, like Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer, which can drive me to wear four sets of noise-canceling headsets at once. We have a wide range of Christmas songs from the religious (Silent Night) to the secular (O, Christmas Tree). Even rap "musicians" can get into the act (Silent &*^#! Night, %@!#). There's something for everybody.

Apropos of Christmas songs, I read a very interesting article a few weeks ago: Christmas Carols: Why We Keep Singing Them, by Nathan Heller. You have to love an article that contains this wonderful passage:

"At face value, the Christmas carol may be the least captivating style of occasional song. While other popular tunes arise from passion or desire, heroism or defeat, the Yuletide songbook is a catalog of modest thrills and postindustrial neuroses. A quick survey turns up portraits of manic stress release (Jingle Bells), overwrought hallucination (Do You Hear What I Hear?), complex Freudian trauma (I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus), desperate midlife lechery (Baby, It’s Cold Outside), forced enthusiasm (It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year), and thinly veiled xenophobia (Dominick the Donkey … the Italian Christmas Donkey)."

Betcha never thought about Christmas songs in that way, did you?

Consider that we don't have a huge canon of music for other holidays. When was the last time you went from house to house in the evening, stopping by each residence to sing an Arbor Day song? Why don't we have books of Martin Luther King Day carols?

I think we enjoy Christmas carols for a lot of reasons. Because they remind us of our safer, happier, less-complicated youth. Because they provide some cheer in an otherwise cold, bleak time of the year. Because they help us celebrate surviving another year of Congressional hypocrisy and ineptitude.

Whatever the reason we sing them, however tired we get of them by the time the season is over, we love our Christmas songs. So join me in a rousing chorus of Good King Wenceslaus, raise that cup of egg nog high, and let's toast the season when we act like the people we should be the rest of the year.

Have a good day. Enjoy the music.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo