It's not even December yet and I'm already sick of Christmas music. That's no real surprise -- Thanksgiving fell comparatively early this year, and once it's out of the way, American stores, radio stations, and other organizations have traditionally felt completely free to bombard people with all-out Christmas promotion.
Don't get me wrong -- I like Christmas. I put up the tree every year, I know the words to all the traditional carols and plenty that aren't, and spend much of the autumn thinking of the perfect gifts to get people. It's just that the Chrstimas music played on radio stations, in stores, and on most holiday albums, completely sucks.
With a very few exceptions, holiday music (though all one ever hears is songs about Christmas or general winter pastimes) is stuck in a swamp of sentimentality. Songs with religious lyrics are arranged and recorded so as to reduce the birth of humanity's savior to the level of a mass-produced figurine of a sad-eyed puppy. How about letting your god have at least human dignity? Songs about winter pastimes play on nostalgia for our great-grandparents' lives -- how many people alive today have ever seen, much less ridden in, a one-horse open sleigh? Most of them seem particularly ridiculous to me because I've lived in the South all my life, and in Florida since 1986. "White Christmas," to me, brings back, not snowy landscapes, but the memories of a middle-school chorus teacher trying to eradicate the accents of South Carolina seventh-graders, so we'd sing "white" instead of "whaat."
Even songs that are neither about Jesus nor northern winters are schmaltz through and through. The same carol that is beautiful and touching sung a capella becomes unlistenable after being remade according to the bland pop, smooth jazz, or fake soul formulas. The work environment is the worst for this. You might be stuck for an entire month listening to the same four tapes eight hours a day (this happened in a fabric store where I used to work), or listening to a radio station playing nothing but holiday songs -- the effect is pretty much the same. Even if you liked the music to begin with, the overexposure is much greater than even the most repetitive Top 40 station. It usually made me want to go home and crank Led Zeppelin, or Nirvana, or anything completely unlike the cutesiness I'd been forcibly exposed to. ( Bob Rivers' "Twisted Christmas" albums were also great, as they provided parody lyrics to sing under one's breath when the original songs were played.) If Ebenezer Scrooge said "Bah, humbug!" to a Victorian Christmas, a modern U.S. one would set him on edge enough to machine-gun the first ghost to enter his bedroom.
Christmas music can be good. Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker Suite, the Vince Guaraldi Trio's music for A Charlie Brown Christmas, those were meant to help but not overshadow stories told in dance or animation, so they don't seem to take on the hamminess of even other instrumental Christmas songs. One of the few recordings I never seem to tire of in December is John Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)." It's performed in a straightforward manner, not coated with sugary-sweet strings, and doesn't try to evoke nostalgia in its words. I'm surprised anyone still plays it. Perhaps the choir vocals at the end fool the radio programmers. The majority of rock and other recent styles' artists who've tried to make Christmas music that sounds like their usual musical style don't seem to reach classic status, which is a crying shame.
An interesting example of this is the Bob Rivers Twisted Christmas version of "O Little Town of Bethlehem" -- which is sung to the tune of and exactly in imitation of the performance of the Animals' "House of the Rising Sun." Once you get over the shock and laughter at how well the lyrics fit the new tune, you realize it sounds good. The bassline and organ fit the expectancy of the deserted town at night as well as they did the story of a young person gone bad. Someone who didn't know the original carol wouldn't find anything humorous about Rivers' version. If more Christmas music were treated like the songs of the rest of the year by good artists, instead of sugar-coated, it would be a lot easier to live in the U.S. during December.
The Christmas tree in our apartment is almost completely my own work. Knowing the stories of the things on it is knowing me. Little things (the lights, tinsel, and bead garlands are all purple, so my favorite color should be obvious) and deeper ones.
One thing that would be seen after some inspection is that I value handmade work, the more intricate the better. There are at least a dozen ornaments I made myself, from the clothespin-and-paper angel from kindergarten, 22 years ago, to knitted bells of several colors to hugely detailed creations of sequins, beads, and ribbons, painstakingly pinned to a styrofoam ball. My mother does those also, and I have two of her constructions, as well as a pinecone painted silver that she or my aunt did as a child. A detailed snowflake of white drinking straws, which I bought from its Eastern European maker at a craft fair, and plastic canvas snowflakes made by some North Carolina crafter my grandmother encountered. And probably some of the others were assembled by unknown Asians or other laborers who got the same back pain I did.
Then there are the hand-me-downs -- at least four ornaments that used to be my great-aunt Bernardine's before she entered the nursing home; four that belonged to my Grandparents Lonon (given up because they have more than twice as many ornaments as could go on any tree that fits in their house); five or so from my late Grandmother Saunders; four that used to be on Mom's tree (as well as many she's bought for me). The ones from my childhood trees are especially important -- they include the tree-topper, a brown-haired, gold-winged angel in a red dress, holding her harp. Tree-toppers in the stores now are much flashier, but I like the angel who stands calmly where a person couldn't, ready with music.
But I'm a pop-culture junkie too, and the tree shows it -- glass balls with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and South Park's Kenny. Figurings of the Powerpuff Girls' Buttercup opening a present, her face lit up with joy, or the Brain standing on Pinky's shoulders trying to wrap a Santa robe around them both. Gold cardboard cutouts of Peanuts characters -- my favorite depicts Charlie Brown's head with an ornament hanger at its top.
And then there are the others: miniature ballet slippers and a tiny model chandelier; sequined hearts and a flying saucer; garlands made of Mardi Gras beads (actually from Tampa's Guavaween) looped together. Putting it all up feels like an accomplishment, my own work of art. In a month it will be commonplace, but this night I finished decorating, with the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas in the background, is probably more special than Christmas Eve or Christmas Day themselves. This is my celebration.