The Christmas Wrong

It started today. Today I entered Dante’s 9th circle of Hell.

The Christmas music got started by my supervisor. The day before Thanksgiving. And from here on out, for the next 4 weeks until December 22 I’ll be forced to listen to her limited yet never-ending playlist of Christmas songs.

Never mind that I’ve told her, politely, that I don’t like Christmas music. My brief stint in retail in my youth caused that. No, never mind that I have repeatedly told her I don’t like Christmas music. That’s just too fucking bad. I get a mean-spirited laugh, then told that I’m a Scrooge and the music plays on.

The same tired old 15 or so carols we all know and loath, repeated over and over, each time by a different artist: Elvis, John Denver, Frank Sinatra, Dolly Parton, Andy Williams, Nat King Cole... Over and over and over.

We didn’t listen to Christmas music at my house when I was growing up. Yeah, I sang them in school. And yes, we still celebrated Christmas even tho we were a non religious family. We just didn’t drive ourselves silly with repetitious, inane Christmas carols. My Christmas-music-lovin’ supervisor was shocked - SHOCKED, I tell you - to discover that I had never heard the Andy Williams Christmas album, and that my parents didn’t own it.

That’s because my parents had taste. I grew up hearing the Beatles and the Stones, not Andy Williams or, gods forbid, Pat Boone.

What makes it even worse (yes, it gets worse) are some of the quirky, non-traditional songs that get tossed onto these Christmas albums. Songs like “Please Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas)” by John Denver or “Hard Candy Christmas” by Dolly Parton are extremely putrid.

Don’t believe me? Go google the lyrics for both. You’ll see what I mean. These are songs that burrow under your skin and make their way into your core, lay eggs and then die. Those eggs hatch later and the Christmas-Music larvae devour your soul.

These songs cause me to lose the will to live. These songs make me want to grab something sharp and just start stabbing.

Thank the gods I have a metric fuck ton of music on my iPod. Looks like I’ll be getting a lot of use out of those earbuds for the next 4 weeks.

It sounds sick, but I’m actually looking forward to going into work Friday. Yes, I really do have to work on the day after Thanksgiving. But that’s ok. Everyone else in my department took the day off. So it’s just little ol’ me. All by myself. With no Christmas music. At least for that day.

Bliss. Until December 22.