MOST of the famous American Christmas pop tunes have been ruined by retailers. Whether it’s “Winter Wonderland” or “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” it’s played constantly and very loudly in stores from Thanksgiving to Christmas. There are the jazz versions, the rock versions, the country versions, the creepy sexualized versions. It’s hard to think at all fondly of roasted chestnuts and sleigh bells anymore. Let these things disappear off the face of the earth. The Christmas season in the stores is a prolonged, industrialized, desensitizing, cacophonous aural assault that has nothing to do with Christmas. It’s so much raw manipulation polluting the soundtracks of the mind and creating a form of Post-Traumatic Christmas Shock Syndrome that paradoxically sends people fleeing to psychologists for anti-depressants because they have been dangerously over-exposed to good cheer and feel their own lives are deficient and gloomy by comparison. Are people really induced to spend by this noise?

It will take many years before some benevolent king looks out on the wreckage of Western civilization from some isolated refuge and says to his people, “Let there be silence.” In the meantime, we must suffer.

Experts complain about the effects of violent imagery. No one complains about the cumulative effects of having natural feelings for warmth and festivity hyper-stimulated by canned music. These tunes have become Christmas amphetamines.

Now that it’s almost over, now that we can perhaps venture out and buy toothpaste without encountering “Jingle Bell Rock” or the “Grinch” song, perhaps we can finally enjoy a few moments of Christmas pop music for the fun that some of it might be if it weren’t overplayed for mercenary reasons. Here is Cyrus Chestnut, the jazz pianist, playing a very good version of the Charlie Brown Christmas song by Vince Guaraldi, a version that I have never heard in my local Rite Aid or Bed, Bath and Beyond. You just might be able to listen to it without seeing a credit card flash before your mind.

Merry Christmas!

— Comments —

Edward writes:

On the subject of Christmas music, there is a Naxos CD of Christmas tunes arranged in the baroque manner which I have (not surprisingly) never heard played in supermarket or mall. I find myself turning to these versions in preference to others more and more frequently in recent years, as I seek relief from overexposure to the trashy, canned versions. The title is “Christmas goes Baroque.”

Please follow and like us: