Christmas Music

There may nothing more horrid than listening to back-to-back Christmas songs on the radio except perhaps listening to back-to-back Christmas songs on the radio while sitting captive for an hour in a dentist’s chair. I was only confined for a cleaning and check-up. Perhaps if I was under the drill, or having a root canal, I would have appreciated the numbing distraction. But just sitting there, especially for the nearly half hour waiting between the hygienist and the dentist, it felt pretty much itself like severe drilling into my skull.

I don’t recall ever being engaged by Christmas music, religious or secular, though I’ve been told that as a child I was enthralled by Burl Ives’s rendition of “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.” That may be, but I also dressed up in a full bunny costume for Halloween at the age of five, so I was clearly under the sway of parents who must have been set on indoctrinating me into mainstream numbing culture. But sometime during my teen years – perhaps when I was getting into rock music (though I also don’t like rock Christmas songs) – I began to be repelled. Perhaps it was the insipid lyrics. Perhaps it was the dull melodies. Or maybe it was just the constant repetition, hour to hour, day to day, year to year – the drilling of it into my brain, if you will.