When your iPod doesn't know it's not Christmas

We're big fans of Christmas at our house. Each year, Karla bakes a bunch of delicious treats, and the place abounds in wreaths, lights, and nativity displays. We also like Christmas music. I ripped a few of our Christmas CD's and purchased a few more so we have a nice holiday mix on the iPod. Of the 3000 or so music tracks on the iPod, Christmas music accounts for fewer than a hundred. This ratio has me convinced that the iPod has a hankering for Christmas music.

I know I have a habit of anthropomorphizing technology devices; it's a coping mechanism for dealing with computers all day long. I rant, lecture, or cajole my way through the hundreds of core systems I might touch over the course of a year. (And of course, there is Fisher-Price TiVo—I know that device has it in for me.)

Yet, the iPod’s preference for Christmas music is the clearest evidence thus far of some nascent ghost in the machine. Although I’ve put together some nice playlists, the shuffle feature is what gets me through the workday. I block out the cube-farm when I need to concentrate by slipping on my Sennheisers and setting the iPod to a reasonable level, as Milton Waddams would say. We have some pretty varied music, so a given hour might take me through U2, Johnny Cash, Coldplay, Diana Krall, Maire Brennan, Yo-Yo Ma, and Miles Davis. And, of course, a nice selection of Christmas favorites from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Elvis, Sinatra and/or John Rutter.

I haven’t taken a detailed account, but Christmas is definitely over-represented. There’s just no way a purely random process would select so many tracks from a group representing less than 3% of the total library. My only conclusion is that the iPod likes Christmas music, or at least following the lead of our big-box retailers: this morning as I made a quick stop at Wal-mart before work, I was serenaded by synthesized versions of “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” and “Joy to the World.”