Much to the iPod's Delight

I face a conundrum every Christmas season, specifically about the music.

On the one hand, there is the music I like: The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Cambridge Singers, Elvis, Buble, and Sinatra. And of course my wife's favorite, Josh Groban's rendition of "Oh Holy Night".

On the other hand is everything else. There are two kinds of bad Christmas music: Those songs that are bad outright, no matter how they are arranged or performed; and songs that are good, or at least decent, that have been tortuously adapted by misguided souls.

In the former category, those responsible for "Jingle Bell Rock" (and "Jingle Bells" itself, for that matter), "The Man With the Bag", "Merry Christmas, Baby" and "Winter Wonderland", among many others, have much to answer for. Whatever form they take, these songs trap the listener in a horrible alternate dimension of over-commercialized false cheer that is so divorced from any semblance of Christianity that one wonders how they ever entered the canon of Christmas music to begin with.

But in addition to this, a truly bad Christmas song also has to be really, really annoying. While children's songs such as "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" are also annoying, their utter banality is couched in pre-adolescent yearnings for, as Calvin & Hobbes author Bill Watterson would say, "more loot." At a certain point, most of us cross a threshold where Christmas means more than a pile of loot. The faux Christmas embodied by these pop hits from decades of yore never transcends the materialism. Not to say that the 40s and 50s have a monopoly on bad Christmas music: a collection we bought a few years ago has an original song by some starlet or other who reminds us at each repetition of the chorus that "this season only comes once every year." (This is opposed to other seasons, which in her world do occur multiple times a year; perhaps she's using some sort of pre-Gregorian calendar?)

The other category of bad Christmas music, abusing perfectly good Christmas carols, has no musical or cultural boundaries. We are just as likely to hear the embarrassment of "Silent Night" stretched to rock ballad as we are to hear it fed through a new age synthesizer. Then of course there is the countrification of everything from "Away in a Manger" to "Carol of the Bells", cheerfully led by that first disciple of Christmas Country, Kenny Rogers himself. (In morbid curiosity, I looked up our friend Kenny on Amazon.com, to see no fewer than 14 distinct Christmas albums. What a business model! No wonder the local FM station plays a Christmas song by Kenny every 15 minutes.)

This is not to say that Christmas music performed by popular artists does not have its place. Coldplay's rendition of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is one of my favorites. And I still enjoy picking out the "cool" 80s acts (e.g., U2, Duran Duran, Sting) from "Do They Know It's Christmas?" even though this means I also have to put up with Boy George. Overall, though, my Christmas tastes trend strongly toward the traditional, to match my view of Christmas as a religious holiday. Anything crafted with the ultimate goal of wafting through shopping mall loudspeakers necessarily conflicts with my view of the holiday as a religious one.

At least the iPod is happy. Its hankering for Christmas tunes (about which I have previously written) is doubtless satisfied, at least for this month.