High School Confidential

By Jeff Zalesin

	Jeff Zalesin is a junior at Briarcliff High School, where he serves as the arts editor for his school newspaper, The Briarcliff Bulletin. When he isn’t writing, Jeff runs track and field and listens to all types of music, except Christmas music.

In America, the frenzied holiday season is perennial fodder for B-list Hollywood studios, a much-needed shot of espresso for the comatose retail sector, and an annual excuse to indulge one’s fondness for red velvet hats. But for some discerning music listeners, the season to be jolly amounts to little more than a Holy Headache. As some of us wish Jesus a Happy 2008th and others celebrate the miracle of long-lasting oil, we are all once again victim to a relentless onslaught of holiday-themed music.

If you wanted to survive the month of December without ever hearing a holiday tune, you would need to make some severe lifestyle changes. You couldn’t walk into a grocery store or a coffee shop, or even along the sidewalk of a commercial street. You’d have to plug your ears and run at the sight of pedestrians in groups, for these might be carolers.  Television, of course, would be strictly off limits. And you wouldn’t dare touch your FM radio dial.

And for all that effort, you’d earn yourself a reputation as a social pariah. To most Americans, it would seem bizarre that anyone would want to avoid holiday music. Aversion to Christmastime fervor – Scroogism, if you will – is considered about as foreign to American culture as ritual foot binding. A real American, we are taught, has the warmth of heart to partake in the wholesome Christmas Spirit, and accordingly -themed music is part of the package.

Of all the types of conformity American society expects, this may be the one I find toughest to abide. It surely doesn’t help that I identify as a Jew, but what really stands between me and the Christmas Spirit is my distaste for the sonic trash that pollutes my musical environment this time of year. And though I do my best to judge all songs with a fair and open mind, I have grown convinced that holiday music is uncommonly derivative and predictable. Over the years, I have formulated the following categories for the easy classification of all holiday songs:

1. Winter Weather – Paradoxically, many holiday songs have little to do with an actual holiday. Instead, they espouse the defining meteorological feature of winter – namely, snow – and all the fun it entails. This category happens to include several of the most popular holiday songs of all time: “Jingle Bells,” “Winter Wonderland,” and Bing Crosby’’s enduring smash, “White Christmas.”
2. Santa Claus – Old Saint Nick may not be real, but you wouldn’t know it from the volume of pop music written in his honor. For the sake of convenience, we will classify all songs about reindeer in this category by association. Familiar examples: “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” “Little Saint Nick,” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
3. Christmas Wishes – These most generic of songs have so little thematic substance that they can do nothing more than simply wish us a Merry Christmas.  Think I’m exaggerating?  Consider the following: “Feliz Navidad,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”
4. Jesus – He may be the birthday boy, but the actual airtime devoted to Christmas songs about Jesus is comparatively slim. The best-known ones tend to be old seasonal hymns that predate the advent of recorded music, such as “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and “Silent Night.”
5. Christmas as Proxy for Something Else – Record executives know that for two months a year, they can shove anything down America’s collective throat, so long as it contains the word “Christmas.” So we get listless, formulaic pop that uses Christmas as a front for something even more mundane, like a run-of-the-mill love affair or a child’s dental woes. Instructive in the phenomenon: “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” “All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth,” and Jimmy Buffet’’s wretched “Christmas In The Caribbean.”
6. Christmas as Comedy: Snobs like me enjoy making a mockery of Christmas music, but a few recording artists have beaten us to the punch. Weird Al Yankovic won laughs as usual with “The Night Santa Went Crazy,”” but it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for Dr. Elmo, whose sole claim to fame is the omnipresent “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer.”     
7. Hanukah Songs – So far, Kwanza has been spared the trivializing effect of pop songs in the Christmas mold.  Hanukah, sadly, has not been so lucky. Since most Jews can’t remember what Hanukah is about and most non-Jews never learned, popular Hanukah songs don’t get more specific than a vague allusion to “days long ago.” Three examples, all of roughly equal religious merit: “O, Hanukah,” “The Dreydel Song,” and Adam Sandler’s “Hanukah Song.”

I once believed that anyone who records Christmas songs is an incorrigible sellout, but I abandoned that theory because the list was so overwhelming: Springsteen, the Beach Boys, Sinatra, B.B. King, U2, The Supremes, The Beatles – heck, most of the great artists in the history of popular music have at sometimes turned to Christmas music. To me, these recordings represent the low points in the otherwise stellar careers of highly talented performers. Sure, there are those who claim that the intrinsic joy of holiday season forgives its trite soundtrack. Bah, I say. Humbug.