Home for the Holidays - A Screed

For the record, I hate Christmas music.  The false cheer.  The hypocritical message of peace and good will peddled by those who believe in anything but that.  The sanctimonious imagery of a Norman Rockwell America that never existed.  And most of all, the simply bad music and lyrics - bubble gum pop Auto-Tuned to bland sameness. 

In other words, "Home for the Holidays." An Anti-Classic.  First demortalized by Mr. Bland himself, Perry Como, then punishingly covered by The Carpenters - it's this latter version that will (if anything could) set my mind to murder and mayhem.  Uber-perky (and apparently perked up on pills) Karen Carpenter trippingly sings (is that what that's called?) about how "the traffic is terrific!".  Words cannot express how much I loathe and despise this recording - which, for some unfathomable reason - is played every hour on every radio station in America (even the All Talk - All The Time ones).  This horror is inescapable - it's like a swiftly moving mass of sewage, creeping through even the most tightly sealed portals.  Last Saturday, nearly a week BEFORE Thanksgiving, I had about an hour to kill before meeting friends for dinner, and I went into three different stores.  Each one was tuned to a different radio station, but for some bizarre reason, five minutes after I walked into the store - "Home for the Holidays" started to play. 

My nightmare is this - although I don't own (and certainly never will) any version of this travesty, I fear that it will somehow infect my iPod, and all 26,000+ songs will become "Home for the Holidays."  Or that I'll put a CD in to play in my car, and you guessed it - that's the only song on the disc.  I'll end up killing myself as I try to jump out of the moving vehicle.  Anything but having to listen to Karen and/or Perry sing about the idiot from Tennesee trying to get to Pennsylvania. 

As much as I loathe Christmas music, I actually love the old English Christmas carols.  My favorite is O Come Emmanuel, which is seems more Jewish than Christian (ignoring, of course, the line "God's Dear Son").   The best rendition is the one by the King's College Choir, Cambridge.  The original recording was an album I got from the Musical Heritage Society (probably vinyl) back in the early 1980s (I remember listening to it in college), which has been plundered for a sort of "Best of..." version that now includes some of the minor horrors of the season.

Anyway - I'll be doing my holiday shopping on line, and when I have to venture out into the Danger Zone (i.e., a mall or chain store), I'll have my earbuds tightly screwed in and something a little more pleasant playing, say John Cage's 4'33".

Oh, and Happy Holidays