[BUMPED UP: scroll down for new posts] One big reason to shop at Amazon for Christmas…
…is that you get away from the incessant repetitive Christmas music playing in so many stores.
I think the people who work in retail are driven crazy by it, too. This year I’ve noticed one particular earwormy song playing over and over and over.
WARNING: if you don’t want to get an especially hideous earworm, please stop here right now and save yourself!!:
And when you shop Amazon, don’t forget to use my portal. Thanks!
That’s a bad one, all right, but over the years The Little Drummer Boy has been my very most unfavorite department store Xmas song. One more Yah-Tah-Tum-Tum and I’ll stroke out.
mizpants:
Shhh, do not mention the Little D– B– without a trigger warning!
Currently working in retail for the second year in a row, and yes, the seasonal music is near to driving me mad. I have had to listen to, among other things, the lesbian version of “Baby It’s Cold Outside”, which I suspect is really about the seduction of a straight woman and is intended to show that there are no straight women, not really, but at least it’is not the gay version.
Then there’s a middle aged Las Vegas style crooner taking the joke out of “All I want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth”: he clearly has dentures, at least.
After the third or fourth dozen times in a season, “Jingle Bell Rock” hammers the word “DECK” into your ears like an icicle.
I want Frosty the Snowman to be hurled into the Sun along with that damned hat, and listen to his drawn out radio shriek as his ions bounce back and forth along the field lines of a solar flare. Rudolph needs to be butchered, barbecued, and served to lepers. Gah.
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I’m sorry, but references to modes of transportation involving horses must be deleted from the Christmas catalog, as must harness bells. I am old enough to have witnessed a tobacco farmer plowing his field with a horse team, and not as tourist attraction, but I have never ridden in a horse drawn sleigh.
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They’re doing a few more straight up carols this year than last, even putting in the words and not just doing instrumental versions. I have mixed feelings about this, because while this does point to the True Meaning etc, it also reduces the sacred to mere marketing jingles, and if they played “Silent Night” as often as “Sleigh Ride”, I’d learn to hate it.
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It is so bad that I’m refusing to sing the more secular songs with my church choir, which will be serenading the greening of our nave. I simply cannot give them any additional purchase in my brain by actually singing them myself.
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I truly despise singers who forget that singing is about the music, not the performer. That goes ten times over for the National Anthem and Christmas carols.
I will leave a shop rather than listen to music I don’t like.
There must be many purchases lost this way.
I like to play the Charlie Brown Christmas album for myself once or twice each year. I neglected to do so last year. But in the meantime, I found that Phil Keaggy’s Beyond Nature serves as wonderful Christmas music, even though it wasn’t particularly intended that way. I recommend it at any time of year, but especially just now; I’ve had it in my collection for a long time, but only at rare intervals did I bring it out. Get yourself a good fire going and put that on.
Backshelf (an interesting choice of moniker, you being in retail), I sympathize with your situation. Why, I wonder, has the round of usual suspects on the radio become such an obligatory thing in stores? You’d think it would occur to more managers that customers must get kind of tired of that stuff.
Am I missing something or is the portal not obvious?
Wait, it’s showing up on my Kindle but not on my desktop. Hmmm….must be my ad blocker. Will test in the morning.
I do truly love traditional carols, sung within a few days of Christmas by friends and family near an illuminated tree. However, the town where I work pipes popular holiday music, not to be dignified by a term like “carol,” nonstop all day long for the entire month of December. The muffled bum bum bum bum ta rum pum pum pums and half-heard garbled lyrics seep all day long into my office. It’s DRIVING. ME. INSANE.
I’m going back to huddling under my desk with earplugs now.
Adblocker blocks the Amazon portal. I disabled it for this site. Works fine now.
For a little different take on Christmas music, try this:
Oy to the World
http://oytotheworld.com/
Most versions of “Last Christmas” do set my teeth on edge, but I find Celtic Thunder’s version, featuring Keith Harkin, to be beautiful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoVzWBOPs9I
Celtic Thunder also does the one version of “Baby It’s Cold Outside” that I’ve ever sought out… I can’t find the version on Youtube that’s on their Christmas DVD, sung by Ryan Kelly and Charley Bird, but here’s a version with Ryan Kelly and Natalie Toro that’s just as pretty:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBLYyZCGA2U