dwasifar's daily gripe

Every year I get sick of Christmas music faster.  Each year, the whole Christmas thing seems more and more like everyone around me is having a huge collective paroxysm of insanity, and the music often seems like the most obvious symptom.  Everywhere you go, it’s the same old crap, drummed into your head – especially in the case of my least favorite song of all time, The Little Drummer Boy. It irritates me in a general rub-your-nose-in-the-Jesus-story way, but so do most carols.  This one, though, I don’t even understand why christians like it.  If the story were true, it’d have ended in early proof of Jesus’ magical powers.  Think about it.  Here’s an exhausted new mother, who had to give birth in a barn after a long hike.  She just got the baby off to sleep in spite of all the weirdos wandering in and out, claiming to be following a star or a UFO or something, and now some little bastard tromps in and starts whacking on a drum, of all things.  Suddenly it’s baby Jesus’ first miracle: The Little Drummer Boy is turned into a pillar of salt, or a pepper shaker, or whatever.

Plus, the phrase “rump pump” has no place in a Christmas carol.  I know, as an atheist it’s none of my business, but it just doesn’t.

Wandering through the mall today, looking for presents for my parents (which is a real challenge at their age), I heard about as much Christmas music as I can stand.  I don’t go to the mall very much any more.  The whole consumer-glitz thing has been wearing increasingly hollow for me in recent years.  Also, as I get older, I am no longer the target market.  Things anyone can use are marketed only to the young, for some reason, as if mature adults don’t buy TVs, computers, pots and pans, shoes, cell phones, and soft drinks, to name only a few things.  There are only two places you’ll ever see gray hair in an advertisement:  1) Condescending advertisements for things only old people buy, like denture adhesive or adult diapers, or  2) Smug, mocking ads designed to make young people feel sophisticated compared to clueless oldsters.  I’m not ready for the former, and the latter are using me as the butt of a joke to sell products, so consumer culture doesn’t make me feel all that welcome any more.  This makes it easier with each passing year to resist what blandishments it still offers up.

Anyway, I digress.  It’s been a while since I’ve been to the mall.  Mostly I shop online, but I procrastinated too long this year.  The place has changed since I’ve taken enough time there to notice.  Many stores are empty; many others formerly occupied by slick national names now  house low-budget tenants with amateur signs.  This is not a good sign for the health of the mall, but it sure makes it easier on the shopper.  The mall’s foot traffic is way down.  I don’t remember malls being this easy to walk through during the pre-Christmas frenzy before.  This may also be partly because so many of the kiosks are gone – doubtless another casualty of the bad economy, but a great relief to people like me who would like to use the hallways to, oh, I don’t know, maybe walk in.  There wasn’t even a big line to see Santa Claus, so I imagine the $20-picture-with-Santa racket is raking in rather slimmer returns than it used to.

One kiosk that was still in business was selling internet service.  I stopped and asked some questions of the kids manning it, which stumped them.  They had to call the home office to get the answers.  The girl took a picture of me with her iPhone, and seemed rather sheepish that I noticed her doing it.  I didn’t ask why.  Maybe a grownup who knows more about internet technology than a college kid is unusual enough to take a picture of.

I’m tired of Christmas.  Or, more specifically, I’m tired of the christian hypocrisy that surrounds it in recent years.  “Keep christ in Christmas,” goes the bumper sticker, the idea being that Christmas has become a big secular hoopla that involves the whole society, and they want it to be a big religious hoopla that involves the whole society.  They think the secular world has stolen their holiday and used it to make a shitload of money.  But this is a hypocritical demand; what they’re really asking for is to take this holiday, now that secularism has made it much larger and more cross-cultural than it could ever have been as a pure religious event in the modern world, and co-opt the whole huge secular production to promote their religion.  It’s not a big deal because of Jesus, it’s a big deal because of commerce; and it’s not commerce piggybacking on religion, it’s now religion trying to exploit what commerce has created.

This will ultimately fail, of course.  Christmas will become what Easter is becoming and Halloween has already become; a holiday that was once a modest religious observance and morphed into a completely secular festival.  You know those people who kick up a fuss every October about how wicked and evil Halloween is?  Ridiculous, aren’t they?  That’s what people who insist on yammering about Jesus at Christmas will look like in about another 50 years.  But for now we have to put up with the sanctimony, largely from people who only have the vaguest notional understanding of their religion otherwise, and about a hundred different syrupy saccharine renditions of O Holy Night crackling over the speakers everywhere from Nordstrom to McDonalds to Home Depot.  At least it’ll stop in January.