Tuesday, December 6, 2011

–Be merry and bright, Rudolph the red, mama kissing Santa, knows when you’ve been, dreaming of a white, dashing all the way–


I really like Christmas.  I enjoy giving gifts.  I’m okay with decorating.  I don’t mind shopping.  Well, I mind the hassle a little.  I tolerate the lack of easy parking.  I don’t like the cold.
But what I hate, really hate, is that while we shop we can’t avoid hearing the same sugary renditions of the same, painfully familiar, irritatingly vanilla, relentless Christmas songs we all heard as children, repeated over and over in every mall, market, and Mart.
We hear them every year, as kids, as teenagers, then as young adults, and now as not so young adults.
Those songs are the meat and bones of the saying: Familiarity breeds contempt.
The audible onslaught starts well before Black Friday and relentlessly pursues us through New Year’s Eve.
It feels to me like what the Germans must have felt as the Russians drove them out of Russia that terrible winter of 1944.  No relief, no mercy, no respite from the misery.
Yeah, I know, that’s way over the top.  Our feet aren’t wrapped in rags.

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