I’d just like to remind you that it’s not Christmas yet.

There’s really no way to describe it. It’s one of those enigmas that may remain unexplained for an entire lifetime—perhaps even longer. Creeping up on you slowly, it then startles you with its awful strains, and if you’re the easily captured sort, it snatches you from gloom and showers you with a combination of grimacing, smiling, laughing, and cringing. If you are strong, you’ll make it through three, maybe even four minutes. I can’t make it that long. And that’s why, when my parents came home on Monday, and snuck a cd into the player, turning it up to high volume, I couldn’t decide whether to run or burst out laughing. First I heard Christmas-like bells jingling, then a voice. Sounds like a promising beginning…. Except that the voice belonged to Bruce Springsteen, and the song was “Santa Clause is coming to town.” If you have never listened to it, now is the time to do it. It is definitely four minutes of cultural education that you will never get back. But until you hear it, you’ll never understand. It’s so obnoxiously dreadful, so horrifically off-key, so severely gritty, that it almost is worth listening to, merely because it is so bad as to become entertaining. I think its appeal is sentimental for me, for there can really be no other explanation. But I’m afraid that the sentimentality can only get me through the first two minutes. Oddly enough, at the time they got home, I had been having a rather bad day, and had in fact written a depressing blog post just before they arrived. (Which will remain unpublished.) Yet something about Springsteen’s off key, skewed rhythm, and christmassy sound pulled me out of it. In the face of so much musical  discord and destruction, all you can do is burst out laughing. Then, sixty seconds later, say “Wait, are you serious? We’re going to hear the whole song?”

Thus begins this season’s Christmas music. I know, I know-- I have posted before about how much I abhor the tendency of listening to Christmas music BEFORE Thanksgiving, and I still hold to that. Sometimes, with admirable effort, I can restrain the tide of jingling bells, snowy themes, chestnuts and stockings, red noses, and frosted evergreen trees from hitting our home until after the third Thursday in November, but this year I am clearly fighting for a lost cause. Two more new Christmas collections from Costco have been tossed into the mélange of bright cheery tunes that we already have, and I’m afraid they are about to become the bane of my existence.

Just tell me one thing. Am I the last person left who LOVES Christmas music, but only in it’s season? Is there anyone else out there who understands that the glories of Christmas music are best saved for AFTER thanksgiving?

Answers/Accusations/Proclamations of shock would all be appreciated.