Not Worth Repeating

I mentioned this in a post the other day, but for a couple of reasons this holiday season has managed to get away from me. Normally I am really organized running up to this time of year but this Christmas I am just a few days behind schedule. (I honestly think the fact Christmas is on a Wednesday is the main culprit. Feels like we should have had another weekend to get all the last-minute details squared away.) This has resulted in a few lost traditions, such as certain decorations never getting brought up from the basement and put on display. In some ways this should be considered a good thing because it proves that not everything has be done exactly the same way it was done last year and the world will keep on spinning. Normally I am a stickler for routine and freak out when something falls through the cracks but time simply wasn't on my side and yet the holiday will go on as scheduled. I need to remember this feeling next season when I am trying to cram 3 hours of tasks into 1 hour of the day - both to remind myself that some of this stuff is only important to me and no one else is noticing, let alone caring, as well as to make sure I have better time-management skills so next Christmas I can do everything I want to do and still have enough time to enjoy the season. That is the thing which is really bothering me about this particular Christmas. Normally I like to finish all my shopping and decorating with a couple days left to just sit back and watch the holiday shows, listen to the music and soak up the ambiance. You can't really do that when you finish the last task less than 24 hours before presents are scheduled to be opened. I finally found a quiet moment to enjoy Christmas just in time for it to be over.

One of the main things I missed out on this year was the holiday music. You see even though some stations switch over to all-Christmas all the time the day after Thanksgiving I find it is very easy to avoid getting sick of the music by simply not turning on the radio. Considering the majority of my listening these days comes from podcast, that is much easier than it used to be. Also, for reasons I can't explain it feels like there aren't as many stations doing the all-Christmas format this year. This surprises me because back when I was still working in radio it was explained to me that the all-Christmas period often got some stations the best ratings they would see all year, hence why stations were changing over earlier and earlier. Part of it can be attributed to the fact that two of the station with the longest traditions of playing nothing but Christmas music changed formats. The oldies station in Boston has been replaced by a top-40 dance format, which makes going to all-Christmas damn near impossible. It is one thing to stop playing the same fifteen bands every day and start playing the same fifteen songs on repeat because clearly that audience doesn't mind repetition. It is entirely another thing to go from a techno remix of a Katy Perry song to Burl Ives. (That is not to say the top-40 station has a greater variety than the oldies station used to present. They also play fifteen bands on repeat but at least they can claim those bands are still alive and touring.) If they did want to play Christmas music they would probably have to meet somewhere in the middle by playing newer Christmas music and trust me, no one wants that.

I have often said that I don't avoid Christmas music for the first couple of weeks of the holiday season out of a sense that Thanksgiving should be allowed to be its own holiday but because if I listened to Christmas music as soon as it came on I would be sick of it by the first week of December. There are hundreds of thousands of Christmas songs to pick from and yet these station managers are only willing to open their libraries up a crack and let out the same ten to twenty songs from the last thirty years which are then played on repeat. It can be very frustrating but at the same time I was recently reminded that it is not like there is a good alternative. While finishing up my Christmas shopping in the last couple of days I noticed that malls and radio stations were digging deeper into their music collections for music. At first I was happy about this because really, how many times can you hear Springsteen tell us Santa Claus is coming to town? However, that was before I started listening to the songs themselves and discovered that they are terrible. Every song which came on was worse than the one before that and after a while I started wishing for a holiday song which had been around since the 1960s because even though it would feel stale at least I would know what I was getting. That was when it dawned on me that during all these years when I was crushing program directors for showing no creativity with their holiday playlists the people I really should have been crushing are the music producers because they aren't giving these people anything to work with.

Let's seriously think about this - how difficult is it to create a good Christmas track? I contend it would not be that hard if the music producers could simply fight the urge to do what all music producers fail at lately, which is let the talent work their magic. The best Christmas songs are the ones which are simple and clean. However, every holiday song produced in the last few years is over-produced with nonsensical lyrics and a thumping baseline. That'll get you a hit 11 months out of the year, but December is the one exception to the rule. Sure, there is something to be said about wanting fresh lyrics because I don't care how well someone sings "Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire" you are not knocking Nat King Cole off his perch of ownership of that track. Still, there is no need to get overly complicated with this. Just sprinkle a few lines about holiday cheer and the spirit of the holiday and you are golden - it doesn't even have to make sense. Now, it is entirely possible that the biggest problem with this new music is the very fact that it is new. Music can't become a classic overnight as it takes some time for it to age properly. I'm sure the first time "Do They Know It's Christmas" came on the radio everyone hated it and now if those same people don't hear that song they break out into hives. That means if these program directors show a little backbone, ignore the complaints and just keep playing these newer holidays songs eventually people will learn to love them. Still, it would be a hell of a lot easier for those people if one of the holiday songs made in the last five years could help them out by not being awful.