There’s an interesting conundrum in the fall, that gets people arguing every year. More than just Daylight Saving Time (which is silly and all this malarky with changing clocks makes no sense). More than just who’s going to sit where at Thanksgiving. More than the gamble of when you’re to change over from summer to winter tyres. The conundrum is this: when is it okay to start playing holiday music?
Morally, ethically, you should never stop playing the music you love. If “Little Drummer Boy” gets your libido up, then blast those rum pum pum pums to your heart’s content. The thing is, early seasonal music has been scientifically proven* to cause what’s called “music fatigue”, and has been linked to mild to moderate cases of eye-rolling, heavy sighs, and general grinchitude. If it’s the first time you’ve heard all the ohs in the “Angels We Have Heard on High”, you get that warm feeling in the pit of your belly. But by the tenth time, you just want to gouge out your eardrums with a set of car keys.
If we have to enter a commercial retail outlet between October and January, we run the risk of hearing “Good King Wassisname” thirty times before we escape. I play in a concert band. We start rehearsing our holiday music in September. I’m done with the ‘ohs’ sometime in November.
More concerning to me is the monoculture we’re all too comfortable with spending outrageous gobs of money on. I think that’s for another post, but surely to #Glob there are more than a dozen holiday carols/songs to choose from. Up with Boney M! Down with rum pum pum pums! Up with Danny Elfman holiday themes!
*If you define “scientific” as “I totally made this up”
Let’s take a moment to remember the origins of something that’s changed the way we do business, the way we consume arts and culture, and ultimately, the way we communicate.
My mum was a brilliant woman. So was my grandmother. So is my aunt. So is my other aunt. It’s pretty cool the amount of brain power all the wymmyns be bringin’ all up in this family. I used to sit on the corner of mum’s bed and watch her put on “her face” in the morning, and I never really understood what all of that was about. Sure, wearing makeup is a rite of passage in western culture, but it was always a nonsensical one to me.
I worked pretty hard this past weekend. I was at a retreat. Had some rewriting to do on a manuscript. Thought it’d be easy. Boy, was I wrong. I mean. I knew I had a lot to rework. I just had no idea that I could actually focus like that. Focusing isn’t really one of my strong suits.
Pretty sure that in most prairie homes there is someone’s gran’s needlework that says “home is where the heart is”. We never had that on the wall at our house because my grandmother was a nurse and she used to say things like “the thoracic cavity is where the heart is”, and also she hated needlework. Of course, now that I’ve just mentioned this I’ve decided I need to do a needlepoint of a drippy heart with “the thoracic cavity is where the heart is” and hang it on the wall.
My father was asking recently whether any more of my articles might be featured on the CBC website. I mentioned I hadn’t pitched any lately, mostly for REASONS that involve being a) pretty busy; b) kinda brain-dead; c) most likely undernourished since our oven is busted and my slow cooker is pooched and basically all we have to eat is cereal and eggs in a nest. I maybe didn’t mention that last one.
Sometimes I’m positive the dog has the right idea. Probably this is why people started keeping their domesticated animals in their houses with them; they saw reflected in their animal buddies aspects of their own natures that they couldn’t quite talk about for whatever reason. Maybe they couldn’t name it because they were afeared. Maybe they didn’t want to name it because they didn’t want to acknowledge it was a thing. Maybe they were just inventing language and literally didn’t have the words.