The War on Christmas is pretty much on, now.

My husband marked the annual flare-up between us and the season by asking me a question I already knew the answer to:

"Can you guess what they started playing at work?"

Without missing a beat, I answered, "Christmas music." It's not even Thanksgiving yet, and the Christmas music is being heard in retail stores, probably throughout America. I knew, because I worked retail myself about eleven years ago, and they did it to us then--constant, wall-to-wall Christmas music.

It would start as sporadic Christmas songs interspersed between the usual repetitive warblings of Musak drivel. But just after Thanksgiving, it became all Christmas, all the time. I suppose that it's something retail stores do to encourage people to be in a merry, giving, cheerful shopping mood. Great for the customers, or at any rate, the ones who like Christmas music. But for the employees?

It's like psyops. No, seriously. Being bombarded for eight or nine hours with that trite, sappy nonsense--think about it: spending that whole time on your feet being nice to people while listening to "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" for the umpteenth time is a very subtle form of mental torture. I'm not saying it's the exact equivalent of the songs being played to torment detainees at Gitmo or whatever. I'm just saying that there is a time and a place for Bruce Springsteen's rendition of "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town", and that twice a day, every day, is not that time. It gets under your skin. It makes you associate the holiday with work--not always pleasant, since holiday shoppers aren't always merry shoppers. It transforms the benign treacle that usually brings visions of sugarplums into a poison that brings thoughts of reindeer slaughter.

Okay. Maybe I exaggerate. But what I don't think is always considered is that these songs really are sometimes very Christian-referent. I realized this when I was working at a store in my old neighborhood. Better than a third of my customers were very observant Jews, and a similar number were Russian immigrants. They could have given a good goddamn about "O Little Town of Bethlehem." My first Christmas at the store, I asked if it was maybe possible that next year, we could get Hanukkah paper to go with all the Christmas paper we had (my manager was Jewish, so he totally understood). Maybe we could even try to get it--by Hanukkah!

I never really found out what the effects of the wall-to-wall joyful ti--ii-dings of joy, comfort and joy, were on our customers. I was in an office supply store, so while we sold a lot of computer games and printers and we got some fancy desk-top tchochkes, we didn't see quite the kind of seasonal madness that a toy store probably sees. Probably, since shopping is an in-and-out thing, it isn't torture for customers. Since I'm somewhat "culturally Christian", I don't know if it's actually alienating to people of other faiths, even though it kind of seems like it should be to me now.

(I may be a hardened case, though. I am the veteran of public school choirs and also sang in college--so practicing Christmas carols for hours on end was part of my "Musak resistance training.")

When I hear the Christmas Musak during my shopping, it still causes flashbacks of how tired I really got of hearing the same songs over and over--any song, played often enough, can begin to grate. Knowing that my husband is suffering from this torment on a daily basis (which he would militate against on aesthetic, even if not religious grounds, being not just an atheist but a lover of good music--and much Christmas music is pretty cheesy) is heart-breaking.

Maybe store associates are saying "Happy Holidays!" to customers in order to be inclusive. But the people who complain about a "War on Christmas" never really sat in a store and noticed Karen Carpenter turning "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" into a funeral dirge, have they? Well, HAVE THEY!!????? (Or "Home for the Holidays". Also sad.)

Ahem. Almost lost control there. Anyway, anyone who has done a stretch in retail, and especially if they have done a stretch in retail and been a non-believer in the details of Christmas, knows that Christmas is actually in your ever-loving face every day for sometimes over a month. We didn't start a war on Christmas--it's like Christmas started a war on us!

I am totally going to make up very bad lyrics to the next Christmas carol I hear.


(Christmas BONUS story: I used to take the bus to class when I was in college, and I passed a yard that had a very handsome chow dog. Well, all chow dogs are handsome, but they are tempermental furry beasties, and this one seemed to be left in the fenced yard too damn often. Yards are at least "out", but a dog gets bored. Anyway, one year, the people the chow belonged to set out a nearly people-sized light-up Santa on their front yard, the kind that has a hole in the bottom for the wires to come out. One day, as the bus passed that yard, the chow dog had the Santa over on its side, and....was doing something very familiar to the hole where the wires came out.

I don't know if dogs ever get coal in their stockings. I just know that if Santa Claus wasn't coming to town, that dog was taking him to town. I laughed my behind off at the image all day.)