Bah Humbug!

A week before Halloween I was having a casual dinner with a friend when I started, for no apparent reason, to get fidgety and irritated. Soon those feelings morphed inexplicably into being REALLY pissed off. I did an internal check (body, mind, and spirit) and found nothing amiss. My friend was certainly not the cause of my irritation; she's a good conversationalist and fun to be with. The food was fine and the crowd was lively. The lighting (my usual bugaboo) was soft and warm and did not make me or my friend look like something dragged up from the Parisian catacombs; I could live with it. So what was it?

“Shhhh,” I told my friend suddenly, cutting her off mid-sentence. “Do you hear that?” I asked, my voice a whisper, secretive and low. I motioned for her to lean in close and to pay attention. “Don't you hear that?” I hissed, glancing up at the corner where one well-disguised speaker dangled precariously over a table of what looked like rambunctious college students out for a meal. 

 “The kids?” she asked, glancing over toward that table. “No! Not the kids!” I was getting snappy now and knew it. But I couldn't stop myself. I ordered her to listen once more as I sat there getting more annoyed by the second.

“The song!” I finally snapped. “Do you hear that song?” My friend cocked her head like an adorable puppy. Her eyes widened and then she laughed out loud.

“Now I hear it,” she smiled at me. “It's a little early for it but I don't hate the song.”

“You don't hate this song? How are we even friends?” I blurted out in disbelief. I was joking...but was I?

The song that was clawing and screeching itself out of the restaurant’s speaker was the horrible (in my mind anyway) Christmastime ditty I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus. But this was not the original version of the song. No, that would have been almost palatable. This was the rendition sung by Alvin and the Chipmunks, a wildly sped up, high-pitched, painful-to-listen-to recording of an already quite obnoxious Christmas song. I'm quite sure it was first recorded by a Mexican drug cartel to use while torturing its victims. “I'll tell you everything,” I imagine some poor soul, tied to a chair in a dingy, dank basement, imploring his captors. “Just please, dear God, turn off that song!” 

I have always hated that song, no matter the version. Even Perry Como's smooth and well-paced rendition fills me with a murderous rage. When I was a young girl my mother told me it was a “perverted” song and I suppose I took to heart what she said. Was Santa a pervert? My mother claimed most men were, so it would stand to reason that he was too. And she never explained to me that Santa was actually the father of the family. And that the mommy he was kissing was his wife. My parents were permanently separated when I was still in diapers and I had no recollection of living with my father (or any man) so the idea of a strange old fat man falling down our chimney and ravishing my unsuspecting mother, on Christmas Eve no less, alarmed me. “Does Santa do that to all the mommys?” I asked my mother.

“Probably," she informed me and that was the end of that conversation.

So I've always hated the song, because it made me think poorly of Santa, a man who, until my mother's revelations about him, I had always considered a good guy. I had no grandfathers growing up (through death and estrangement) so Santa was like my once a year grandfather who was invisible but who would bring me presents. I loved him. Or the idea of him, anyway.

“We should get the check,” I announced to my friend brusquely.

“What? Why? Let’s get a coffee.” I'd been such a pill since that blasted song came on so I relented. But then I excused myself and went to the bathroom, the last verse of the Mommy-Santa song making my ears bleed as I dashed by the speaker. 

When I got to the bathroom I ran cool water over my wrists and tried to calm down. What was this anger, this gathering mental storm, that was making me want to leave the restaurant and go home? I couldn't figure it out...and then it hit me. It was the “holiday season” in general that was causing this violent reaction. We hadn’t even celebrated Halloween. I didn't have a costume yet and I was stressed about that, and now here was that stupid little chipmunk and his idiot chipmunk brothers, singing about Christmas Eve...on October 24th. Christmas was still a long, and potentially grueling, eight weeks away.

When I got out of the bathroom, Bing Crosbys Little Drummer Boy was playing, and although I was still on edge, Bing’s smooth-as-butter voice did help tame the Grinchy beast within me.

As I sat back down my friend looked at me and said “feeling any better?”

“Yes” I told her, “but it's just so nuts, this Christmas frenzy in October business. It stresses me out. What about enjoying the fall? And Thanksgiving? And football and the leaves changing? I just want to enjoy that. I want to be present. I want to be mindful of each passing day. I don't want to be catapulted into the future. I don't want to spend the next two months listening to terrible renditions of bad Christmas songs and acting like I'm full of the ‘holiday spirit’ and ‘good will toward men.’ It’s just all so infuriating.”

“Christmas is infuriating?” she asked me, trying not to laugh at her miserable grumpy friend.

“No…I love Christmas,” I told her. And I really do. I enjoy seeing family and friends and trimming the tree. I love driving around my neighborhood after dark and admiring all the Christmas lights and decorations. Our town lights up its entire main street, from the top all the way to the bottom, which is well over a half mile of gorgeous twinkly wonderfulness. My friend makes the most elaborate and intricate Christmas cookies and she outdoes herself in taste and cleverness of design every year. That is the part of the “holiday season” that I enjoy. When I was growing up that season started a few days after Thanksgiving. The lights would go up the first week of December and come down right after New Year’s Day. When I was a kid the whole “Christmas” experience lasted about four to five weeks tops. Now it spreads itself and its sticky tentacles into mid-October, which can make the panic of the season stretch out over ten exhausting weeks.

“It just feels like this whole season has become so commercialized. So sales-focused. So centered around money and commerce and buying crap for people we love and people we don’t." I complained. "Buying junk and wasting money because we are supposed to, not because we want to. And the driving! Everyone is speeding around like morons. Ten weeks is a significant chunk of the year. And I'm supposed to spend that time running around with the frenzied hordes buying whatever it is that I think person A or client B would enjoy, all the while trying not to get hit by a manic driver looking at their phone?”

“Don't let it bother you,” my wise friend counseled me.

“Sure. I'll do that,” I scoffed. “You realize that that’s like telling an alcoholic ‘just don't drink’.”

“Well, that’s still my advice. Enjoy the parts you like and ignore the rest.”

“It's not that easy,” I fought back. “We were just subjected to the worst Christmas song ever recorded. My ears and my soul are traumatized by what we just heard. And it’s just going to be that, ON REPEAT, until January first. I can't bear it,” I cried, burying my face in my hands as if sobbing.

“You'll be fine. Just ignore the craziness. If you have to go shopping go to the stores as early or as late as possible, that's what I do. You can also shop online if thats less ‘traumatic’ for you.” She added a hearty wink on “traumatic” for emphasis.

She’s right of course. I need to take my attention off of what I despise about the holiday season and train it onto what I love about the holidays - which happens to be quite a bit. But I still wish the “season” was a few weeks shorter. The avoidant part of me wants to just go live on a no-holiday-season-allowed island where we would raise a glass once on Christmas day, say a prayer of thanksgiving, and then all go swimming. That's my kind of Christmas.

But is it really?

Tonight as I walked by that same restaurant the Christmas lights on the trees out front were shimmering and sparkling against the midnight blue of the crisp December night sky.

And that was a magnificent sight to behold.