THE FAMOUS DOOR DECEMBER 16, 2011
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I’ll hold my humbugs. We’re entering the blue center of the holiday season, and Christmas songs—that is to say, songs that we associate with the winter holiday season, regardless of the lyrics’ literal meaning—are all around us again. The Billboard album chart, itself a relic of a tradition meaningful mainly to box-store retailers and nostalgists, has in the number-one spot for the third week the Christmas CD by the smarm prince Michael Bublé. (It is titled, in an evocation of the music’s imaginative power, Christmas.) At the same time, the homepage for the respected alt-rock site, Pitchfork, has in its prime ad spot a promotion for the new holiday album by the cheeky, cutesy folk-pop duo She & Him, which is cheekily and cutely named A Very She & Him Christmas.
Both of the albums, like a great many of the holiday collections released every year, are lame—safely unadventurous variations on the Christmas-album formula of slickly packaged cheer and sentimentality. I’m not sure why anyone who already has one good Christmas album would buy either of these new ones, though the model of my Uncle Gabey comes to mind. Every two years for decades, he has traded in his two-year-old Oldsmobile for a new-model Oldsmobile. Like Michael Bublé’s Christmas or A Very She and Him Christmas, my Uncle Gabey’s latest car is the same old vehicle, reconfigured just enough to provide both the reassuring comfort of familiarity and the fleeting pleasure of superficial newness.
Both the Bublé and She and Him CDs—again, like most Christmas albums—defy criticism. After all, to complain about Christmas music for its commercialism and sentimentality is like criticizing little children for being young. Christmas, in practice in this country, is a ritual of commercialism and sentiment, and the music of ritual is always formally restrictive and endlessly repeatable. The holiday songs truest to the season are those that revel in the gleeful consumerism and consumerized glee that are the essence of Christmas in America.
6 comments
Christmas sentimentality is mostly (though not totally) a protestant thing; it's the protestant equivalent to the Catholic rituals. Like Jews, Catholics express their faith in rituals. Protestants don't have rituals. What's striking about all Christians, especially protestants, is the juvenile treatment given the most sacred Christian holidays, including Christmas (Santa Klaus) and, the most sacred, Easter (bunny rabits and egg hunts). Until very recently, protestant churches even gave the sacred sign of the faith, the cross, juvenile treatment: no suffering Jesus on the large crosses at the front of protestant churches, an empty cross instead (unlike the crosses in Catholic Churches). Times have changed for protestants, at least for evangelical protestants, with ubiquitous public displays of piety and an emphasis on suffering by Jesus (and all Christians, especially evangelical Christians). I suspect that this change for evangelical Christians may have the benefit of toning down the sentimentality; indeed, many evangelicals frown on the commercialization of Jesus's birth and the juvenile treatment of Jesus's death and resurrection. For that, all of us can be thankful.
- rayward
December 16, 2011 at 9:38am
rayward - the empty cross is a powerful symbol of the Resurrection as opposed to the Atonement. In fact, a 'cross' is an empty cross. What you are speaking of is a 'crucifix'. And I have not found that sentimentality is lacking in catholic chuches, rather the reverse. To me, what some evangelical churches are missing is any sense of history, including and especially their own history. They act like they were born (again) yesterday, without the need for the rituals which connect peoples together across time and distance. Without those connections, one has to shout very, very loud to hear oneself.
- polijunky
December 16, 2011 at 10:57am
♪♫ Hark the Herald Tribune Sings ♪♫ adverstising wonderous things. ♪♫ God Bless You Merry Merchants ♪♫ may you make the yuletide pay!♪♫. Angels we have heard on highhhhh, ♪♫ tell us to go out and buyyyy!♪♫
- Nusholtz
December 16, 2011 at 1:04pm
I struggle to find good holiday music every year - mainly because so much of it is, as rightly pointed out, sentimental and commercialized. I do have to thank David for his recent post on the horrible Stan Kenton and malahat's subsequent mention of June Christy in the comments. It led me to dig up her song "The Merriest", which is now a permanent addition to my holiday music list.
- Attrill
December 16, 2011 at 4:04pm
"After all, to complain about Christmas music for its commercialism and sentimentality is like criticizing little children for being young." Huh? Children are, by definition, young. Christmas music is by no means necessarily commercialized. It's the pop Christmas music that has emerged since the 1940s that is primarily susceptible to commercialization, although any song can be turned into muzak. And does this sound sentimentalized?: In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, In the bleak midwinter, long ago. Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain; Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign. In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.
- ccarrick@vzavenue.net-old
December 16, 2011 at 10:57pm
I would mention a very good piece of un-kitschy Christmas music, namely Marianne Faithfull's recording of "I Saw Three Ships," accompanied by The Chieftans. Very spare, very direct, absolutely beautiful.
- lump516
December 17, 2011 at 11:13am