“It’s the most wonderful time of the year!” Town trips are excruciating. Store after store, carol after carol, after carol. “It’s a holly, jolly…” The same five Christmas songs performed by the same 25 artists. “Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bell Rock…” Holiday songs are the perfect ear worms. Like a record album with a skip, the songs get stuck on repeat, over and over.
Either you love Christmas music or it makes you want to puncture your eardrums with a fork, as someone eloquently put it. Music psychology researcher Vicky Williamson says that there’s a U-shaped relationship between our reaction to music and the number of times we hear it. At first, we like a song the more often we hear it, but at a certain point, familiarity gives way to contempt, and the repetition is irritating rather than fun. “Feliz Navidad …”
And what about the poor souls working in retail that have to listen to the incessant Christmas song loop since early November? According to clinical psychologist Linda Blair, these workers have to make a hard, conscious effort to drown out the sound of Christmas music, or they’ll go insane. “If they don’t, it really does stop you from being able to focus on anything else,” Blair said. “You’re simply spending all of your energy trying not to hear what you’re hearing.” Dreaming of a White Christmas is probably lovely the first 20 times, but listening to the same ten songs over and over again all day, every day is cruel.
On a Reddit thread the “hipsterbandit” wrote: “As a person who has worked in the service industry for a long time now, Christmas music is a form of psychological torture after about an hour of uninterrupted playing. It’s gotten so bad I find myself humming Christmas songs in the summer.”
Slash178 noted: “It’s not so much a genre. It’s a theme, the music of which can be part of any genre, even heavy metal (e.g. Trans Siberian Orchestra). There haven’t been a whole lot of new additions to the playlists at the grocery stores in a long, long time. I’m pretty sick of hearing Mariah Carey and Frank Sinatra as if they are the most recent examples of Christmas music. If they played Ariana Grande’s Santa song or some Trans Siberian Orchestra, or some other modern Christmas tracks then I’d feel better about it.”
In a poll conducted by the Research Intelligence Group in Montreal, 36% of respondents said they had left a store sooner because they disliked the music. A surprising 75% of us enjoy listening to Christmas music. According to Nielsen’s 2017 Music 360 report, millennials are the biggest holiday music fans (36%), followed by Generation X (31%) and then the baby boomers (25%). Research has shown that Christmas music and scents actually make shoppers happier in a store. The key is not to overload the shoppers with jingle bells of happiness.
Holidays bring up all sorts of stuff with people. Visiting families can be quite stressful for some. In a poll of 2,000 American holiday travelers, a third (34%) don’t even count traveling home for the holidays as a vacation. In fact, 71% of them say they’d likely need a separate trip afterward to decompress. When visiting their family, 43% said it makes them feel like they’re being parented, as if they were a kid again. (We all know that one.) The poll also found that 86% of travelers prefer to stay somewhere else to relax (like a hotel nearby) after just one day of visiting the family.
According to clinical psychologist, Jessica Watrous, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves and our loved ones during the holidays to make things “perfect,” and when circumstances fail to meet this unrealistic expectation, it can leave some feeling frustrated and angry.
There are those who don’t have family, are estranged from their kin or are just too faraway. Or others who don’t celebrate, for one reason or another. As Julia Furlan of NPR wrote “it can be that much more difficult to watch everyone else operating at that eggnog-for-breakfast-inject-candy-canes-into-my-bloodstream level” of holiday mode.
Catherine Winter wrote that that for many people, what was once a beautiful holiday has turned into a consumerist nightmare. There’s an immense amount of pressure to buy, buy, buy to prove to your loved ones that you care enough to spend tons of money on things they’ll never use. We’re “lost in the maelstrom of expectation.” All the joy is sucked out of the celebration. “Everything feels obligatory rather than celebratory; chores instead of delights.”
As a result, Christmas, as Mr. Keith Porteous would say, can feel hollow and performative, and it leaves you feeling sad rather than joyful. What’s more, if some of us don’t show holiday cheer, then we’re called “Scrooge.” Just give me another eggnog.
Now, how many swans were swimming? Seven? And was it five geese and three French hens dancing? And one Turtle dove in a pear tree or was there also three calling birds?
