Chill 'Em All

It's about time for my annual complaint about ubiquitous Chirstmas music. Once again, I'm trying not to sound too curmugenly. I'm trying to find a reasonable middle ground between people like myself who only enjoy a little Christmas music, and the folks who want their Christmas cheer pounded into their head non-stop, Clockwork Orange style.

First up, while I do appreciate a reprive from Christmas music in stores, playing "What Are You Doing New Years Eve" in November is not an improvement. I'm just thankful there aren't any Valentine's Day songs, or they'd be staring later this week.

I also just heard a re-write of "Mr. Sandman" altered into a Christmas song - "Mr. Santa, bring me some toys." I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not. On the one hand, I've always figured that a way we could improve the Christmas music season would be to write more songs, so we would at least have a greater variety to play over the eight-weeks of Christmas. But rewriting existing songs to become Chirstmas-related? That's an awfully big can of worms to get into.

For a start, you might have already started by trying to think of other songs with "sandman" in the title that could be just as easily changed. And if you're similar in age to me, you immediately thought of Metallica's "Enter Sandman." There's some promise in the corus:

Silent Night
Holy Light
Take my Hand
We're off to Winter Wonderland

Of course, I knew someone would already have come up with lyrics along these lines. And in fact, someone has recorded an actual song. It's not quite the Christmas music diversity I'd hoped for, but at least now rock fans don't have to keep playing Trans-Siberian Orchestra. You occassionally hear their music in stores in the lead-up to Christmas, and it gives the experience an apocalyptic overtone that already-stressed shoppers just don't need. I don't think Merry Metallica will be much better in that respect. I think I'm going to do a search for Enya Christmas albums.