In Which We Learn What Lysistrata's Daughter Means When She Says She Hates Christmas
My husband loves Christmas. By which he means that he loves the hymns and services of Christmas, both East and West. He loves to have an Advent wreath and sing the O Antiphons of the Roman rite. You know? Christ-mass. The lovely churchy parts of Christmas. The hymns we love because we only get to sing them once a year.
I love all that, too.
What I hate about Christmas is something quite different, and it was on full display today. It started this morning, with NPR hinting darkly that people who do not spend every penny they can afford on Christmas presents, and a few more after that, were nothing more than economic jihadists, determined to sell the country into financial ruin.
As if the brainiacs of Wall Street hadn't done that for us already. And I'm so sorry that I'm not willing to spoil my child rotten and fill up my little house with kitchen gadgets we'll never use in order to save an economy already being killed much more effectively than I ever could with my small frugalities.
Anyway.
We went to Mimi's for dinner, in the (vain) hope that our son, full of carbohydrates, would fall asleep in the car on the way home. When will we learn?
Anyway, the food at Mimi's was the usual: fair to middling and too much. A had had enough of 'restaurant behavior' before dessert was finished, so I took him out to splash in the puddles while Y paid the bill.
Yes, it's raining in Los Angeles.
A cheerfully made himself wet and muddy as I stuffed my hands deeper into my pockets and arranged my hair to be a muffler. Then it hit me. An all-out assault of the worst of Christmas; blaring from the loudspeakers outside the restaurant was the foulest sort of updated jazz-cum-rock, half crooned, half shouted. And the lyrics? Frosty the Snowman. First a man, doing a poor imitation of Frank Sinatra. Then a woman, rubbishing breathily on about Frosty and the jolly holiday.
For real? This is LA! Traffic has practically ground to a halt because precipitation is dropping from the sky. I, a SoCal native, first saw snow falling from the sky at the age of 15. But only because I spent my spring break in Montreal, trying to improve my French.
But Frosty was only the beginning. We were treated to Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer next, done by a singer who had clearly failed to make a mark in any more respectable musical genre. And then the king, the all-time, very worst Christmas song. Ever. I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas.
No, I'm not. The only Christmases I've ever known have been clear, sunny days. Occasionally it's raining, but I remember very clearly wearing shorts more than once on 25 December. Who makes up these playlists? And why does anyone sing them? Especially in LA. Are we suffering from some sort of East Coast-diaspora-induced Christmas inferiority complex?
I'm going off to sing some O Antiphons now, in the hope that I can cleanse my aural palette, until the next time I have to sally forth into the musical wasteland that is retail Christmas in southern California.
I love all that, too.
What I hate about Christmas is something quite different, and it was on full display today. It started this morning, with NPR hinting darkly that people who do not spend every penny they can afford on Christmas presents, and a few more after that, were nothing more than economic jihadists, determined to sell the country into financial ruin.
As if the brainiacs of Wall Street hadn't done that for us already. And I'm so sorry that I'm not willing to spoil my child rotten and fill up my little house with kitchen gadgets we'll never use in order to save an economy already being killed much more effectively than I ever could with my small frugalities.
Anyway.
We went to Mimi's for dinner, in the (vain) hope that our son, full of carbohydrates, would fall asleep in the car on the way home. When will we learn?
Anyway, the food at Mimi's was the usual: fair to middling and too much. A had had enough of 'restaurant behavior' before dessert was finished, so I took him out to splash in the puddles while Y paid the bill.
Yes, it's raining in Los Angeles.
A cheerfully made himself wet and muddy as I stuffed my hands deeper into my pockets and arranged my hair to be a muffler. Then it hit me. An all-out assault of the worst of Christmas; blaring from the loudspeakers outside the restaurant was the foulest sort of updated jazz-cum-rock, half crooned, half shouted. And the lyrics? Frosty the Snowman. First a man, doing a poor imitation of Frank Sinatra. Then a woman, rubbishing breathily on about Frosty and the jolly holiday.
For real? This is LA! Traffic has practically ground to a halt because precipitation is dropping from the sky. I, a SoCal native, first saw snow falling from the sky at the age of 15. But only because I spent my spring break in Montreal, trying to improve my French.
But Frosty was only the beginning. We were treated to Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer next, done by a singer who had clearly failed to make a mark in any more respectable musical genre. And then the king, the all-time, very worst Christmas song. Ever. I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas.
No, I'm not. The only Christmases I've ever known have been clear, sunny days. Occasionally it's raining, but I remember very clearly wearing shorts more than once on 25 December. Who makes up these playlists? And why does anyone sing them? Especially in LA. Are we suffering from some sort of East Coast-diaspora-induced Christmas inferiority complex?
I'm going off to sing some O Antiphons now, in the hope that I can cleanse my aural palette, until the next time I have to sally forth into the musical wasteland that is retail Christmas in southern California.
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