Sans Fig Leaf
w
"Caroling"
13 December, 2007
He was explaining a great
trauma he had suffered years before: how he had been forced to endure
the torture for hours at a time, day after day. And that was why, he
said, he hated Christmas music, and had no patience for people who
liked to listen to it.
His "torture" had been
working in a retail establishment one Christmas
season and having to listen to the same bad Christmas music played over
and over and over. I might have been inclined to sympathy, except I had
also heard him mock survivors of child molestation because "they
couldn't grow up and get over it."
Not everyone who says they
dislike Christmas music because of some
similar experience have committed such gross hypocrisy, but many suffer
from the same lack of perspective. As a survivor of both physical and
emotional childhood abuse (i.e., actual trauma), who has grown up and
gotten over it, I find it difficult not to laugh in the faces of people
who go off on long, angry rants about Christmas music.
A lot of these tales focus
on one particular song being rendered by
some cheap electronic device, which they were forced to listen to again
and again. While I agree that anyone would find the situation
maddening, it's a bit of a stretch to then insist on condemning all
holiday music. If someone who once suffered food poisoning decided for
the rest of their life never, ever again to eat solid food, and
frequently made disparaging remarks whenever they saw other people
eating anything, we would all agree the person was crazy. So why treat
holiday music any differently?
Others put forward a
religious oppression argument. Intellectually I
understand what they're trying to say. Certain hymns and a lot of
"contemporary Christian" music can really push my buttons.
Religious-themed Christmas music doesn't do the same thing for me. Not
even in my mid-to-late-twenties when I was an adamant atheist. Back
then I might get upset over someone talking about "taking the nation
back for Christ," but then turn around and blithely sing along with one
of my favorite recordings of "O, Holy Night."
For a while I thought I
was a bit of a freak because of that.
Then, when I was a member
of the Lesbian & Gay Chorus, I got a
different perspective on the situation. We were singing a classical
piece--I don't remember what it was, but "god" was mentioned in the
lyrics, and some members of the chorus were very angry about it. During
a long discussion of the entire membership, it transpired that the
members who were most adamant had never suffered, personally, from
religious discrimination.
There were plenty of us in
the chorus who had been rejected by members of our own families on
religious grounds, or had lost jobs, been denied housing, or any number
of other indignities at the hands of people who felt justified in doing
so because their religion branded us sinners. And all of us were
arguing for keeping the lyrics as originally written.
I realized the reason the
lyrics didn't bother me was precisely because I had endured rejection.
I hadn't just endured it, I had overcome it. The words no longer had
power over me because I refused to give them that power. I also refused
to give up well-composed music just because I didn't happen to agree
with some of the lyrics.
Admittedly, it's easier
for me to do that with something written by Verde, Beethoven, or
Mozart, than it is with something written in the last couple decades.
So I am most certainly standing in a glass house.
Now I live with a man who
has a low tolerance for Christmas music. He doesn't hate it, but he can
only listen to it in small doses. Early in our relationship, I learned
another interesting aspect of the different ways people perceive music.
I have at least 39 different versions of "White Christmas" in my
collection, for instance. And while I would never want to sit down and
listen to all of them in a single sitting, I don't mind at all if
several of the versions come up on shuffle play in close proximity.
Because, to my ears, each of those versions, sung by different people
in different styles, with different sets of instrumentation backing
them--they're all different. I can appreciate the differences, and
enjoy the comparison and contrast.
To him, they're all just
the same song. While he's willing to believe me when I say I can
appreciate the differences, it's clear that he just doesn't.
But then, other friends
who are into styles of music that I don't care for, can spend hours
discussing the fine distinctions between various songs and bands that
all just sound exactly the same, to me.
I've certainly spoken
with disdain about a particular rendition of a song that I consider
poor quality for some reason or another. And don't get me started on
the topic of one particular Christmas movie that lots of people love,
but which I despise so much, given an opportunity, I would gladly go
back in time and terminate the author of the original short story
before the tale was written, regardless of the potential consequences
to the space-time continuum.
Because that's completely different.
--Tom Stoppard
.