And the Shelf He Rode In On (Part III)

In the Bleak Midwinter - Beth Whitney (mp3)
Where Are You Christmas? - Faith Hill (mp3)

Part One -- "The Origin of Laura Jane," wherein I mention our transgendered hero/heroine, Nicole Kidman, late night elf pornography, and Gmail

Part Two - "Bad Dad," wherein I experience the stages of grief, emotionally abuse my daughter, and am reminded why the Christmas season is so despicable

My second daughter continues to write to Laura Jane, our transgendered Elf on the Shelf and the ever-present reminder of a failure of my fatherhood.

She wrote that damn elf five times in November, each time desperately (but as patiently as her little heart would allow) anticipating Laura Jane’s response. My eldest hasn’t mentioned Laura Jane. We’re fairly certain she’s aware that the elf has no clothes, so to speak, and she's hinted as much, but we can’t be sure, and there’s no easy way to ask that question without giving it away.

And this story, split into three lengthy parts, sums up why I tend to despise “special” days, most especially Christmastime. We create these days where things have to be more. They have to be bigger, and better, and greater, and more important. Why? Because people need bigger, and better, and greater, and more important. Because normal isn't good enough.

This is proof that too many people allow their everyday to slip into something bad, something negative and undesirable. They then look to Special Days to rescue them from their monotony and boredom. It's like the abusive spouse who justifies his daily cruelties by being super-sweet on birthdays and anniversaries. I prefer trying, sometimes feebly, to value each day and to not save up my happy karma for Special Days, but rather to celebrate my joys whenever I can find them.

Wednesday, Bob wrote about being sick of winning. But isn’t Christmas, like, the World Heavyweight Champion of Days? Haven't we manufactured Christmas into nothing more than winning? Our entire fucking economy depends on it, fer cryin' out loud. Families depend on it to spend time together, to invest in one another, to think of one another first for a change. Moms (and some dads) need it to get out of the house at midnight on Thanksgiving as some sad proof that they must really really love their families.*

[* -- On the day after Thanksgiving, one of my friends had written on Facebook, “I’m in Target at 3:42 a.m. I can’t believe HOW MUCH I LOVE MY CHILDREN!” If you aren’t bothered by this leap in logic, I pity you. Fortunately for him, some 30 people responded that they, too, were out and about, and that they, too, desperately loved their children enough to invest in Black Friday.]

Christmas has become some maniacal race. It’s become competitive. It's become about winning.

How we got from the story of a family who couldn’t afford a room in an inn and had to sleep in a barn, to elves on shelves made in China but born in the North Pole and who mess up houses and hide and write emails that make children cry is truly beyond my grasp, but almost nothing about this holiday makes me feel one bit more religious.

My goal isn't to sap your joy, dear reader. If you find Christmas in Walmart, bully for you. I'm actually a bit jealous.

For me, however, the only times in this month-long stretch when I feel closer to God, or like a somewhat better version of myself, is at the dinner table with my family and in church singing hymns... and neither of these are seasonal.

And then, finally, at 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve, we get our service when I finally get the chance to feel undistracted, undiluted joy. Our standing room only church of people raise candlelights above their heads as they sing “Silent Night.”

That service is the very opposite of Black Friday. We pause. We reflect. We listen. And we do it all together in the middle of the night as a way of finally -- one hour before the Most Important Day of the Year -- clarifying for ourselves what the whole damn day is really supposed to inspire in the first place.

Not iPads, not a Lexus in the driveway, and not something from Jared.
Families. Huddled together.
Candlelight.
The acknowledgement of a world in desperate need of hope and meaning.
A communal feeling of love surging through people like a strong gust of wind, carried through them from the notes of a pipe organ or a hammer dulcimer or the sound of a choir.

Christmas finally arrives, deux ex machina, and rescues us from the previous 30 days of misguided obsessions and pepper-spraying our fellow consumers. And nothing, no matter how much bile and bitterness and anger they invoke in me leading up to that evening, can shake the power of the Day itself. It's bigger than we are, and we can't ever completely screw it up.

For that, I am eternally thankful.

And the Shelf He Rode In On (Part II)

You Gotta Get Up - Five Iron Frenzy (mp3)
Please Daddy (Don't Get Drunk This Christmas) - John Denver (mp3)

Part One -- "The Origin of Laura Jane," wherein I mention our transgendered hero/heroine, Nicole Kidman, late night elf pornography, and Gmail)

November 29, 2010. My elder daughter -- let's name her Billie Jr. -- writes a letter to Santa and places it under our Christmas tree. In it, she requests a new Elf on the Shelf of her own so that she doesn’t have to share Laura Jane (our gender-transformed female elf who looks like all the other male elves) with her sister.

You see, my second daughter was always far more obsessed with Laura Jane writing her emails almost every month... and we didn’t know it because we didn’t check Laura Jane’s email account until Thanksgiving Perhaps because Billie Jr. was resigned to never be capable of loving Laura Jane quite as ardently as her sister, she was hoping to start over with a new elf.

And this is where I morph into the bad guy. Here comes my Tragic Flaw.

I crafted an email from Laura Jane that started something like this:

My Dearest Billie Jr.,

I read your note to Santa because I thought it was for me.

Have I done something wrong? I am feeling quite awful about this and wonder how I have failed you. Just this morning you want to know about my life at the North Pole, and then this evening you are asking for a different elf. I am trying not to cry, because I must have done something awful or mean for you to want another elf.

The email went another two paragraphs. Laura Jane was heartbroken. Santa can’t send multiple elves to households. It’s one or none. She might lose her job. The sky is falling, and the Pole with her.

We have struggled with Billie Jr.’s increasing inability to attune to the aches and needs of others, to empathize and to grasp the depth of The Golden Rule. What better way to address that level of selfishness, I thought, than to let the voice of absolute North Pole innocence address it?

Her mother and I had sat her down on numerous occasions to discuss this matter with her, but we had gotten nowhere. Perhaps Laura Jane could accomplish what we could not.

If results can be measured by the level of psychological and emotional distress inflicted, then I earned a gold medal. My daughter looked like death warmed over for two days. She lost the ability to speak in complete sentences, and it was obvious that every time she emerged from a moment of privacy that she’d spent her alone time crying.

Her first email to Laura Jane first thing in the morning was a panicked apology. Her second reply, later that evening, was this:

you have made me cry even more.now i am very sad.I am so so so so sorry!i wrote that note because (my sister) & i argue about who has you and so on,but i am truely sorry.My thoughts have changed so much and thank you for reading the note. it has made me relize christmas even more.

You'll need to trust me on this: Billie Jr.'s apology was more about the fear of losing everything than about an appreciation for what she had. Her concluding sentence was more platitude than truth... although I think she really wanted to believe it.

The 72 hours after Laura Jane’s heartbroken email involved a gradual evolution of personal assessment for me. At first I was proud. Laura Jane’s email had worked. The message had penetrated. The seed would grow into something good.

Then I was defensive. My daughter needed to be taught a lesson, dammit, and some lessons are hard. But sometimes you can’t learn about a stove eye being hot unless you touch it and burn your hand, and human emotions are the same way, and she needed to learn about selfishness.

Then I was panicked. Had I just embodied the persona of one of Santa’s elves and crafted a note intended to stab a psychological knife into my own daughter’s heart? Nooo, of course not... no. Not quite. No no, nothing that awful.....

Then I was horrified. What kind of father does something like this? Isn’t what I did, in some way, even more dangerous and harmful than if I’d pulled out my belt and lashed her a few dozen times, something I would never in a million years do? Isn’t inflicting emotional scars far more cruel and dangerous?

Not to mention the hypocrisy of me -- ME -- having the gall to try and teach someone else about being self-centered or selfish. Who the frick was I to go judging my daughter so much more harshly than I’ve ever been willing to judge myself??

Suddenly I was eyeball-deep into a state of despondency not unlike that which had overtaken my daughter the first day of Laura Jane's “lesson” to her. Except as the puppet-master and supposed adult, my sadness went deeper, and my self-evaluation was unflinchingly brutal. Everytime I heard or thought “Merry Christmas,” I cringed. The season was suddenly a symbol of deception, heartbreak, manipulation... nothing good.

A week later, Laura Jane was dead to me. My wife didn’t handle my resignation very well. I have little doubt that I failed to share in any adequate way my internal nuclear chain reaction with her. I probably mentioned to her once or twice that I was bothered by what had transpired, and the next thing she knew, I was quitting, and it was non-negotiable. That jump from "bothered" to "done" seemed extreme and unfair, I'm sure. (Like many men, I'm not fond of breaking down in the presence of others.)

She begrudgingly and angrily took over Laura Jane duty and carried that seething frustration with her like a sack of coal, thus adding one more body to the list of Christmas casualties, all borne from my single heartbroken manipulative scheming late-night email.

Now it's the 2011 Holiday Season. Daughter Number Two has continued her pen pal devotion to Laura Jane...

Part Three - "The Night Before," Wherein at last shines a faint glimmer of hope.

And the Shelf He Rode In On (Part I)

We Wish You a Merry Christmas - Shonen Knife (mp3)


A f*#king elf might be the death of me.

Have you seen the Nicole Kidman movie “The Others”? In it, she’s the mother of two special-needs children whose skin is hyper-sensitive to light, and they have become recluses and shut-ins in a mansion/castle in the UK.

(SLIGHT SPOILER ALERT... although if giving away the surprise ending to a decade-old movie is a spoiler, it means you didn’t plan on seeing it...)

The big catch of the movie, and one I failed to properly appreciate the first time around, is that the terrible mean ol’ servants aren’t the enemies in the film. They’re the heroes. The enemy in the film is their mom.

Back to the f*#king elf. Laura Jane arrived by box, purchased from a store by a relative seeking revenge on us for some previous crime, three years ago.

My children had many times over witnessed a box precisely like it in one store after another, constantly begging us for one, a special elf for our house. We’d heard of these damn things, and we were certain it was a terrible idea. But now one was in our house, wrapped up without our knowledge or approval. We had been infiltrated.

My daughters unwrapped the package. They shrieked and screamed. They opened the box. Inside the box was, encased in mixed paper and plastic, an Elf on the Shelf. Much like Stormtroopers, all these elves look exactly alike. Which is to say nothing like any other elves on any other Christmas shows. They look like Justin fucking Bieber.

My daughters opened the box. They removed the Elf from his bondage. They hugged him and tested to see if he had any special features, sounds, or moving parts. They then, right there at that moment, mutually agreed that this Elf was female, and that her name was Laura Jane.

How, you ask? How can children of relative intelligence and sanity open a box “Made in China,” pull out a cloth mass-produced creature, and convince themselves that this thing came from the North Pole? I do not know. I only know it happened, and I didn’t have the courage or the cruelness to crush their enthusiasm like a grape.

From that day to Christmas, we became a predictable stupid American family. Laura Jane hid at night. She messed shit up. She ate cookies and spilled milk and snuck into the computer room and watched porn late at night. She was a cute adorable deviant menace.

She disappeared to the North Pole after Christmas, and we thought that was the end of Laura Jane, the transgendered fabric elf from China. But no, the next Thanksgiving, the girls were literally frothing at the mouth for Laura Jane’s return.

Although I’m not competitive about most things in life, I can’t say that about creativity. In my mind, I am hands-down the single most creative living mind not currently working in Hollywood, the book publishing industry, the comedy circuit, the newspaper-column industry or the big-time blogosphere.

So if regular normal boring parents could make their elves hide and mess shit up and be all playful, then I would by God kick it up a notch.

Therefore I created a Gmail account for Laura Jane, and she started sending nightly emails to the girls. Probably after she was done watching all that elf porn, but how would I know, right? Laura Jane even stole our camera and took a few pictures (clean, safe) and attached them to her emails. Ours was a technologically savvy elf.

The season was fun. Everyone enjoyed playing with the elf. I was super-cool creative, and we were awesome parents. Yada yada.

But something happened on the way to heaven.

(You can read my post foreshadowing all of this, from November 2008, here.) 

Part Two - "Bad Dad," wherein I experience the stages of grief, emotionally abuse my daughter, and am reminded why the Christmas season is so despicable

Part Three - "The Night Before," Wherein at last shines a faint glimmer of hope.

The Winning Trap

We are suckers for a beautiful woman, a handsome man, and winning. Myself susceptible to the first, admiring of the second, and guilty of the third, I nevertheless must retreat (or better yet, recoil) from the obsession with coming out on top. At least right now.

I like to think that I work around, live around, people with reasonably strong moral codes. They will likely shout down racism, recycle whenever possible, attend church far more than I do, and exhibit any number of neighborly traits that they don't have to, except that they have probably been raised right and seek to live out the traits that were instilled in them when they were young.

But give them a chance to win, and it will all go out the window.

The purchaser of the lottery ticket, the sports fan, the irate parent whose child has been "wronged", the hardcore ______ (insert political party here), the friendly arguer who turns unfriendly--all have to emerge victorious.

Some aspect of our lives, and maybe it's our capitalistic lives, has convinced us that there are some things that we absolutely must win. There are rivals that we must face down. There are paybacks that we must not concede. There are affronts that cannot be tolerated. There are situations that must be corrected, situations that are unimportant when compared to the amount of time and/or money that we are suddenly willing to invest in them.

Even though most readers of this blog are not Japanese, we nevertheless have mostly embraced the concept of "saving face," which is its own form of winning, but our face-saving is a perverted form. Somehow our pride has come to depend on the outcome of contests that we have not participated in or battles that we have not fought, but ones that are associated with the reputation of the institutions that we work for or live under, the academic institutions we attended, or, in the worst case, teams and organizations that we simply share geography with.

And our only hope of seeing the stupidity of this is if it is a situation where we don't care whether or not we win. I exist right now in that rare void. I see the folly of sacrificing personal and societal values in order to win. Right now, the desire to win that surrounds me concerns sports. And I am miserable. Sweet Jesus, I am miserable. I am so consumed with the wrongness of what I am watching that I can barely think of anything else.

Of course, if this were a situation where I did need to win, then it really wouldn't matter if Satan incarnate was driving the race car or passing the football or running for the office that is important that I have put my hopes behind. I, too, have been consumed by the desire to win sports. If you are a Steeler fan as long as I have been, then you have tolerated a member of the "Steel Curtain" taking pot shots at cars on the freeway back in the late 70's and you have tolerated your quarterback assaulting a young woman in Georgia just in the last couple of years, and any number of misdeeds in between.

But it feels different right now, because no matter where we work, whether it's the U.S. Post Office or Bennigan's or some corporation in a high rise building in a large city, that place of employment espouses some set of institutional values, and however hokey those values might be, however overwrought a mission statement might seem, we still grab for those values as some kind of a benchmark. And if we feel like we are not hitting that benchmark, then we start not to believe.

Because nowhere, even in the most cynical, profit-driven Wall Street firm does the motto read "We will win at all costs" or "We will chuck our values out the window in order to win." No place is that outwardly craven.

Winning is a trap. It becomes its own goal and casts aside any benefits or lessons or silver linings or whatever noble might have inspired a desire to win in the first place. Left instead is just the winningness itself, an unpolished stone, which brings only the briefest of satisfactions, which is all that it can do, because when we are left time for any kind of reflection, we can't help but remind ourselves what it cost us to get there. By the time that stone is cut and polished, we haven't the interest and can barely look at it, so focused are we on the next stone, the next win, that we must attain.

Heartbreak Ridge

The Future's Nothing New - The Alternate Routes (mp3)
A Circus - Army Navy (mp3)

Last week, one of the founding members of our fantasy football league announced his intentions to retire. This announcement -- which in the world of rational and reasonable thought should be about as significant as him saying he got new glasses -- was significant on several levels.

First, this owner claimed it was just time, that he was getting too old for it, that the experience was played out. Why? What’s wrong with him? How dare he desert us in this, our time of desperate need?? Is this some kind of Fantasy Football Owner Lockout, and we didn’t get the memo? Here I thought we were all, like, Al Davis, that the only way you could take our team ownership away was from our cold, dead hands.

The second level was even more disconcerting. Was this merely the first defection? Was the entire league either doomed or irreparably altered?

My thoughts then drifted to this blog. Even as we approach 1,000 posts and soon after that the completion of our fourth year (if it survives to March), death is on my mind. How old is a 4-year-old blog? It’s gotta be like dog years, except more like goldfish years, right? How long do we go until this has become a hobby that merely keeps us from trying other ways of exorcising our creative demons?

Things. Must. Change.
(Psst. this will be a running theme, off and on for the remainder of the year, possibly for eternity. It started with “William 4.0” and even showed up in my Oasis post yesterday.)

Must. It is inevitable. It is fact. The challenge for the wise, it would seem, is not to cling desperately to everything in our lives in some nutty attempt to prevent or dodge change. The challenge is to identify what we most value, what we hold most precious, and to figure out whether honoring and protecting those things requires holding fast to them or finding ways to adapt and evolve them.

I cannot be a good parent if I insist on treating my 11-year-old daughter the same as when she was six. I can’t be a good employee if I’m still sending snow alerts to radio stations as our sole advisory.

Oh crap. Know what I just realized? Maybe schools can’t be very good schools if we’re still doing 95% of everything we did back when my mother was 12. Maybe we’re clinging a little bit too tightly to too much? Ya think?

So maybe fantasy football and blogs -- and office environments and job descriptions and schools -- aren’t in and of themselves what I fear losing. Maybe it’s not about Calvin Johnson and shoddy opinionating. The challenge is figuring out what I need from these outlets, why they mean something to me, why my soul aches a little at the thought of losing them, and what I need to do to hold onto what’s important about them. In all likelihood, with just a little contemplation, I can find other ways to feed those parts of me currently fed by those pursuits.

When the day comes to say goodbye to fantasy football, were I wise, I would already know what my next step would be. I would know what it is I love about the experience, and I would already have plans to funnel that energy into some new endeavor.

Improvise. Adapt. Overcome. These are the words of the new normal and the essential. They are the words of the wise. They are the future, and we will be.

(I just made a reference to Prince/Batman AND a Clint Eastwood movie in the same paragraph! WOOOT!)

A Desert in the Oasis

Drums of Death - Noel Gallagher w/UNKLE & Mike D (mp3)
F**kin' in the Bushes (live) - Oasis (mp3)

Beady Eye. High Flying Birds. Whether these names mean anything to you depends on where Oasis falls in your musical universe.

When Oasis split up in 2009, the world yawned. Back in 1995, my longtime friend and music nut told me of his love for this supercool new band by describing them thusly, “They’re like the world’s greatest bar band... only with a massive Beatles fetish.”

“World’s Greatest Bar Band” isn’t the most original superlative, I’ll grant you. But if NRBQ and Southside Johnny can lay claim to such a title, I’m happy to give one of my votes to Oasis. I’ll bet Oasis blew the f**kin’ windows out of bars and stripped the paint off the walls in their early days.

The problem with even the best bar band, however, is that eventually it’s closing time, and Oasis kept playing even as the lights went up, the chairs were turned upside down on the tables, and the manager swept up the floor and locked the doors.

The sibling drama between Liam and Noel Gallagher might have amused their fanatics -- it did a sublime job of inspiring a character in LOST -- and it certainly helped sell a few Brit tabloids, but for modest fans like myself, we didn’t give a flip. Make music and make it good, and whatever you do backstage to each other is beyond our fleeting prurient concerns. I’m more interested in what kind of stroller Jennifer Garner buys than I am about why the Gallagher brothers might be breaking bottles over one another’s skulls.

Reasonable minds can differ on exactly when the barlights went up on Oasis, but for me the answer is fairly easy: 1997. The following year, Oasis released The Masterplan, one of the greatest B-side compilations in rock history, which created the illusion of a band still overflowing with creative power. But they were already on the backslide.

Be Here Now, their third release, was less than highly regarded by critics. Not because the music was bad, but more because the Gallaghers didn’t know when the hell to stop a good song. Of the dozen songs on that album, only three dip below the 5-minute mark, and one of those is a 2-minute “reprise” of a 9-minute song. The other two under-5-minute songs clock in at 4:22 and 4:88.

Overlong songs are fine for a prog rock act like Rush, or for a jam band like Widespread Panic, but it’s deadly for a pop rock act or a bar band that idolizes the Beatles, a band who kept some ⅘ of their songs under the 3:00 mark and 95% under the 4:00 mark.

Had Oasis stopped drinking -- alcohol, and a little less from the cup of their own hype -- they could have cut this album down by 20 minutes and had a piece of pop rock art every bit as amazing and infectious as What’s the Story Morning Glory? and Definitely Maybe. Instead, you’re constantly pushing the NEXT button halfway through the song. Unless you’re drunk.

They lumbered through four more albums, each equipped with two or three catchy gems and a lot of forgettable crap, before Liam smashed Noel’s guitar backstage in The Moment That Killed Oasis for good in 2009. (Or at least until the 2015 “20th Anniversary of Morning Glory Reunion Tour.”)

In the past nine months, Oasis has emerged as a two-band Yin and Yang. Liam & most of the other Oasis band members formed Beady Eye and released Different Gear, Still Speeding last spring, and Noel and his High Flying Birds released their eponymous collection in late October.

And the truth of Oasis is in these two releases: Liam has the 'tude; Noel has the brilliance.

Liam was voted the greatest frontman in the history of rock by Q magazine (no, I’m not kidding) in 2010, besting all the names you, dear reader, immediately think of as the obvious choice for this title. While I won’t go as far as Q, I certainly appreciate the key factors that make Liam a helluva stage presence.

Different Gear... comes with plenty of self-confidence and moxie, but that’s about the alpha and omega of what’s good about it. Seriously, I can’t even remember the name of two songs, nor could I begin to hum the lyrics of a single Beady Eye tune. Until yesterday, I hadn’t listened to a single track on that album since the two weeks after I first bought it. Moxie is fun in the moment, but it’s the lipstick on the musical pig.

If High Flying Birds has a flaw, however, it’s the lack of lipstick. They’re the cute girl who could be a supermodel with a little bit of lighting and makeup.

Although neither brother was going to be immortalized for lyrical talents, Noel was definitely the more gifted lyricist, and he was also the one capable of injecting a diversely-inspired sonic assault that managed to wink lovingly to his Beatles while also stealing from hip-hop and electronica and numerous other styles. Noel is -- as most successful modern rock artists are -- a master thief who happily leaves his calling card on the table.

Listen to “Drums of Death,” one of the rockinest mostly-instrumentals ever to bleed out your ears. Listen to “F**Kin’ in the Bushes,” which is basically Noel telling everyone else in the band what to do. (Which, by the way, is exactly why they hated him, because he knows better than they do and probably wasn’t shy on reminding them of that fact.) With rock candy like this, who needs lyrics anyway? (Which probably annoyed the crap out of Liam, since nasally whiny vocals was basically all he brought to the table.)

If you’re not well-versed on the Oasis oeuvre and need a place to start, I recommend The Masterplan. If you want to start with their most recent best work, then you’re much better off starting with High Flying Birds and jumping straight back to Heathen Chemistry or even Morning Glory.

HFBirds, is IMO, the best non-B-side compilation album by a Gallagher in 14 years. If it just had a little more lipstick, it would be awesome. As it stands, it’s just really good.

These Are A Few Of My Favorite Songs

Renee and Jeremy--"Sunny Christmas" (mp3)

How often in your life has someone asked you what your favorite song is? It can get pretty annoying, especially because you're put on the spot and expect to sort through everything you've ever heard and liked a lot and pick the one song (of the moment, I might argue). I can't imagine having a favorite song that transcends more than a week or two. A batch of songs, yes, but not one song.

Mathematically, all top 50 of my favorite songs are Christmas songs.

Think about it. Come December 1st, at my house, we tend to play nothing but Christmas music in the home and in our cars for the next three and a half weeks. We've got the Vince Guaraldi Charlie Brown, the Chieftain's The Bells Of Dublin, all of Sufjan's homemade Christmas songs (the only exciting addition to the ever-growing Christmas song catalog in the last 20 years) and a variety of other jazz, folk, classical, vocal, instrumental offerings. We've got the wacky stuff, too, though we don't tend to play it much.

So why are these tired Christmas tunes my favorites? Do the math. If your favorite songs are the ones you listen to the most, then all of mine are Christmas songs. By far. A new CD that I bought this year that I really liked I probably heard, at most, about six times. A classic CD that I love, I probably heard two or three times. But the songs of Christmas? It's not unreasonable to expect to hear the better-known ones 40 or more times during the month of December, and really even before, during those days in November after Thanksgiving.

They're everywhere! They're in the backs of our consciousnesses as we buy groceries, pump gas, shop in any store, watch television (which seems fixated on variations of that "it's the most wonderful time of the year" song, which I don't own). Last night, I went to listen to student performances of nothing but Christmas music during the annual Candlelight extravaganza.

And that doesn't begin to address my own playing of them. As I write this, I've listened to the last of the Sufjan songs, leftover from the other night, and now I'm listening to New Guitar Ensemble, whom I posted on this site last year (or was it the year before) right now. "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!" in my head right now.

This month, I blew all of my eMusic "allowance" on new Christmas stuff. Not new songs, for the most part, but new performances by new people. I bought a kind of low-rent cocktail jazz set of Christmas songs by David Ian; I bought a new batch of solo piano Christmas pieces by . I bought a version of "The Christmas Song" as played by the late, great saxophonist Clarence Clemmons. Along with some other xmas detritus here and there.

Societally, we like to make fun of all of the Christmas music out there, all the cynical commercial decision-making going on behind all of those CDs, but, let's face it, the songs themselves, almost regardless of how they get tarted up, still hold a primal, nostalgic appeal, even in their most schlocky versions. Even artists I don't particularly like can still hit the "sweet spot" on a song or two. Because it's the song even more than the performer. To find versions that feel real, that feel sincere rather than obligatory, is bliss.

The other aspect of their "favoriteness" is that I've been listening to them for 54 years, even before I could walk or talk. Early on, my father indoctrinated us with the Ray Coniff Singers versions of classics that have now faded away like "Jolly Old St. Nicholas." For me, Christmas songs have 7 years on even the Beatles. How many thousands of times have I heard "Silent Night" or "We Three Kings" or "Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful"? How many listenings of Alvin and the Chipmunks have I endured? I couldn't begin to say.

So, yeah, many of my favorite songs tend toward nostalgic rememberances of Christmases that never were. I can't help it. I don't feel a need to try.

And as the years pass, I salute most those artists who try to add to the canon. Sufjan's "That Was The Worst Christmas Ever" (and about 8 more songs) and Shelby Lynne's r+b-ish "Xmas" and Jackson Browne's "The Rebel Jesus" and Shawn Colvin's digging up of "Love Came Down At Christmas" from somewhere all serve to freshen up the more traditional numbers when you're working through the same bunch of songs for an entire month. I also enjoy how different songs have moved to the forefront over the years. "O, Come, O, Come, Emmanuel" was not even in the mix 20 years ago. "Bring A Torch, Jeanette" and "Good King Wencelas" and "In The Bleak Midwinter" weren't either, and are all among my favorites now.

Among the many joys of Christmas is how the songs still transcend everything else. Regardless of their origins, they maintain a kind of purity now.