I went over to the neighbors’ side of the duplex Saturday night. I hadn’t been inside before. They were having a Christmas party—one of them had told me out in the yard the day before, my puppy hot on his dog’s heels, eight paws sending up bits of crumbling leaves after the puppy went to the dog’s window asking if he could come out and play. Emma was at dinner Saturday night, celebrating a friend who’s moving away soon.
It’s an awkward position at a party, knowing no one but the hosts, and with the dog the star of the show (he looked quite dignified and refined in his little red sweater) I couldn’t rely on conversing with him and him alone the whole evening. But I heard a man say he was from Indiana, and I splashed over to the social life raft, and about six of us—four of the others Hoosiers—spent a good two hours talking about Muncie and Menards and weird former jobs and weird current jobs and the most boring job the other non-Hoosier had worked, since she claimed to have nothing peculiar on her résumé. It was nice. It was fun. It was warm. It was a quiet corner of a Christmas party.
The marketability of the holidays reaching the threshold where Christmas music can sustain an FM radio station for nearly two months has its perks. As a kid, I soared in the cheeriness of 93.9 up outside Chicago, expecting it to be on in my parents’ cars ceaselessly from the drive home from Thanksgiving until it prematurely switched back to pop on Boxing Day. There’s a feeling about Christmas, a tingling in the heart, and industries like radio foster that feeling, or fostered it in childhood me. Back then, the feeling felt all-encompassing. I think I wrote around this time last year of how it felt nothing bad could happen at Christmastime. I really do have few memories, before my teenage years, of anything bad at all happening at Christmastime. But as my twenties have spread out and I look up to find myself closer to forty than I am to thirteen, that immersive cheeriness has become more fleeting, and even in moments when it’s caught, more shallow. The world, I’m sure, hasn’t much changed. But I’ve changed, and I’ve grown, and the deep ends of certain pools are no longer so deep.
There’s that silly debate about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Experiences with the joke differ, mainly based on how many times one has heard the joke, but the joke illustrates something significant about Christmas media in general: We tend to define it with thick, clear lines. Part of why the Die Hard joke persists is that there aren’t many movies out there that give our line too much trouble. Frosty’s a Christmas movie, The Breakfast Club is not, few films fill the space in between. It’s similar in television—when a show is released serially, as opposed to all at once, the show is allowed one Christmas episode, should it choose to exercise that right. I’m sure this has been blurred at times, but more or less, rules are rules: One Christmas episode. Not two. One or none at all.
Nowhere, though, is this line firmer than in music. Songs are played on Christmas radio or they are not played on Christmas radio. Am I missing some? Sure, probably. But there’s no Die Hard equivalent in the music world, and while this might be a blessing, given where the Die Hard joke has gone, it leaves a lot of good music out of the Christmas season, especially since Christmas music, like Christmas film, is dominated by a gelatinous, saccharine core. My sister-in-law appeared last year in a Hallmark remake of A Christmas Carol which explicitly excluded the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. If you want to listen to a sad Christmas song, you have few options beyond Blue Christmas, which is mostly an exercise in Elvis shaking his ass (nothing against Elvis’s ass, or its vanguard status in lateral hip movement). Grief is a fearful specter around the holidays. Loneliness is a fearful specter around the holidays. Better to overdramatize it or shut it out entirely, we seem to say, rather than feel the emotion with any sort of clarity.
This is a shame, of course, and not just because we miss out on feeling the full range of emotions, kneecapping a season we allege to be the year’s most profound. That’s the whole of it, if we’re going to spoil the message here, but there’s a part of it that’s musical, too. It’s a shame we hold such firm lines around Christmas music, because when we do that, we exile some very good December music.
Food delivery is not an industry receptive of saccharinity, at least not when you’re the driver and you’re driving alone. Sometimes, fine, one may find oneself in need of some Mariah Carey. But for me, last December, finally exhausted after eight months of listening to podcasts for thirty or forty hours a week, the misty Austin nights did not instill a craving in me for Mannheim Steamroller or Band Aid or Bing Crosby. They made me want to listen to Lua, by Bright Eyes, a song about coldness and emptiness in the midst of the chill. They made me want to listen to that Sara Bareilles/Ingrid Michaelson song about winter, pleading through the darkness, a lighthouse amid frost. They made me want to listen to Evermore, that then-new Taylor Swift album with all the piano and, because it’s not “a Christmas album,” one—just one, its allowance—Christmas song. Christmas music? Not by our definition. But a side of the season worth its own notes, notes etched in crystal rather than Jell-O.
It’s not just sad music, either, or lonely music, or cold music that gets left out. It’s hopeful music, and euphoric music, and sometimes ragefully defiant music, like This Year, by The Mountain Goats. It can be love songs. It can be breakup songs. It can be saccharinity. It can be all sorts of music, because it can be all sorts of feelings, because it’s ok to feel all sorts of feelings around Christmastime. Elvis doesn’t need to shake his ass for you to let down your smile for a second.
I excused myself from the party after half the Hoosiers had left, saying with complete sincerity (which later made me realize I’d been drunker than I’d thought) that I had promised the puppy I’d take her for a walk. It was cool outside as I stepped onto the stoop and back through my own front door, and it was cool outside as she and I conducted a midnight patrol of the neighborhood, passing the sleeping goats and the sleeping preschool and the sleeping house where the puppy’s friend Bugs lives, all within the view of the watchful moontower over on Speedway. It was cool outside when Emma came home from the karaoke bar, and as we sat in the stillness and I downed a Coors Light and a liter of water. It was cool outside when the puppy walked into her crate and looked at us expectantly for treats, reminding us that it was bedtime, and that she had an appointment in the morning to knock on the neighbor dog’s window and ask if he could play. It was a quiet night, and a happy night, cool but not cold and tired but not pained and starlit but not mysterious. I can’t think of a song for it. I wish I could.
