Time for a Christmas Rant!!!

I'm sure where you are, you also have radio stations that play Christmas music all day and all night. I'm fine with this. This is not the nature of this rant. I actually kind of like the Christmas music all day and all night, especially if the kids and I are out having one of those special moments together. You know the ones: where daddy is fighting through traffic and the kids are picking up new and creative swears to share with their friends. Ah, the holidays.

No, instead, my gripe rests with the lack of variety in Christmas songs. It's the same thing, time and again. Every 45 minutes, we start back with the same goddamned seven Christmas songs, three of which are three different versions of "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree". I'm about to burn an effigy of Brenda Lee; I don't care that she's 64 years old. Someone spread a rumor that Brenda Lee hates America. Maybe we can go all Dixie Chicks on her and burn every fucking copy of that song ever made.

I will say that, fortunately, we've gotten away from the "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" song that plagued the airwaves for a few years. If it makes a resurgence, then I'm definitely leaking to someone that Elmo and Patsy have links to al Qaeda.

And, yes, people, I know that "Carol of the Bells" is fucking awesome. I love it. You love it. I don't love twenty different fucking versions of it playing 24 hours a day. We all tend to love things a lot less when they are raping our ears over and over again. Take note, please. Mannheim Steamroller, I'm looking at you.

But, perhaps the most perfidious of all the "Christmas" songs comes from everyone's favorite Glitter star, Mariah Carey. Ugh. Can anyone possibly ruin a season of love and harmony like her? I mean, honestly. "All I Want for Christmas Is You" is ear-bleedingly bad. In case you're one of the very few people blessed enough not to have had this thing violate your ear canals, let me give you a brief summary of how it goes: fourteen stray cats are placed in a burlap bag; someone swings the bag against a wall, thus pissing off the mangy, flea-ridden felines; music ensues; someone chants "Christmas" over and over again in the back ground.

There's another one that she mangles, but I can't think of what it is. Maybe yet another version of "Santa Claus is Coming in my mouth to Town". I'm not sure. I feel an aneurysm threatening to burst right now just thinking about the first song. Please don't make me do the research on the second one.

But here's the thing: I don't mind Mariah Carey that much, when she's not ruining Christmas music. I'm not saying that I own all of her albums or anything (I might still have a tape copy of Vision of Love somewhere, don't judge). It's just that her holiday music that makes my stomach tie itself into knots and my testicles to recede into the safety of my body as if a solid punting is imminent. I would naturally assume that I'm just not hip or cool, but these fucking songs have been plaguing us since 1994, when I was a senior in high school, arguably at the pinnacle of my hipness and coolness. So, it can't even be that.

So there. While I love Christmas, and while I don't mind the Christmas music playing at all hours of the day, the monotony is what kills me. Plus, the screechy implications that "you" can satisfy what I need and want for Christmas (maybe if "you" came with, I dunno, a PS3 and maybe a 47-inch flat panel television, then we're getting close) just don't do it for me.

Fortunately, someone else has done my bitching for me in regards to Dan Fogelberg, everyone's favorite leather mug maker from the Renaissance Fair.