So, you’re sick of Mariah Carey, huh? You wouldn’t be the only one. Watching her name shoot up the charts every year on the first of December never ceases to amaze me; it has to be some sort of woo-woo clockwork. Now don’t get me wrong, her music is great and her voice is astounding, but despite her popularity, hers just doesn’t feel like Christmas music to me. “That’s impossible!” you say. She sings about mistletoe, the North Pole and Santa Claus — that’s about as Christmassy as you can get! But when you grow up decorating the Christmas tree to the sound of a rickety old Baby Gap CD, you’re bound to feel a bit different.
By the time I was about seven, it already took a lot of fiddling with the practically-ruined stereo system to even get our Christmas music playing, but I was nothing if not determined to carry out my yearly concert of the “Lion Sleeps Tonight.” Yes, you read that right. My family’s Christmas music is, well… technically not.
On whatever random mid-November school night we had chosen that year, I would spin around at the first “oh wimoweh” of the evening to find my mom swinging her hips to the beat, my brother climbing the ladder, and my dad sitting on the couch directing the whole production. We would soon be on the third run through of the 19-minute soundtrack, still belting out “Do You Love Me” by The Contours at full volume somewhere between nine and ten at night, feeling the holiday spirit all the way up to our Santa hats.
It was the perfect routine: play some ’60’s love songs, hang up the ornaments and completely forget about the Michael Bublés of the world. The songs were so intrinsically Christmas that I never realized they weren’t “actual Christmas songs” (whatever that means) until I was a lot older. By then, I lived a double life, singing our Christmas songs at home and then pretending I enjoyed Mariah Carey with my friends. Sure, I never heard them at the mall while shopping for presents or on any one of the thousands of Christmas albums that circulate every December, but those songs were such an important part of my childhood that I never doubted their validity for even a second. Even when I recognized that no one else listened to those seven songs like we did, I still believed they were Christmassy.
Still, I never told anyone that my family’s holiday music was nothing like everyone else’s for a long time, because it was easier to learn their songs than to explain mine. I was embarrassed that my family’s tradition was so different, and my younger self definitely didn’t need any other reason to stick out. So I memorized the lyrics to “All I Want For Christmas Is You” and I even learned to enjoy it.
Little by little it became harder to hide that I didn’t really listen to it though, and at one point, I decided that I just didn’t want to pretend anymore. So what if Louis Armstrong singing about “blessed days and dark sacred nights” conjures up images of reindeer in my mind’s eye? So what if I’d rather listen to Dusty Springfield declaring her love than “Last Christmas”? At the end of the day, no one gets to tell you what the holidays should look like for you.
Now that I’m older and just a little bit wiser, I know that jingle bells in the background aren’t what makes a song “Christmas Music.” What we chose to listen to doesn’t have to consistently top the charts to be valid and enjoyable; it just has to make you smile. My family strings twinkle lights to Etta James pouring her heart out with the same joy yours might do it to Van Halen. You might actually love Mariah Carey and Michael Bublé, and that’s okay too. “Christmas music” doesn’t have to follow some mystical formula to get you in the holiday spirit, all it has to do is to feel right, because in a world full of “White Christmas,” it’s always fun to have someone blaring “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
Rafaella Gonzalez is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at [email protected].