Chrismas Time Again

It’s that time of year, when we gather around the fire with our friends and a cup of hot cocoa, and we debate when is it acceptable to start playing Christmas songs.

For many people, the sweet spot is Black Friday, a made-up holiday designed to drop you into a red and green-ribboned Squid Game, where you must claw your way over human skeletons and chunks of flesh to win your prize of the crappiest television they could slap together for fifty bucks. If you can survive the pre-game death trap known as Thanksgiving, only to find yourself swallowed up by the sea of sales tables, you know it’s officially Christmastime.

For some places of business, Christmas seems to creep into our consciousness earlier and earlier every year. Believe me, I understand the disgust you may get when you stroll into Target in October to take in the wonder of plastic skeletons and glittery pumpkins, only to find several aisles mocking you with Christmas lights and ornaments. Before too long, every trip to the store shoves Ren-and-Stimpy-esque Christmas spirit into our eyeballs and earholes.

For me personally, I love a spot of Christmas sprinkled throughout the year. I usually start in February or March during one of my trumpet jazz improvs with the Outcast Jazz Band by throwing a reference to “Here Comes Santa Claus” or “The Christmas Song.” Then, by April or May, I manage to listen to a Brian Setzer or Chicago Christmas album. More Christmas quotes in the band in August, then another album in September. I will not apologize. I enjoy those songs, and every year, someone comes out with a new version of Chestnuts Snowing on a Santa Clause Tree that I can add to my list. So, yeah, whenever the retail corporate marketing teams pull the trigger on Christmas season, I welcome my sing-songy overlords.

Here is the issue these businesses face. If you want people to remember you, you have to tell a story. If you also need to persuade them to do something, you better include some emotion in there. We experience the world as story because it helps us make sense of our messy, disjointed series of random events called the human experience.

Retail needs to tell their story through your experience inside the store. If you’ve ever visited a Lush store, you know that they have put some thought into their story. The shape of the store forces you to move around a certain way on your journey. The smells and textures invite you to interact, and they even have samples. You can actually WASH YOUR HANDS, which comes in handy after too many Bath and Body Works lotion samples. It’s truly a miraculous adventure.

Compare that to when I accidentally wandered into what felt like a war zone, where a boozy, unshaven 42-year-old woman, looking more like a 67-year-old animatronics bear, kept coughing in my face and popping pills. What could I do? It was the closest 24-hour Walgreens.

No matter how far away you may roam this holiday season, every destination from your local strip mall to the opening of this sentence wants to take advantage of the built-in Christmas experience we bring with us. By putting up lights, dressing the staff in elf ears, and playing that incessant Christmas music soundtrack everywhere from Starbucks to Bloomingdale’s to the bathroom at Starbucks, the people who need to draw in customers, help them stay long enough to make a purchase, and leave with good feelings about their brand, they can create a no-brainer marketing campaign by capitalizing on our own personal internal stories we bring along with us for the Christmas season.

You may ask what does Christmas mean any more? Where does the baby “reason for the season” Jesus fit in all this? The commercial aspect of the season works very hard to hold our attention, with the fat man in the red suit and all the shiny distractions. It didn’t help that as a Catholic, we got used to celebrating our religious stories one day a week for about an hour, and then the rest of our time could be spent sinning and eventually asking for forgiveness.

Regardless, I connected better with the birth of Jesus and other stories of Christmas through music. One of my favorite stories came from the classic fan fiction song “The Little Drummer Boy,” written by... David Bowie and Bing Crosby I assume?

As you know, this song tells a simple story of a little boy who wanted to give the new baby a gift. The song does a really good job telling it as a slow-drip tale, letting out details bit by bit, separating each moment with a “pa-rum-pa-pa-pum”. You have to wait for the juicy payoff in the middle of the second verse that he could only had his drumming to offer. Then, it ends with the big rum-pa-pa-pum performance number.

For the sake of suspending your disbelief, you need to set aside certain questions of logic. For example, do we really believe Mary would want to draw attention by letting some random kid off the street dragging his noise-rattling drum into her birthing space, where she probably just spent hours trying to get a fussy baby to take a nap? Somehow, she gives the go-ahead to start banging away. She must’ve held in her heart some God-sized kind of faith that the stranger would know how to play with taste.

Then, her approval comes with a simple nod. Was it a reluctant nod? Did she feel pressured by the crowd? With all the visitors, did she even mean to nod at the only percussionist in the room? I always chose to suspend my disbelief because I’m a sucker for heart-warming stories, especially because I can identify with the protagonist carrying a musical instrument of considerable ruckus.

Ultimately, whether your soundtrack brings back your memories of learning the story of the manger for the first time, or raising a glass of Bailey’s to a room of cheery party people as Count Basie cooks along with a jazzy rendition of the Nutcracker, you should decide the kind of Christmas experience you want to bring with you as you drop by your local crumbling mall of sadness.

Or, you can do all your shopping online, scheduling your playlist as you please online, and sending Christmas emails to all your favorite email personalities. Either way, you’ll wind up transferring your generous feelings of connection for your fellow man into cold hard cash, and then using it to drop a stack of plastic gift cards under the tree, because then everyone can just do their own shopping.

However you choose to connect with your loved ones, I wish you all this best this season. Now, I must settle down to watch another Hallmark classic, where a man with an odd face and woman visiting her small home town from the city get together to count down from 3 (or 5 or 10) to light a tree, and eventually save the Christmas tree farm from the evil real estate dealer.