Music is my life. I play several instruments and sing. I majored (and double minored) in music in college and am active in civic groups and church music as participant and conductor. I even went to flute camp (for adults) last summer. And I spent 30-odd years as a public school music teacher.

So– I have a love-hate relationship with Christmas music. Mostly love. But.

December can be brutal for musicians—and for school music teachers, brutal on multiple levels including community expectations and endless rounds of kids-on-risers. Music teachers become de facto activity directors, lurching from frigid parade to caroling at the nursing home. 

But still—there’s the rich opportunity to teach excited kids something about their cultural inheritance and surround. Which includes a clear definition of the divide between music as spiritual practice and music as auditory clutter.

Because you really can’t get away from Christmas music in America in December (or November), hard as you might try. People of other faith traditions, people who don’t believe in any of the Christmas iconography (like Santa or Jesus), people who loathe the downtown decorations and the Hallmark channel—we’re all stuck when Santa Claus comes to town.

For many people, Christmas music becomes irritating aural wallpaper, especially if they’re tuned into one of the omnipresent satellite radio Holly-day stations, or actually paying attention to what’s on the PA system as they’re perusing cheese in the dairy aisle. Because most of the commercial Christmas music readily available in businesses and on Sirius is, frankly, somewhere between uninspired and dreadful. I don’t want to hear—to choose just one example—Burl Ives at any time of year, let alone at holly, jolly Christmas.

I started listening to Christmas music on my little portable record player (Christmas gift from my parents), beginning with the LP records from the gas station ($1 will Fill-up!), where Percy Faith and Ella Fitzgerald were interspersed with the Chipmunks and the NY Philharmonic. When I got my flute, in fifth grade, I was invited to play Angels We Have Heard on High for the church Christmas pageant, a gig I kept through junior high because I liked the wings and halo, as well as the tune. I was hooked.

So I started collecting (and studying) seasonal music as a teenager, eventually making yearly cassette tapes of my favorite cuts. Cassettes morphed into CDs in the 1990s. I made annual gift CDs for family and friends—then eventually, due to the magic of iTunes, custom-selected CD playlists and discs for my regular customers. I requested multiple catalogs from folk and jazz artists and ordered new CDs, unheard, in the fall. At one time, I owned 500 holiday CDs, and had a catalog of over 3000 digital cuts on iTunes.

 Yeah, I know—when does a hobby become a sickness?

The last year I made CDs was 2018, when I realized most people no longer had the equipment to play a CD. I still make my own annual December playlists on Spotify—there are still arrangers and artists creating beautiful new seasonal music. I love listening, but I am really picky about what I am listening to.

Here’s the thing, though, about so-called Christmas music: it’s familiar, or will become familiar in time. A tune you recognize, when you hear it again, come December. We don’t have a lot of those commonly remembered classic songs anymore, holding our culture together. Nostalgia is a part of cultural norms.

For centuries, there was mostly sacred music—all of which has cultural value, whether the listener is a believer in the divine, or not. O Come, O Come, Emmanuel dates back to the 9^th century, for example. How often do young listeners authentically interface with such a different time, except through music?

Commercial music has been shaped by the march of new technologies and low-bar popular opinion (lookin’ at you, Frosty). Children no longer know folk songs sung around campfires in the 19^th century—unless they learn in school to cross the wide prairie with Betsy from Pike. We are losing bits of our cultural heritage, including traditional carols.

Whatever you want to listen to today is immediately available on your phone. But if you haven’t explored the truly glorious—magnificent or austere or funky–songs and carols of the season, how will you know what to ask for, to know what musicians have created from a simple tune?

In collecting mountains of Christmas music, I have favorite versions of all the songs, of course. But when I want to relax on Christmas Eve, with a glass of wine, this is what I put on: https://open.spotify.com/track/5c0sQY87Iw7qUu46N31f3v.