Proof That I'm Right: Christmas Music Drives Us Crazy

There's a good reason why the Grinch loathed listening
to all those Christmas songs from the Whos down in Whoville.

I've always disliked most Christmas music.

Mostly because of its repetitiveness. How many times can you hear "Deck The Halls" before you deck the spacy store clerk in the mall?

A lot of us started hearing Christmas music everywhere starting in early November. Now that's less than two weeks before the actual holiday, we are Fed. Up. Most of us, anyway.

As CBS News and plenty of other news outlets reported recently, British clinical psychologist Linda Blair say listening to too much Christmas music, especially when it starts so early, stresses us out.

The incessant Christmas music, from which there is no escape, reminds us every minute of our waking hours that we have all this stuff to do to get ready for the holidays. Because, as every retail advertiser and every Christmas TV special reminds us, if we don't make the holiday absolutely perfect and the the most memorable event ever, we are abject failures.

Why wouldn't we be stressed under those circumstances?

Can you imagine the life of that spacey mall store clerk, the one you want to deck? She's probably spacey and out of it because she's been force to listen to that godforsaken Christmas music since October. Blair, the clinical psychiatrist, sympathizes with those mall workers. They struggle to tune out that awful "music."

"You're simply spending all of your energy trying not to hear what you're hearing," she said.

And what about the rest of us? We don't have it as bad as Spacey Mall Store Clerk, but we are all subject to this torture. We've seen Christmas decorations in stores as early as September, and the stores have been feeding us holiday "music" over the PA systems since early November, or even before that.

The Tampa Bay Times reported in November that one of the worst offenders, Best Buy, started playing Christmas music on October 22. That's before I even started to think about Halloween.

On a positive note, the Tampa Bay Times said some retailers have had a sense of mercy lately, interspersing Christmas music even now with non-holiday selections, to give us all a sense of relief.

Look, some holiday music is OK. But none of it's OK to pressure us to buy, buy, buy! Retailers are desperate. Desperation is unattraction, and makes us less likely to help those desperate retailers.

So give us a break, all you online and brick and mortar stores, and maybe we'll become a bit less Grinchy and give you a break. Try it!