Rhetoric Rheya Tanner muses on life as a local
My Sleighlist
It’s beginning to sound a lot like Christmas, and that’s music to my ears.
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The Local
WI N TE R G AR DE N
than, like, 40. I love that there are a dozen covers of “The Little Drummer Boy,” but my only options for “Frosty the Snowman” are Willie Nelson and Jimmy Durante.I even love those lame filler songs no one cares about, like that Paul McCartney one that never really starts, or that other one that claims Africans don’t know what Christmas is. (Sorry if one of those is your favorite. It probably isn’t.) I laud Christmas music for its stubbornness. These songs are old— so old that they have outlived their lyrics (what the heck are hop-along boots?) and their singers. Half the crooners caroling on the radio right now are dead and have been for a long time. Make no mistake though, in thinking that I ever want to hear a
new holiday hit in my life. Classics forever, please. Music in general has that enduring quality, but there’s something about Christmas music—maybe it’s the snow—that better preserves it in time. I can’t hear Nat King Cole’s rendition of “The First Noel” without thinking of baking cookies with my grandma. I can’t hear Elvis’s “Blue Christmas” without hearing my dad teach me to sing the “ooohs” with him. If you’re one of those bah-humbugs who hates all the repetitiveness, I feel you; I, too, am sick of it by the 14th. But those lights keep twinkling, and that music keeps blaring throughout the town. Savor it while you can. And before that Christmas tree in the square comes down, I hope I’ll see you rockin’ around it.
Illustration: Josh Clark
H
ere it is once again: that magical time of year when we listen to the same 35 songs over and over for several weeks—the very songs we’ve been playing since Nat King Cole roasted his first chestnuts. We get to hear that big band intro to Andy Williams’s “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” (and then feel a little cheated when it’s actually the Johnny Mathis version) through WG’s downtown speakers and in shopping malls across the country. We get to enjoy Bruce Springsteen’s long, bewildering preamble to “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town,” which they haven’t cut from the radio edit for some reason. In most aspects of life, I wouldn’t consider myself a traditionalist. Christmas music is a hard exception. The second the leftover turkey is in the fridge, I turn off the obscure neo-jazz I listen to during the other 11 months and start having myself a merry little Christmas with Crosby, Como, and the Carpenters. Part of me loves the novelty of it. I love singing along to songs about snow and ice and winter wonderlands when I’ve literally never experienced a Christmas colder
