© 2003 Brian Hodges - Please do not remove the copyright from this essay

y wife loves to sing. In the shower, in the kitchen, behind me while I'm trying to write, there is a seemingly non-stop melody flowing through our apartment. But I don't mind. She has a beautiful voice and is very passionate. I have only two rules:

#1: She is no longer allowed to make up songs about the cats (something I've written about before). <<I'm gonna meow your body… Kit-ty.>> I just couldn't take it anymore.

and #2: She is not allowed to sing Christmas songs before Thanksgiving.

I'm no Scrooge. I like Christmas as much as the next guy who refuses to approach a mall (or even leave the house) the day after Thanksgiving. But a man should be able to live his life and not be forced to hear "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" in April. I feel there is a time and a place for everything, and Christmas songs should be relegated strictly to the Christmas Season. I don't sing Twisted Sister in church. I rest my case.

For the most part, Lauren has honored my request. Here and there, during the Christmas-in-July sales she'll slip into a chorus of "What Child Is This" but stops as soon as I shout, "NO!" But as we get closer to Thanksgiving (i.e. the week before Halloween), the urge to break into merry cheer gets stronger and stronger and I find myself yelling "NO!" more often.

"Oh come on!" she whines.

"Not until Thanksgiving." As the man, it is of course my job to remain firm. Because if she starts singing Christmas songs in October, eventually she'll be singing them in September and then where will it end? "Christmas season only!" I repeat, putting my foot decisively down.

Unfortunately, the mass media aren't helping my case any. We've all seen how it works. Advertising for any major holiday begins a month early, and since most retailers view Thanksgiving as Christmas Junior, they've done their best to convince everybody that the Christmas season begins somewhere around Columbus Day. But hey, that's commercialism for you and as long as it's stimulating the economy, I'll let it slide.

My real beef is with the radio people. Forget what I said before. When it comes to Christmas music, I am a Scrooge. By Christmas Eve, I'm ready to put a bullet in my head over "Feliz Navidad" alone. But, I've learned to mentally prepare myself for the jolly onslaught, knowing it'll start the day after Thanksgiving and end the day after Christmas. I figure it's only a month, I'm in the Christmas spirit anyway and I have all year to psyche myself up for it.

But this year they took it too far. I don't know how it is anywhere else, but here in Philadelphia, they started playing Christmas music two weeks ago! It's not even Thanksgiving and they've already been caroling for two weeks! It was seventy degrees here last week, we broke all sorts of heat records, and they were playing "Walking in a Winter Wonderland"!

That's not the worst part. I know a lot of areas this time of year have a station that dedicates itself to non-stop Christmas music. Philadelphia has two of them! And yes, they both started up two weeks ago. That's essentially a combined total of twelve weeks worth of Christmas music by the time the "season" is over. You figure stations play about forty-five minutes worth of music per hour. That comes out to almost 91,000 minutes of merriness on those two stations alone! How many Christmas songs are there really? Twenty-five? Maybe fifty? And each one runs about three minutes. That means, by the time we're done, each song will have been played an average of 605 times on just those stations! A little more for the really popular songs. Seriously, how many times can one person rock around a Christmas Tree?

You radio people aren't making things easy on me. It's hard enough to stop my wife from singing Christmas songs year round, but if you keep on extending the Christmas season and making her think it's okay to sing "Oh Christmas Tree" in October, I'm not going to be able to justify telling her "NO!" anymore.