Baby boomer xmas muzak is the worst music in the history of the world.
It is secularizing, lowest common denominator, garbage.
Every nation without exception has a national religion and Christianity isn’t America’s.
Rule one of American Mammonism, offend no one and include everyone in the Christmas shopping bonanza. Gene Autry, Rudolph, and Frosty are the high priests of a post-christ Christmas. If everyone is to engage in the consumerism then caroling must be replaced with secular in-offensive drivel. The sentiment behind wishing “happy holidays” instead “merry Christmas” starts on fifth avenue in 1946.
Sadly America being a new nation we doesn’t even have the benefit of an actual virile paganism with which to syncretize. Yule logs, Christmas trees, and mistletoe have some blood in their traditions. American pop-folk-traditions, and ersatz-fairy-tales are not historical, organic, or lively. Our culture is only as deep as celluloid. Our paganism is hollow and de novo from New York and Hollywood.
As Charles Taylor would say we live in a disenchanted world and all we can grasp at is regurgitated mass media childhood commonalities of 70 years ago. At best the music represents a longing for whatever we had before we personally lost our naive childish enchantment with the world since as a culture we cannot muster more than blasé ironic distance from anything. Lacking sincerity in general we substitute nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake one month a year. Santa Claus is a lie and there is no magic in the world.
If post-modern deconstructionism has taught us anything it is that nothing is neutral and the xmas anthem of the postwar generation is anti-christian as it crowds out actual Christmas music to be the liturgy of American syncretic consumerism. Nostalgia is no excuse for undermining christianity.
No one can imagine a “secular” Ramadan which everyone regardless of faith celebrates with atheistic songs, or a secular “Hanukkah” devoid of jewishness. Those holidays have been protected by their respective believers. Christmas alone has been neutralized as we believers are Americans first and christians second.
For a while christianity as kitsch was allowed such as in Charlie Brown’s monologue but the grinch gets more play.
You can’t worship both God and Mammon but the infinite loop of 50’s secular favourites in shopping malls everywhere will sure help you try. (A blessing of COVID is at least the avoidance of restaurant and shopping center audio systems.)
May God protect us from Bing Cosby. What will you be singing this “holiday” season?
Signed “Stone of Help”.
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