I Volunteered Last Year With A Retired Engineer Who Once Transported A Space Probe Instrument From San

A Christmas Pop Song Rant

You see, the thing I hate isn't Christmas music as a whole. I adore carols and Christmas hymns. It's the Christmas-themed popular music I can't stand.

Maybe I should explain the difference, although I expect a lot of folks already know: while we all use the terms indiscriminately, a "Christmas carol" is technically a song that's worded and structured as either a lullaby for the newborn Jesus, or a joyous announcement of His arrival. Most carols are very old traditional songs, or started out that way, but there are a few notable modern compositions that achieve a similar feel to the traditional carols, notably "Silent Night."

A "Christmas hymn" is generally addressed to God the Father instead of Jesus, but deals with Christmas themes. It's a hymn for the Christmas season. This does overlap quite a bit with the definition of "carol," especially if you want to bring Holy Trinity semantics into it, but I think calling "O Holy Night" a Christmas hymn is a fairly uncontroversial choice. The fact that it's a great song to sing while caroling doesn't disqualify it.

Christmas popular music, on the other hand… is popular music with a secular-Christmas theme. By "popular music," though, I mean any commercial music product that was originally produced to make money, whether it's "Jingle Bells" or a modern pop megastar's latest charity-fundraiser Christmas album. These songs almost exclusively shy away from older religious elements of Christmas in favor of celebrating secularized versions like Santa Claus and Christmas trees, or generic winter traditions like snowmen, coziness, and winter sports. And, yes, there are a few weird, cursed things like "Deck the Halls" (a traditional Welsh tune repurposed in the 19th century as a Christmas pop song), and there's probably some contemporary-praise artist who tried creating a new, contemporary-praise, Christmas song instead of making pepped-up versions of old Christmas carols and hymns… almost certainly equally cursed.

I should probably clarify that I'm not denouncing the secularization of Christmas. Midwinter celebrations are far, far older than Christianity, and the modern Christmas shopping season is not only a crucial element of late-stage Capitalist society, but also a highly visible example of consumers acting neither rationally nor in their own "enlightened" self-interest, and as such, I'm not going to knock it.

What I object to is the nature of most Christmas pop music. Almost without exception, there's a strong "I heard you like Christmas, so I made you some Christmas with a Christmas, so you can Christmas your Christmas with Christmas while you Christmas the Christmas this Christmas" vibe to this music, and worse, a sense of forced cheerfulness and jollity. It reaches deep down to my hindbrain and makes all my social anxieties say, "Oh, crap, here we go again." Much of it also is obvously just thrown together with minimal effort, expense, or artistic expression, simply as shovelware for a jingle-bell-addled consumer market.

The most heinous Christmas pop songs are formulated specifically to target children. Little children, Mandrake! And despite this, we are all subjected to these songs for up to four months prior to Christmas. Can you imagine what would happen to a sporting-goods store if they habitually played "Baby Shark" and the Barney theme on their Muzak?

While I can say that most of it "just isn't very good," that's a personal opinion and I refuse to claim it's relevant. But I theorize that one more reason I find so much Christmas pop music tedious and irritating is because the concept of a safely non-religious, uncontroversial "holiday season," based almost entirely on subjective feelings and concepts, is too vague, confused, and artificial to truly inspire either artist or audience.

By contrast, most Christmas carols and Christmas hymns were products of the old Christendom society, and the creators and intended audience were shaped their whole lives by European Christendom, whether they believed or not. The subject matter and relevance were powerful to them in a way that it's hard for us to understand today.

There are some anti-Christmas songs I enjoy, but anti-Christmas songs occupy a very precarious niche in the popular music ecology. A song can only be "anti-Christmas" until the Monolithic Secular Christmas Music Juggernaut adopts and assimilates it. We need to learn from what happened to "Fairytale of New York."

NGL the idea of being properly seen unlocking one's latent superpowers is a pretty banger concept

Absolutely astonished that while helping a lady today she turned and said, “Your eyes are different colors!”

Reader. My eyes are different colors but it’s so subtle that I’ve had close friends who couldn’t tell the difference. I’ve excitedly told people only to have them clock it and go, “That’s it?”

I’ve had multiple people I’ve known for years see my eyes in sunlight and go, “Oh! Your eyes are green!”

Mom mother still calls me her blue eyed girl.

But here comes this beautiful lady. Who I’d only known for five minutes was just gushing about how cool it was that one of my eyes was greener and the other bluer and how she desperately wanted a dog with heterochromia and how she thought it was super noticeable.

My day is made. I feel like an anime protagonist. I could leap a tall building. I think this unlocked superpowers, probably.

UPDATE: Yes, the kittens do live next door. We had no idea!

The problem with having "free range" cats is that they will annex properties and people you don't have control over, into their territory. I hope they eventually learn that the neighbors' dogs can't keep them safe up here. At least they'll put a dent in the vole population.

This is here because I can't post photos on the local message board. I'm trying to find the owner of these two kittens before the raccoons get them.

Kyana: me and my boys are gonna mess you up

Dani: I rolled a one

Vhas: I rolled a one

VRLA who rolled a seven: Fuck

I’ve rewatched my fav film, Dr. Strangelove.

Note that this does NOT say, "If a person cares about you, they will drop whatever they're doing, RIGHT NOW, and rush to your side for any reason you deem sufficiently important, and if they don't, then they don't care about you at all."

“No matter how busy a person is, if they care, they’ll find time for you.”

— Unknown

Pro tip:

Never confuse the War In the Pacific with the War Of the Pacific.

Other similar things people say are:

"Oh, I was just curious."

"I was just asking a question!"

"Apparently you can't take criticism."

"If you can't take a little criticism, you shouldn't blah blah..."

"I'm just sayin'!"

"You need to touch grass."

"You take everything too seriously."

It's all the same redirection trick.

Complicating matters is the fact that not everyone who redirects this way is consciously aware of what they're doing and may not even have genuine malicious intent. People don't want to admit to any bad qualities... some people redirect like this so they don't have to admit to themselves that they were thoughtless or malicious.

That doesn't justify their behavior, however. It just makes it harder to correct.

You're not "too sensitive" for getting upset when someone purposely upsets you. It's not "just a joke". They know what they're doing. They're just hiding their bullying behind the label of joking so they can play innocent.

Nerf that Ring of Flight by making it the ring itself that flies, while wearing it, you can move the ring through the air in any direction at will. How the character manages to keep the ring on their finger, and their finger on their hand, is the player's problem.

@is-it-a-man

I swear to god one of these days were going to see a video of Amaury Guichon and he's going to be making some wings and they are going to look dope as hell, the detail of each feather will be breathtaking, he'll spray paint them to perfection, but as the video goes on, he's not building any sort of winged creature, just the wings. And then there's a human-sized harness (also made of chocolate, somehow, he can do it). And he's attaching the wings to the harness. And he's putting the harness on and he demonstrates how he can flap the wings. And then he'll be off. Out the window and up and up and up. And we'll be looking at the livestream (it's a livestream now) and we'll scream "No, Amaury, the sun! It's going to melt the wings!". But he knows this already. And he is free.