From Black Friday to New Year’s Day, I consciously avoid the inside of stores that have the annoying type of Christmas music piped through overhead speakers—Walmart in particular.
Unarguably, “The Twelve Days of Christmas” is the most irritating Christmas tune on the planet. If you hear it once, it stays in your head for weeks while it slowly drives you insane. It clings to your brain like a brain-eating amoeba. You hear it in your morning shower. You hear it all day long on your job. You hear it as you cook supper. You hear it in your sleep.

Listening to that song is worse than Chinese water torture or water boarding. In fact, the U.S. Federal Government should adopt the practice of playing the song for a terrorist suspect to hear nonstop while the suspect is enclosed in a white-walled room with no windows. This would be a highly effective form of torture; and because the song is a Christian song, using it as an instrument of torture might even qualify as the most politically incorrect form of torture possible to apply to a jihadist.

As I write this piece, the confounded song is running through my head. I don’t even want to reread this piece after I’ve finished writing it, and I apologize to my readers in advance for any mental agony that I may cause them by publishing this piece.

The simplicity and the seemingly unending up-and-down repetition of the song drive me nuts. How many times in a lifetime can anyone endure hearing a rendition of the song before totally losing it? I especially dislike the fifth verse because the baritone, who thinks he’s God’s gift to melody, obnoxiously bellows, “Five golden rings,” in double forte. Mercifully, that’s his only verse.

I’ve always liked the traditional religious Christmas carols and the modern good “pop” Christmas music: “Silent Night”, “Little Drummer Boy”, “Joy to the World”, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” and his other Christmas songs, Whitney Houston’s Christmas songs, and so on. But along with “The Twelve Days of Christmas”, any kind of jazzy Christmas music is off my holiday song list. Note that Frank Capra didn’t incorporate any trite or jazzy Christmas music into his “It’s a Wonderful Life” motion picture starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. It was Christmas all the way.

It usually takes three doses of hearing Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” to get me cured of one hearing of “The Twelve Days of Christmas”. I always enjoy listening to his singing “White Christmas” with his smooth voice. Bing Crosby sure could sing. That’s a fact. He just couldn’t act better than mediocre; and Bob Hope, his long-time associate, couldn’t do either. They both should have quit acting after the first of their seven “Road to” pictures. Dorothy Lamour held up both of them.

Well, the holiday season is here again all too soon; and what with the Christmas-ad parodies, the mobile office choruses, and such, I’ll just have to accept the fact that my complete avoidance of hearing “The Twelve Days of Christmas” is about as likely to happen as a staunch Republican’s election to the next presidential term of office.