Please Save Me...

...from Christmas music. I can't think of a song, ditty, tune, composition, etc. that I hate worse than Christmas Wrapping by The Waitresses. It's just horrible. I hear it every year, with that irritatingly repetitive, syncopated and staccato saxophone honking and the godawful monotone chanting. And if Elvis's Blue Christmas didn't have a deeply sentimental connection to some wonderful and hilarious memories, I'd despise it too, because of the background singers hooting like drunken owls. And then there's whole discs full of dogs barking and cats meowing the classic carols. They make me want to shoot the radio. Feliz Navidad is another one I should ridicule but can't, because it still means all those foggy December nights marching up Orange Avenue in Coronado or San Diego's sparkling Harbor Drive along the waterfront, with red velvet ribbon candycane-striped around my bass trombone slide and happy, admiring holiday crowds and blinding t.v. camera lights. (Did I tell you I'm related to the Farnsworth that invented television? And I only have twelve channels of cable, which I hardly ever watch.) Anyhow, one of the only Christmas songs written in the past ten years that I really adore is Sam Bacco's soft and haunting Belleau Wood, recorded with surprising taste and care by country music artist Garth Brooks on his most decent album, Sevens. It's about a Christmas Eve truce, a pause in a bloody (and disputed) WWI battle (which, confusingly, all my research shows took place in June. Even so, the song never fails to choke me up.) I also like that Merry Christmas, Carol song about a mall Santa who finds a girl on his knee asking only for parents for Christmas; said mall Santa ends up adopting said orphan. Very touching. Very Christmassy. Bah humbug.