I have friends and relatives who complain about how quickly our culture is saturated by Christmas advertising and programming. Certainly this past year, the radio was playing 24-hour Christmas songs as of November 1st, but most radio stations stopped playing Christmas songs around December 27th. Never mind that those famous 12 days of Christmas start on December 25th, just as there's a rush to start celebrating Christmas early, there's also a rush to stop celebrating well before New Year's.
What we call "Christmas" songs aren't even all concerned with Christmas - some are simply winter songs (ie, "Winter Wonderland") that, in a snowy city like mine, would play just as well in January/February as they do in November/December. But once Christmas Day is past, local radio stations seem to forget it's winter outside and go back to playing the same type of music heard in August.
And that's what I find really remarkable about the 2-month marathon of Christmas programming that I hear on the radio. The other 10 months of the year, pop radio stations play love songs, break-up songs and get-back-together songs. That is, songs about romantic relationships. But for 2 months each year they temporarily stop and instead play songs that are (mostly) about a non-romantic love for others - love for strangers, love for the world and the giving of gifts.
Call it hokum, schmaltz or treacle, but for 2 months radio stations set aside their typical fare to celebrate friends, family and humankind. So although I expect in the future I'll continue to hear complaints about how early those Christmas songs appear on the radio, I won't be joining that chorus.
