When Life Is for the (Calling) Birds

Earlier today I Googled “The Twelve Days of Christmas” for any mention of the little-discussed human trafficking aspect of the beloved English carol. I mean, the song’s essence is that there’s nothing like finding a bevy of enslaved people and trapped fowl under, around and above the Christmas tree, courtesy of your true love.

Was it once acceptable in English society, I’ve lately wondered, for people of means to pay a middle man to round up eight maids a-milking, nine ladies dancing, 10 lords a-leaping, 11 pipers piping and 12 drummers drumming; cram them into a enclosure decorated to resemble a huge gift box; and present to one’s significant other a cacophonous conglomeration of 50 people—who presumably were covered in the combined waste of 23 confined birds?

The Internet is strangely silent on the issue. When I entered the search term “Twelve Days of Christmas human trafficking,” I found only one other person's observation, similar to mine, that this carol is far from benign. What I did not find were any scholarly treatises on the economic conditions in Victorian England that might have induced families to sell their milking and dancing daughters to the monied gentry for presentation as gifts, or any theories from social historians as to why lords, pipers and drummers were preferred marks of these gift-giving fiends—as opposed to say, carpenters, haberdashers and other townsfolk with skills more useful around the manor than such specialties as (respectively) leaping, piping and drumming.

Anyway, the upshot is that I listen to a lot of Christmas music at this time of year—so often hearing the same 15 or 20 songs on WASH-FM, our local Christmas music station, that I’ve had a great deal of time to absorb, consider and, in some cases, question the lyrics. This is ground I first covered, by the way, in a December 30, 2010, blog post titled “Did You Hear What I Heard?”It is available for review at any time on this site, should you care to share my puzzlement over why a man as seemingly humble as Santa Claus would assign his own name to the lane on which he lives, or should you, too, wonder whether the Andy Williams-sung “Happy Holiday”—singular—should be condemned for implying that only the year-end celebrations of Christians matter.

In fact, this year I’ve been playing WASH-FM in the car and at home even more than I usually do, because I find all the nostalgic cheer to be a hugely welcome escape from the news of the day. While it’s no secret that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, it lately seems as if that hand basket is weighted with cannon balls and falling toward Hades at light speed.

As if such overwhelming problems as world terrorism, the refugee crisis and global warning aren’t upsetting enough, this morning I unwisely read an entire article in the Washington Post chronicling how a focus group of Donald Trump supporters backed the billionaire buffoon even more vociferously every time a moderator repeated and factually refuted one of their hero's moronically uniformed utterances. One guy even used the occasion to vow that he would not piss on the current president of the United States to extinguish the flames were our nation’s chief executive to find himself on fire.

Given the choice between 1) encountering such vitriol in print, online and/or on the air, and 2) singing along with the happy if often nonsensical holiday tunes I've known since childhood, the latter option has tended to win out.

What's more, should you listen really closely to words of Christmas songs, I find that you even can find ways to channel anger that are kind of fun rather than cancerous. Here’s a prime example: I’ve heard the holiday staple “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” approximately 18,000 times since Thanksgiving, and every time I hear the chorus I go apoplectic, albeit it in a bemused kind of way. This is the lyric: “Have a holly jolly Christmas/And in case you didn’t hear/Oh by golly, have a holly jolly Christmas this year.”

Think about that for a second. How in hell could you not have heard that you are wished a holly jolly Christmas?!  The singer—Burl Ives or whoever might be covering the song—just wished you a holly freaking jolly Christmas the previous sentence!! It’s like saying, “Get me that pen. Oh, and while you’re at it, get me that pen.” The message is unmistakable!. It’s the same message, expressed twice in immediate succession! How could you not have heard it the first time?! You want us to have a Christmas that not only is holly (whatever that means), but that is jolly, as well. We get it! Jeez!

I know, I know, it’s just a stupid Christmas song. It's not Shakespeare. Still, I’d much rather laugh while fuming about something so trivial than get red in the face, and sickened in the gut, contemplating some far darker joke, such as the sadly viable candidacy of would-be President Trump and his frothing followers.

Maybe Christmas music isn't your thing, whether that's because you're of a non-Christian background or you simply heard "Frosty the Snowman" one (or a hundred) too many times. My point is, we all must do what we can these days to preserve our sanity. Because the outlook for our country and the world is not good.

 In case you didn’t hear.