Daryl Batt- It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas, Unfortunately Is it just me or are the holidays in America becoming more and more commercialized? The original purposes for holidays are swept under the rug and it is all about what we can get. It was November 9th and I was driving home from school, flipping through radio stations when I heard the Christmas carols. I yelled, “NO! ” and completely shut the radio off. It was not even Thanksgiving yet and they were playing Christmas music! Since Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, I was a little put off by this.
Why are they playing these songs already? What about Thanksgiving? Heck, what about Hanukkah? Why aren’t there Thanksgiving carols? That is when I decided I was going to write a Thanksgiving carol for my seed project. | started out with a few ideas about my Thanksgiving song. I was soon stumped, unsure where to go from the few lines I had written and figured going home for Thanksgiving would inspire some creativity. It did not. Thanksgiving came and went and I was still without a song. When I returned to Colorado Springs, it was Christmas galore. Lights and Santa decorations were everywhere!
I walked into my house and my aunt and uncle had gone all out with decorations. It sort of put me in the Christmas spirit. That was bad for my Thanksgiving song though, and ended up completely scrapping it. I decided I would write my own Christmas carol instead. I thought I would write one about how there is more to Christmas than gifts and money, but I kept reverting back to Taylor Swift’s song Christmas Must Be Something More. I was at work when I heard It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas and I thought, “It sure is beginning to look a lot like the commercialized American Christmas.
I knew then that I wanted to write about my Christmas traditions and views on the holiday. My family is supposedly religious, not that they ever go to church, nor do our holidays revolve around Jesus Christ, or God, or whoever else. To my family, Christmas is all about the gifts. One year, when my parents could not afford gifts, the rest of my family agreed we would not do presents. I was 14 years old, but I was the one who acted most like an adult that year. My aunt, who was 40 at the time, acted like a baby getting her favorite blanket taken away.
I was just so excited to even see my aunt and uncle, whom I never got to see and she just moped around the whole visit. It was pathetic. It was the first time I realized how materialistic my family really is. I get it though, it was an awkward night because after dinner instead of opening presents like usual, we all just sat there in the living room. We had nothing to do and nothing to talk about. It revealed how my family interacts, or does not, when there are no presents being received. Ever since that Christmas, Taylor Swift’s song Christmas Must Be Something More has really become my favorite holiday song.
The song is about forgetting the bows and glitz of Christmas and it says; “What if ribbons and bows didn’t mean a thing? Would the song still survive without five golden rings?…. You’d say that today holds something special, something holy, not superficial… So here’s to Jesus Christ who saved our lives. It’s something we all try to ignore… Christmas must be something more. ” In my song, I briefly touch on that year with my family, but I focus more on people as a whole. I ended up using the melody and a few of the lyrics from It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas and rewrote what the song was about.
The creative process of rewriting this song was actually a lot harder than I had expected. When writing lyrics to another song, you have to keep the number of syllables close or exactly to the original and also the emphasis on certain syllables similar to the original. Rhyming is also very important in Christmas carols, so what I could say and how | could phrase it got limited to the words that rhymed with each other. In the end, I was able to say what I have wanted to get off my chest for many years now.
This song not only was an outlet for me, but it also taught me how to stay motivated when writing a song as it gets tough. I had major writer’s block some days and would have to figure out how to get around it. Performing it live for the class also helps me in the future because the more I am able to perform in front of people, the more confident and comfortable I get do so. This year I am spending the holidays with my parents in the Springs and we are going to give each other memories instead of gifts. I am really not Scrooge, I just want to spend the holidays with the people | love and that is all I need.