Oh man, already with the Christmas music. From now until Christmas, the same 22 songs, played over and over and over again.

And not even proper Christmas carols, which would get irritating with enough repetition but at least not quite so quickly. I like a lot of Christmas carols, they have some weight to them, some meaning. But stores don’t want to play a lot of music with specific religious associations — and very rightly so — so what they give us instead is winter novelties, trivial jolly crap like Jingle Bells and Santa Claus is Coming to Town and Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, stuff that would be dumb but fun if you only had to put up with it one day a year but which is mind-numbing when for five or six weeks you hear it every time you venture out into public.

(This year I heard my first Christmas music the day after Halloween. I was taking the casual carpool into San Francisco and the driver had it on the radio. Argh! Trapped! I was never so grateful for light traffic and a quick trip across the bridge as I was that morning.)

Hating both crowds and Christmas music, I try to cut my shopping to a minimum in November and December. There are a couple of things I actually need to pick up from Target this weekend and I am dreading doing it and really wondering if I can do without them till after the New Year. Probably not. Ugh.