This is my 39th holiday season. You would think after that many years of fruitcakes, Tannenbaums, Griswolds, leg lamps, and Zuzu’s petals even I would be up-chucking from the secondhand smoke of merriment. And yet, no. I am, in every way, fully addicted to the sweet nectar of the mistleteat.
I cannot help it. Since childhood, every last detail of the 60 days between November
1 (my favorite day) and January 2 (my least favorite day) has given me goosebumps. Of course, the goosebumps may have been partially due to the mesh jersey I always wore in 35-degree cold. What can I say? It was the ‘80s.
Christmas at the Steele household was like a good marriage. It didn’t matter whether or not we had much or little or were well or sick; there was something in the air that created anticipation. I attribute this predominantly to my mother. Having lost her own mother as a little girl, she vowed before she had her four boys that the most would be made of the holidays, regardless of temporal circumstances. It was a vow she never broke; a vow we never knew existed. Yet, somehow, every last moment in those two crisp, blue months was filled to the brim with Yule.
As I matured, I carried my family’s Christmas traditions deep in my heart (and a few additional bits wedged betwixt skin folds). The same focus—the same reverence for the birth of Christ combined with the ridiculousness of dancing spastically to a swanky Andy Williams Christmas song—into my own family. And I was particularly talented in one area: selecting the songs.
What good would savoring the holiday season be without a soundtrack? As the purveyor of the mixtape, it has been my familial duty every year to compile the “Steele Family Christmas Party Mix.” This has a downside; very few solid new Christmas recordings have been released in the past, oh, 20 years. Once in a blue and wintry moon, I am able to squeeze in a new Sufjan Stevens song, but other than that, we’ve had 23 mixtapes in 23 years and the pickings are getting slim.
Hence, you can imagine my joy to the world a few months ago when I discovered iTunes’ 2008 technological breakthrough known as the Genius Bar. It sits there, to the right of my iTunes library, and seizes the intellectual property of whatever song I am listening to at the moment and then creates it’s own playlist based on my current choice and my catalog’s tastes. It is designed to simultaneously read my mind and replace it.
So, in an effort to knock one “undid” off my Christmas to-do list, I chose a favorite Yule tune and clicked the Genius button. Let’s try something old school: how about Andy Williams’ “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”? Certainly the iGenius will champion that choice with a plethora of swanky and unexpected holiday goodness! Right now, it’s thinking … it’s thinking … it’s… oh. It just followed that track up with the rest of the Now That’s What I Call Christmas compilation. Neat.
OK, let’s try something retro yet pop. How about the U2 staple “Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home).” That’ll preach. It’s thinking … it’s thinking … there! Oh. It added a few more tracks off of the Very Special Christmas disc this song actually comes from. But, hey, at least it also followed it up with the rest of Now That’s What I Call Christmas. Hmm.
I am growing impatient with modern convenience.
One more try, something more obscure: Mindy Smith’s “Follow the Shepherd.” And now, the Genius button. Ah, the rest of the Mindy Smith album. And Madonna.
Perhaps Christmas Future is not quite ready to replace Christmas Past. Perhaps it is the very human sentimentality that builds the playlist that makes the playlist something that evokes the spirit of the season.
After all, it wasn’t the semantics of my mother’s efforts that made her sons chock-full of figgy pudding. It wasn’t calculable detail. It was the God-given passion inside her to make the special things matter—for them to draw our family closer so that, even in the broken and painful times, we’d have our love to keep us warm.
I close my laptop, and I pull out the CD’s, ready to make Steele Family Christmas Party Mix #24 by hand. It may not be the Genius way to do it, but for that reason alone, it will matter all the more.
Mark Steele is the President & Executive Creative of Steelehouse Productions in Tulsa, OK. He is the author of Flashbang: How I Got Over Myself and Half-Life / Die Already. You can hear him discuss God in pop culture every Friday on the Steelehouse Podcast—available free at iTunes.