Blog #298: Christmas Music and Why I Embrace It Every Day?
- Jeffrey Snyder
- Dec 8, 2022
- 3 min read
Now, I know what you might be thinking. Why does Jeff Snyder want to write a post about listening to Christmas Music every day? Isn’t Christmas music bad for your mental health?
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Well, yes for some people. Christmas music can be harmful to someone’s mental health especially in an overstimulating environment like retail. Just the idea of listening to Christmas music is enough to make someone go crazy and wish that the holiday was over. Some people even just don’t care much for Christmas or the other holidays simply because they don’t feel like they need to celebrate.
Others simply just want to be a Scrooge or a Grinch because they have nothing else better to do. In my over 15 years in retail, I have seen Christmas music affect some people in a very negative way which is such a shame because each and every year, they miss the whole point of why we celebrate the Holidays as a whole and the Christmas music makes them even more negative.
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Well, that’s just how Christmas music is viewed in a commercial aspect. If you have known me for a while, you know that I listen to Christmas music every day on my I-Pod or on YouTube. Typically, I will put Christmas music on during the summer because it’s my way of keeping cool. But as a Catholic, I listen to Christmas music because it’s a reminder of where my lord and savior came from in the same manner of his resurrection on Easter Sunday. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter what goes on during the Catholic Church year whether its Eastertide, Advent, Lent or Ordinary Time, we are constantly reminded of the important moments in JC’s earthly life.
To me, Christmas music calms me down and it helps me focus on life as a whole. It helps me calm down when I get stressed and for some neurodiverse individuals, there is no other music that can satisfy or help them in more ways than one. There’s something about that year-round Yuletide feeling that can calm frizzed nerves and help me stim.
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But you might also be wondering, if I listen to Christmas music year-round, why don’t I play it in public? Well, I don’t because I want to respect the feelings of others around me and the fact is, sometimes it’s better to listen to Christmas music in private because there is nothing more private than that. There’s no judgment and it makes me feel like myself.
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Finally, if you are a therapist and looking for a type of music to help calm your patients or clients down, I highly recommend just low-level Christmas music like the following below:
In many ways, listening to holiday music in general is just as good as listening to the Calm App, not that it’s bad of course. It’s just that now more than ever, we need to embrace this kind of music instead of turning it away.
Who knows? Christmas music might help you in more ways than one mentally if you just embrace it for what it is.
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Catch you all later!!
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