Christmas Music

by Randy Kemner, Proprietor

To any owner of a small business, attention to detail is often the measure of success or failure.  In a retail store it may be obvious, like managing cash flow and inventory, or mundane--making sure the bathrooms are stocked and clean.

Most important, a retail environment must be welcoming to its patrons.  As a first measure there must be friendly and helpful service at all levels.  But the environment itself must evoke feelings of attraction, and that includes invitations to all five senses, which involves lighting, aromas, temperature, tasting (if in the food and wine business, as we are) and sound.  If any of these elements offends people, retailers are in trouble. 

 

One of those details is the sound of the place.  In some ways a wine store is like a book store, with rows and rows of interesting labels that evoke geography, history, culture, cuisine and pleasure.  It is often a place for contemplation, yet total silence can be oppressive and uncomfortable.  Background music is the answer for most retail environments, and the kind of music played and its volume is as important in setting the mood of a place as any other factor that involves the senses.

My wife Dale commented the other day that it doesn't feel like the holidays.  "Eveything seems so manufactured, on a schedule, doing things because the calendar tells you to.  I just don't feel Christmas-y." 

"That's because we live in southern California," I answered.  "We don't have snow to signal the season.  We only have the calendar.  That's why spray-painted Christmas trees were invented here."

So now it's December, the most important retail month of the year and it was 80 degrees a couple days ago.  If we're going to feel Christmas-y, we'll have to manufacture it for ourselves.  That means the sights and sounds of the season.  The calendar is ticking.

In the wine shop we have customers for gift baskets, wine accessories, gourmet foods and wines and spirits of every kind, for every use from holiday entertaining to the "wow" bottle.  We need to create an environment that simulates the Christmases of our memory.  Evergreen garlands, red bows, velvet stockings, strings of lights, brightly colored packages and, of course, Christmas music reminding us that the holidays are just four--three--two weeks away.

Is anybody really turned off by Christmas music?  I have to ask this question because Fox News has insisted there is a war on Christmas in this country.  You wouldn't know it by the lines outside Wal-Mart on Thanksgiving evening.  Still, there are schools that have banned all but the most secular "holiday" music from "winter" pageants for fear of establishing a state religion in middle school.  That leaves out almost all great music written before 1750, including Handel's Messiah.  Not very scholarly, if you ask me.

Banning Christmas carols anywhere is an affront to our collective culture, no matter what religion--or non-religion--you adhere to.  Christmas Day is a national holiday, for crying out loud.  Fox News needn't worry that's going to change anytime soon. 

Christmas has become, shall we say, Christmas for retailers.  Sure, it has its roots in Christian theology, and over the years composers and songwriters have been inspired to write some of the world's most enduring music from it.  These are the tunes we grew up with, the soundtrack to our lives.  Banning them for fear of violating the Establishment Clause or offending Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or non-theist listeners robs them and us of our shared cultural heritage.  Is "Away in a Manger" a threat to anyone?  I must remind you that the most successful Christmas song of all time was written by a Russian Jewish immigrant named Israel Isidore Baline, who the world knows as Irving Berlin.  The song, of course, is White Christmas.

Christmas is a legal holiday in a country that has no official religion, guaranteed by the First Amendment.  Its religious significance lies in the hearts of our country's people to greater or lesser degrees, but the feelings of good cheer from giving and recieving, say, a gift basket or a specially selected bottle of wine are nearly universal--gift giving transcends religious and cultural differences.  Christmas music is a seasonal reminder of that spirit of good cheer.  Without it, our lives would be as dull as the winter sky.

   

Even in southern California, the home of the flocked Christmas tree.