“Fa la la la la, la la la la.”

It’s December 1st and I’m about to fa-la-la-fall off a cliff as a last resort to escape the Christmas music that’s playing in every public place I walk into.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Mr. Scrooge. I love Christmas and the holiday season, but the music begins about when the decoration sales do: way too early. Sure, it’s all probably a big marketing tool anyway – an attempt to use music to get customers to bring out their wallets and purchase more and more Christmas decorations – but it certainly has an adverse effect on me.

The largest culprit of overplaying Christmas music is undoubtedly FM radio stations, as mainstream music is replaced with “Jingle Bells” and “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”. That, in turn, means that nearly every local store, restaurant, and gathering place imaginable is streaming an excess of holiday tunes, discouraging people like me from even leaving the house during the month of December.

We don’t wear Halloween costumes for the entire month of October, and we don’t overeat all through November (at least, not in the spirit of Thanksgiving), so why should we play Christmas music as soon as the month of December rolls around? It tends to drag the holiday out over the course of the whole month, and it distracts from the actual day that we celebrate. I don’t know about you, but by the time December 25th gets here, I’m so Christmas’d out that I’m ready to pack everything up before the day is over.

Think about it: relatives typically come to visit for the holidays, right? Well, if the Christmas holiday lasted as long as commercial America makes it, we’d all get pretty sick of our relatives. The same goes for Christmas music – it’s like that annoying cousin you can’t ever manage to escape, except the music is in town for an extended stay.

There’s a simple solution to this dilemma, however: a radio station for all of the avid Christmas celebrators, the hardcore people who begin celebrating Christmas at the same time as the commercial holiday begins it. Non-stop Christmas music can be played and people can listen to it as much as their hearts desire, so long as the music stays far, far away from all of the mainstream radio stations.

Maybe an entire month of Christmas music wouldn’t feel so cheesy if I didn’t live in Texas, where the winters are the mildest of mild and snow falls about as often as Halley’s comet comes into view, but frankly, I won’t be able to test that theory anytime soon and I’m not quite sure my feelings would change even in the midst of a winter wonderland. A month of anything, especially the same jolly Christmas tunes on repeat, is just a bit too long for me.