LOS ANGELES (KNX) — Whether you’re rockin’ around the Christmas tree or waiting for Santa Claus to come to town, holiday music makes most people feel holly jolly during the holiday season.
But for some people, holiday music makes them feel bah-humbug.
How does that happen? How can songs about Santa, Rudolph, Frosty, and Christmas time turn one into a Grinch?
Nate Sloan, assistant professor of musicology at USC's Thornton School of Music, told KNX In Depth one reason could be that the season takes away our craving for popular music.
“You get songs from the 30’s, the 40’s, the 50’s,” he explained. “It’s nostalgic. It’s different time and place. I think for some people that makes them feel ‘Oh, this connects me to the warmth and the comfort of the holidays.’ For other people, it makes them feel, ‘What happened to my pop music? Why am I required to listen to Bing Crosby all of a sudden?’””
Linda Blair, clinical psychologist in the United Kingdom, added that a person’s specific history could trigger certain reactions.
“So there can be a general response, but there’s also specific response just as you said,” she told KNX In Depth. “If Christmas is a time to be lonely then you don’t want to hear the music. If Christmas is a time to go into debt, you don’t want to hear the music.”
Another reason, Blair suggested, could be the repetition of the song.
“There’s a researcher (in the UK) called Victoria Williamson and she’s found that the number of times you hear a piece of music is a bell-shaped curve in terms of whether you like it,” Blair went on. “You know, at the beginning you sort of go ‘Ooh! That’s different.’ And then you love it because you know it. But then you get sick of it.”
On the other hand, one may wonder what makes holiday songs so appealing. What draws them in? Sloan said it comes to down the song structure.
“A lot of these songs that become popular during Christmas are written in an earlier era of American music and as a result, they follow different sets of rules than the ones that we’re familiar with today,” he said.
“Like, the structure of the songs is different. Where you expect to hear a verse and a chorus is different. The pallet of the songs is different. So I think that’s what’s so appealing about it to some people is that it really feels like you’re stepping into this different world musically speaking.”
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