[Coda]

Completely agreed. I HATE October through December because it's a nonstop barrage of all of the same cliches. And it gets worse every year because they keep starting earlier and earlier, which makes them overlap, which means MORE cliches at the same time. And then January provides a small relief (for some reason New Year's stuff isn't nearly so annoying) and then we dive back into February (thank goodness only for the first half of the month).

And Christmas music is one of those cliches that annoys the crap out of me. Suddenly every radio station and every store's background music all sounds the same. It's the same songs I've heard for my whole life, and I can count myself lucky if a new song that isn't a cover of an old song gets successful enough to be played but not so wildly popular that it gets overplayed and burned out before the season is even over.

And then there are a few songs that I just absolutely despise with a seething passion: Last Christmas, Santa Baby, Baby It's Cold Outside, and Christmas Shoes come to mind. Not only are they overplayed (though thankfully Christmas Shoes hasn't made the rounds this year on the stations I listen to) but I hate the songs on their own merits anyway: Christmas Shoes is bloody depressing. Last Christmas is whining about being cheated on. Baby It's Cold Outside is either skeevy/rapey if you take the lyrics at face value or annoying and setting a bad example if you don't. And Santa Baby is just way too much innuendo for a song about the quintessential family-friendly holiday and EVERY VOCALIST I've ever heard perform it uses the same over-saccharine squeaky cliched supposed-to-be-sexy-but-actually-stupid voice.

There are a few I can tolerate. I'm a big fan of Trans-Siberian Orchestra; their stuff is musically interesting enough that the fact that they're covers of traditional songs doesn't bother me.