Say No To Santa

I spend at least 5 hours a month in shopping malls, and I appreciate the efforts of the management to try to make my time in their environment more pleasant.

They build with high ceilings, spotlessly clean floors, and comfy benches at conveniently spaced locations.

The supermarkets especially have obligingly designed their premises with my comfort in mind, with very wide aisles, usually 3 trolleys wide.

Happily they don’t store their spare stock on the floor in the aisles, but in some big back room that I will never see. The lighting is bright and cheery, and the decor is subdued, yet not depressing.

At the mall, it seems like they have really taken some thought about how to make my shopping trip pleasant. I know it’s a clever ruse to get me to stay longer and spend more, but that’s ok.

Well, it’s not ok right now though. The malls are alive with sounds of muzak - Santa Muzak. I can’t stand the stuff. All the way from Away in a manger, to Deck the halls, right along the to the end of line with Bing Crosby dreaming of yet another white Christmas. In Australia, where it’s 35′ in the shade, and we’re only in the mall because they will pay for the air conditioning bill.

I guess they figure that filling our ears with Santa’s Hit Singles will remind us to get in the festive mood and spend even more. We can tell that Santa is only 2 stores away by the long trail of children tugging anxiously on their mothers’ arms waiting to tell the big guy in red what he has to haul to their house this year.

I guess, if I were in a generous mood, that I could forgive the big malls, and even the supermarkets for trying to engender some festive cheer with their crappy songs.

The thing I can’t forgive is the little Asian restaurant, where they have the Hindu shrine in the corner of dinning room, and they still have Bing warbling in the background. A tad too loudly, so you are compelled to speak louder to get over the sounds of his white Christmas dreaming.

Why do they do this? It seems so incongruous to me for Hindus to be playing along with the Santa theme. I did ask: Rajiv why the Santa Songs? Because the customers like it.

Rajiv, this customer doesn’t doesn’t like it at all.

I was suddenly in the space of feeling that the good opinions of others was important, and that there was something wrong with me for not wanting to listen to Santa Songs while gobbling down my dahl.

At this point I found I was more irritated about asking or not asking for the music to be changed more than I was about the music itself.

I decided it was all too much and took the rest of the meal home in a plastic container - where there was not a single strain of Santa Muzak in sight.

So - should I have asked for Rajiv to get rid of Bing and bring on the Sitar? Or should I have just sucked it in and expected nothing else? Perhaps I should just stay at home, and hibernate until the world gets back to normal.

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Saturday, December 15th, 2007 at 8:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.