ah yes. the holidays, the smell of pine needles in crisp chilly air, the proliferation of poinsettias outside every deli, the twelve dollar rolls of wrapping paper, the exasperated sales people sweating with the heat of their own hatred, the grizzled elbows of old women jabbing into your kidneys in the endless jostle for optimal shopping position. such a beautiful time of year.

lest you think me an average every day humbug let me just say, i enjoy the holidays in my way. there are pleasant sensory associations, conversations with rarely seen relatives, and the fun of watching people open gifts, all of which can be very gratifying. i actually stress out about my purchases, wanting to offer only the most thoughtful, most enjoyable gifts to my loved ones. aside from that minor agita certain aspects of the proceedings always stick in my craw. not just the ferocity of shoppers, the crowds, the lines, the awful music in every enclosed space. those are well known and widely despised qualities of the season. feeling your pleasure ebb at these hardly qualifies you for true humbuggery anymore. they are just unfortunate facts of life. what really gets to me are the little things. the things that, were i filled with the holiday spirit, as i’m told i ought to be, i’d most likely be able to overlook.

case in point. carolers. now, first off understand one thing. i am in new york city. i am not in a cutesey cottage house in a grassy suburb. i do not drink eggnog with my neighbors and exchange cookies with them. i do not cover my home with mechanical santas and eight million mega watts of christmas lights, then take the neighborhood tour to compare my accomplishments to those of my community. new york city is not the place for these things. there are pockets to be sure, little microcosms of traditional christmas kept alive through great effort. but by and large the city remains during the holidays what it is during the rest of the year. a vast unpinpointable space. a place for anonymity, for individuality on a scale which dilutes any cultural norm to near unrecognizability. i like this about the city. i like being left to my own devices. i am happy to not have to smile at my neighbors, happy to not need to know their names and feign interest in their lives at the mailbox. so this brings me to carolers.

carolers are a christmas staple. a tradition seen as warm and quaint. people being drawn out onto their porch by the angelic song coming unexpectedly from their front yard. fine. in the suburbs you live in an area of cultural equality of some sort, meaning your culture is roughly equivalent to that of your neighbors, otherwise you would not have chosen the area to live in. the song starts up in catholic neighborhoods, “come all ye faithful” and catholics come out of their homes to see neighbors they know and recognize, they are being serenaded and all is warm and fuzzy. that’s very nice. now imagine carolers here in new york where people rent apartments wherever they can manage to find one, where tax bracket and proximity to subway stations are the cultural glue that decide a neighborhoods composition, and where 99% of the people passing by your apartment are strangers, and that by design. this is a place where simple eye contact isn’t misconstrued as a challenge, but rather is assumed to be. this is a place where people want to be left alone to do their thing and not be hassled by people and their annoying opinions. thus, in this city the sound of carolers seems somehow aggressive, almost like an attack. people out there singing do so almost defiantly. there is a sense of self consciousness about them because they must suspect what they are doing is, neither entirely natural for their surroundings, nor perhaps completely appreciated either. they sing too loudly, overcompensating.

this year a crowd of perhaps 80 people gathered on my street. directly in front of my ground level apartment actually. each and every one of them either in their 40’s or in single digits. parents defying what they know to be the order of things here in the city to foist an old tradition on their bewildered spawn, and their anonymous neighbors. they looked as if they were protesting something rather than celebrating. the children shivered and fidgeted, most likely wanted to return to their video games and tinsel. and here in this predominantly jewish neighborhood they struck up the band so to speak and let forth with “come all ye faithful”.

now, i, a young man who came to new york to leave behind the trappings of small town america had 80 defiant crooners outside my window belting some awful off-pitch jesus tale directly into my livingroom. it was like some catholic exhibitionist circle jerk. my girlfriend attempted to raise the volume of the movie we were watching above the din, but to no avail. we sat and waited for the invasion of our livingroom to subside. in the windows across the street blinds shut and curtains drew closed. all ye faithful were not coming i guess. in new york, looking out your window to see a huge crowd of strangers is never a welcome thing, no matter how benign their intent. in this case, intent benign or not, the caroling struck me as supremely invasive and overwhelmingly annoying. it was a long hard week at work, made harder by the attempts to buy gifts dispersed throughout. i was in my robe, slumped, trying to decompress, my girlfriend was lying down trying to do the same. i imagined all the manuara flames in this neighborhood flickering, agitated. after about 6 minutes the song finally came to an end and we sighed our relief, i think i muttered something with the word ‘fucking’ as it’s centerpiece. annoying as it was, we were tolerant and let them have their defiant, forced, christmas moment. that is until the second song started up.

“from god our heavenly father… blah blah… an angel… something something” and that was it. my place as anonymous, jostled, stressed out new yorker allowed me then to do something which went against all the greeting card slogans i’ve ever read, which flew in the face of every christmas special i’ve ever seen. i fought back.

first i went to my apartment front door intercom and began playing accompaniment on the buzzer. bZZZZZ bZZZZZZZ bZZZZZZZZ bZZZZZZ. you know that awful, loud, jarring noise every new york apartment intercom makes as welcome when unlocking the door. bZZZZZZ bZZZZZZZZZZ bZZZZZ bZZZZZZZ. some of the children looked around perhaps sensing danger. bZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ bZZZZZ bZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. the parents straightened up bracing themselves against the onslaught, but ultimately the tactic did not prove effective because they just sang louder, more defiantly.

next i went to the computer and called up the most obnoxious, aggressively bass-heavy hip-hop song i could find, i opened my windows, angled my speakers outward, turned up the levels on the subwoofer, and joyfully clicked the ubiquitous right pointing triangle- PLAY. “break the barricade head straight for the sound man, bring the beat down if the shit aint poundin” at first they were brave, trying to seem unfazed… “ohhh tiding of comfort and joy….” but my counterattack was relentless and window shaking, “nine niggas come up in the club, looking for a woman to rub…” i threw in some more buzzer buzzings for good measure, and with that the singing subsided and in mere moments the crown moved on.

i imagined all the neighbors applauding in their separate anonymous apartments. my girlfriend laughed so hard that i started laughing too. i imagined all the kwanzaa kinaras, and chanukah menorahs smoking ever so slightly, all the beautifully quiet, dignified christmas trees smelling of of pine and sap. it was the smell of victory! i imagined all the prized new york quiet returned to the neighboring homes, the annoyance melting away. i turned off the music and sat down, still laughing, thinking “ah, the fabled joy of christmas finally realized.” applied humbuggery at it’s best.