Blog of Magic Cheese

Since working retail jobs while I was in school to keep the food coming, Christmas has always been a special holiday for me.

I'm not Christian, and my family doesn't really celebrate Christmas in any traditional sense. December 25th with my father was always a cold and depressing day, with no food in the house and nowhere to go because everything was closed.

Things changed when I worked my first winter and became acquainted with the wonders of the holiday mix tape - 3 hours of mandatory saccharine tired music voiced by the most recent lineup of talentless vapid pop stars, on endless repeat, starting in October.

This winter, I've been amusing myself by checking off the days until I would inevitably find myself humming a Christmas jingle.

I sing a lot to myself. Songs that I hear while walking around never consciously register, but I'll find them playing in my head and find that I'm singing them for hours afterward. It's never good music, either. It's horrible horrible shit like commercial jingles and pop tunes. Then I have to mentally backtrack through my day until I figure out the location where I got infected, tent that area of my memory, and spray it with radioactive toxins.

Today it struck. I was standing in the office kitchen behind Natalie, our office manager, when I found myself humming some jingle I'd heard playing on a PA strapped to a streetlight on the way to buy lemons. Luckily, Natalie's very cool and didn't bat an eye when the person behind her cut off mid-hum and dropped the f-bomb with an angry shriek.

In fact, she understood even before I explained. She used to work for Macy's before coming to work for us, and the materialistic holiday nonsense starts there even earlier than in my retail experience. It was so bad that she refused to celebrate for the five years she worked for that company. Ha!

So we traded stories, pulled in Adam for a conversation about where to buy tea in Paris, and once again I love my intelligent, well-traveled, frugal co-workers. Some days this little company of 30 people gives me faith that this country's going to be all right.