i don't particularly enjoy most christmas music. i'm not a christian, and having grown up in the oppressive atmosphere of mormonism, it's safe to say i have emotional baggage about christmas. i've become less spiteful and more accepting towards the holiday, as i've processed and worked through the sting (trauma?) of growing up in a cultish church which suppressed enormous parts of my sense of selves for my entire childhood
ironically though, i actually have more negative feelings towards pop secular christmas music than i do towards the overtly religious christmas hymns sung communally in church choir. this is because stores playing music is already a difficult thing for me as an autistic person, and i dread when it comes time to hear "last christmas" or "all i want for christmas" repeatedly on store speakers, while i'm already overloaded with information and stimulation.
most pop christmas music does not actually step out of safe and marketable thematic and acoustic ground, and it tends to sound pretty samey. more adventurous artists may make comedic songs about christmas instead, and these can be fun, but for whatever reason, they usually just don't resonate that much with me. the novelty usually wears off pretty quickly.
so when i became obsessed with lemon demon over the course of 2021, and december rolled around, i was kind of hesitant to listen to that entry in the discography, "I Am Become Christmas EP". i worried it would just be more of what i'm used to- gimmicky tacky comedy Christmas songs that wear thing after the first listen
i was wrong. i fell in love with this EP, basically instantly.
at times, it is emotionally vulnerable. at times, it paints strange and wonderful imagery. at times it is just ridiculously funny and probably hews closest to "gimmicky tacky comedy Christmas song" but maybe i'm just biased towards lemon demon, so i like it anyways. and so much of the sound of this album is just... so atmospheric.
I Am Become Christmas EP is very short, at only 16 minutes long, and i really recommend listening to it, or at least listening to "Christmas Will Be Soon" if nothing else. you can get it on bandcamp for 4$.
have you done that? good. now i'm going to talk, track-by-track, about why i love this album so much. after "Prelude to Presents", a short but tonally important instrumental which provides musical foreshadowing and gives the album a more cohesive, almost cinematic feel, we are introduced to the first full track, and it's one i have a lot of feelings about, so, buckle in.
Christmas Will Be Soon
despite the deceptively cheery-sounding name, this is a song about the christianization of pagan europe, about cultural forgetting, and it destroys me emotionally.
this song just makes me feel so sad. i put this album on yesterday for maybe the first time in a year, and when this song came on i realized i was going to start crying.
when neil cicierega, someone who usually writes songs about drinking rain from the gutter or weird guys who are also clouds, suddenly drops lyrics like this on me:
One last toast to has-been ghosts
Ooh, Christmas will be soon
Let's stop burning Yule logs
In faith of fools
Gods our kids won't know
Idols come and go
Ordinary folk
Floating like the smoke
We are adrift
Take this gift
Christmas!
i just have to stop all other thoughts in order to process my emotions. i think about all of the beautiful rituals and traditions that were just erased, forgotten, because of christianity.
when i hear "one last toast to has-been ghosts", i feel the pain that those ancient spirits and gods must have felt, being discarded, forgotten. i imagine them watching the people they'd had a symbiotic relationship with for centuries, ... moving on without them. where there had once been awe, now there's only dismissal.
"gods our kids won't know" makes me mourn for the rich pagan cultural heritage i might have been brought up with, if only things in the long ago past had gone differently- if only christianity hadn't homogenized my ancestors' cultures, if only those same ancestors hadn't participated in the atrocities of settler colonialism, in the process further erasing their senses of cultural selves, to be replaced with homogenous, empty, soul-crushing white usian capitalist culture.
ordinary folk / floating like the smoke / we are adrift / take this gift / christmas!
we could have had a culture of wild and sacred places, beautiful myths of becoming animal, even symbiosis with the nonhuman world, instead of a culture of violence and strip malls and american civil religion.
and a thing in particular about this song that gets me, is that it's not about being converted at swordpoint. i'm not a historian, so i asked a wonderful acquaintance of mine, Bree NicGarran, who, alongside being an author and podcaster, is very knowledgeable about pagan history, and has done a lot of work to dispel misinformation in the pagan+witchcraft communities. the context she had to offer was helpful:
Swordpoint conversion certainly happened. Old sacred sites were publicly and ostentiously destroyed or repurposed for Christian monuments and churches. Older beliefs were also repurposed or given new meaning and rolled into the canon and calendar for the area. [...] But equally often, conversion happened by syncretism or outright bribery. Christianity moved in with the money and resources to improve an area and told the common folk, "Hey! Looks like things are shit. Convert our religion and we'll build a monastery or a church or a nunnery and that will be a source of revenue for your village AND a place of refuge if you get attacked or the weather turns nasty. Sound good?"
"But what about our seasonal festivals? And all our traditional symbols?"
"Bring them with, we'll blend things together and see how it goes. But just so we're clear, you're doing this for OUR God now."
obviously this song is fictionalized, and simplified, and self aware, but because of this framing of it being ""willing"", when i hear lines like "this is who we are" or "the winds have changed / and we are strange", i feel the ghosts of long-ago people who had to tell themselves to not look back, who took what they could with them, but had to leave so much behind
and, it hurts. so much cultural loss, so much forgetting, so much walking away...
deep breath
anyways,let's move on to the more lighthearted songs on this album! for most of them i have less to say, so the rest of this post shouldn't be too long.
Arora Borealis
this is a fun listen. it's a very catchy song about being in love during some kind of wintery eldritch apocalypse. i feel like dancing whenever i hear it, the lyrics are very sensory evocative- i feel like i'm watching a movie when i listen to it, i can imagine all the scenes so vividly.
the lyrics are funny, but also really well-written. like most lemon demon songs, even though it is a humorous premise, it doesn't actually rely on the joke still being funny in order for it to be fun to listen to. the humor is more subdued, a pervasive atmospheric mix of horror and fun.
also, it makes me think of this funny steamed hams amv
SAD
this is an oddly catchy song about seasonal affective disorder. while i do have seasonal affective disorder, it's tied to the summer, not the winter, (and it's gotten less severe since getting into botany) so i can't actually relate that much to the premise of this song. but it's really fun to listen to, and i like singing along to it. a lot of the rhymes in this song are unexpected, and i like that. the instruments are very twangy and stimmy, and the overall sound of it makes me think of the color beige.
it also reminds me of this cool rhythm heaven custom remix, which was one of my first exposures to lemon demon! potential photosensitive epilepsy trigger warning in the video description.
CryptoSanta
the track title has not aged well (and i mean that literally, not euphemistically- it has a wildly different connotation to someone in 2022 then it did in 2012, when the album was released). i am just now realizing as i write this that it is actually intended to be a pun on "secret santa"
this song is about a corporate plot to murder santa claus going wrong, resulting in an executive getting tf'ed into santa claus by nebulously-explained Christmas Lasers.
i absolutely love this song because the premise of it is just so overwhelmingly absurd. santa body horror! it also has a really good book-end effect with "prelude to presents", the opening instrumental track, which features musical motifs from this song. it really seals the album as a single cohesive concept.
the fact that it goes so fucking hard, that it has this strange, fun, exciting, off-kilter time signature which keeps you on your toes, that it's so full of ear candy, means that long after the humorous elements of the song have worn off, i still want to listen to it, because it's just a really good song, regardless of what the lyrics are even about. i sometimes get the urge to listen to this song even in summer.
i alluded to this with "Arora Borealis" as well, but this really shows how lemon demon has a talent for writing songs that are simultaneously funny, but are also somehow still just as fun to listen to on your tenth listen as on your first, when the novelty of it has worn off.
it also reminds me of a christmas movie i grew up with, "the santa clause", the premise of which is that if you kill santa, you become santa. i have no idea if this movie is good, i refuse to ever watch it again, but the line "the santafication process has already begun!" from that movie will haunt me forever.
anyways
i hope you enjoyed this little excursion into my favorite festive album. if this music meant anything to you, or if you just enjoy it, i encourage you to buy it on bandcamp!
it's still little early for any kind of "happy holidays" signoff, but i hope the last weeks of fall treat(ed) you well, and that your winter will be/is cosy and spent around people who love you. <3