Roger Rabbits with Jim Bunny

It’s in your face, beckoning, tugging at your wallet.

‘It’ is Christmas. And it seems to come calling earlier and earlier.

This year it was about seven weeks out from Christmas, early November, when retail started decking the shops and stores and supermarkets with “boughs of holly” and we were being lulled into getting joyous, getting in the spirit, and to start spending.

People noticed, people talked. Put the love, hope and joy aside – forget the true message, just get spending.

It was suggested to me those decorations could be a hangover from last year, they hadn’t got around to taking them down.

Or perhaps the Christmas seasons now overlap. There’s no downtime. There has to be peace and goodwill 365 days a year. That would be a stretch.

Anyhow a banner declaring ‘Joy to the World’ blared out at me on the Christmassy archway into the supermarket. Of course, banners don’t blare, but it felt like it was blaring. It just felt loud and intrusive because it was unseasonably and unreasonably early. We hadn’t even had Guy Fawkes. It was barely November. I’d dropped in for some bloke essentials – chorizo and a six pack – and suddenly I am engulfed by a tsunami of Christmas spirit.

By the carrots

“We will sing, sing, sing. Joy to the World.” Well, no I wouldn’t sing. People aren’t blessed with inexhaustible reserves of ‘joy’ to share with the world. And what joy I do possess would require spreading very thinly to make it cheerfully, let alone joyfully, through the seven weeks until Christmas Day.

But a lofty sentiment nonetheless. ‘Joy to the World.’ Especially in these grim, soulless times.

So why not embrace it? We might even get to like it.

And by the time I’d wandered by the broccoli and carrots towards the fresh mesclun salad greens, adjacent to the avos and across the way from the truss cocktail tomatoes and bean sprouts, I had become a self-anointed, proselytising, apostle of Isaac Watts. What a bloke.

Isaac Watts, Izzy to me and his mates, was the 17th Century hymnist, who wrote ‘Joy to the World’.

It was a winner. Should have made it to the Billboard Hot 100.

And to celebrate the man and his work, I gave fruit and vege a full blast of classical Izzy. “Joy to the world, the Lord is Come,” I declared. “Let Earth receive her King.”

It didn’t go well. “Weirdo,” muttered a young chap in a Santa hat stacking carrots and caulis. “Freak,” said teen #1. “Yeah, whacko!” said teen #2. No-one was getting the ‘joy’.

They were probably unaware that ‘Joy to the World’ was never meant to be this way, was never to be a Christmas carol, had no link to Christmas. Izzy, a congregational minister, intended his poem to be about ‘the return’ rather than ‘the birth’ – not a song of incarnation but Christ’s return. So not a Christmas carol but a hymn. I did say it might be interesting.

But Izzy had no control over the destiny of his work, and 200 years later it remains one of the most published hymns. “Let every heart prepare Him room, and heav’n nature sing.” It’s a ‘go to’ at Christmas, and so has become a carol rather than a hymn. Or is there such a thing as a Christmas hymn?

Antsy

Izzy got antsy over what the market did to his ‘hymn’, he got his ruffle in a twist and crawled off into a dusty rectory to write yet another poem.

There are none so zealous as the newly-converted, so I gave fruit and veg another burst of Izzy’s best work. “Joy to the world. We will sing, sing, sing.”

A mature woman with an arm full of bowel-friendly broccoli, beetroot and Brussels sprouts stopped and stared at me.

“Shush!” she said. “You need therapy. You need a hobby.”

Then I get accosted by two big, burly blokes, whose mother had dressed them identically in black.

“Excuse me Sir. You can’t just willy-nilly start spreading spurious messages of joy and goodwill to all men. It detracts from the shopping experience,” said big burly bloke #1.

“Joyful, joyful, we adore thee,” I replied.

“Sorry Sir. Gushing Christmas cheer, and love and selflessness amongst the anti-bacterial toilet brushes, multi-purpose spray wipes and dunny rolls is inappropriate and won’t be tolerated.”

But it’s okay to foist Mariah Carey on us – three months of ‘All I Want for Christmas is you’ on loop in the supermarket, or any shop, is an assault on the senses.

I wonder if retail staff have a ‘Mariah Carey’ clause enshrined in their employment contracts?

Every time ‘AIWFCIY’ plays in-store, the meter clicks over, they’re compensated for having their musical sensitivities violated, and for carol fatigue and torture.

After all, it turns about $NZ5 million in royalties every Christmas for Carey, so she could afford to share her joy with the world.