While Greg was putting gas in the car on the way home from church, I fiddled with radio buttons. Country? Not right now. Oldies rock n’ roll? Well, sometimes, but the post-church mood didn’t quite lend itself to hearing about Mick Jagger’s inability to get satisfaction, so … no on oldies. And then I saw button number four and hesitated. This is the station that started playing non-stop Christmas music at the beginning of November. I have been ranting to anyone who would listen — which, surprisingly, is almost no one — that it is completely unacceptable and downright immoral for a radio station to start playing songs about Rudolph and Frosty when everyone still has their Halloween decorations up.

I don’t want to invoke my advanced old age as a benchmark of pure wisdom here, but the fact remains that when I was growing up, the Christmas rush didn’t start until a couple weeks after Thanksgiving. Now, we good Orthodox know that the Advent season starts in mid-November. But if anyone can tell me how hearing Madonna sing “Santa Baby” helps you with this, I’d like to hear it.

But it’s December now, and I had made my stand for propriety. So it was with great trepidation that I punched radio preset #4 to usher in the secular world’s idea of “season’s greetings.”

“Chest-nuuuts roasting on an open fire…” Oh thank goodness. An old standard — even, ironically enough, an old chestnut — to start with.

“Jack Froooost nippin’ at your nose…” And not a bad version of it. A little bit heavy on the “lounge-singer” stylings, but I suppose I can live with that.

“Yuletide carols being sung by a choir…” Who’s singing this anyway? It’s not Nat King Cole. Not Sinatra. Is it Harry Connick? Maybe it’s Mel Torme.

“And folks (chuckle) dressed up like Eskimoooos …” Ugh! Did he chuckle? What a pointless little addition. Was that supposed to sound warm and genuine? This is Mel Torme. I mean, he wrote this song, so I suppose he should have the last word on whether chuckles are randomly inserted, but I really think that was ill-advised.

Greg got back in the car and hesitated as the enormity of radio button #4 hit him. Then he started up the car and we started out again.

“Is that Harry Connick?” he asked after a minute.

“I think it’s Mel Torme,” I said. And then there was another line where a little warmth was meant to be conveyed and we got another of those little chuckles.

“It is Mel Torme,” we both said together.

We traveled on together through the rest of that song, just listening to this sappy old Christmas song. Not bad, really. I mean, a little stale, and maybe not able to tug the old heartstrings quite as much as Mel quite had in mind. But, y’know, it does bring back some memories. It does make me think about driving out to the Boy Scouts’ lot when we were kids and getting our tree. Digging out our Christmas tree lights and spending a half hour or so just untangling them and seeing which ones had died in the past year.

I was even able to keep to happy reveries as the next song started, a peppy little version of “Sleigh Ride.”

“Just hear those sleigh bells ringling, ting-ting-tingling, toooo…”

This should really be sung by the Carpenters and only by the Carpenters, because … well, y’know, they haven’t got that much of a legacy left and it only seems fair. But whoever the singer was doing this version (Greg and I never could figure it out), she had a good enough voice for the song. It seemed like she was going to acquit herself well, until she made the mistake of trying to supplement the lyric about “friends are calling ‘yoo hoo’” by demonstrating with a sudden “yoo hooo” thrown in. It’s an understandable impulse, and I think I’ve heard other singers do it at the same point. But it was startlingly loud, and for some reason a scratchy Kim Carnes quality crept into the singer’s voice. So her ‘yoo hoo’ sounded like Ma Kettle telling all the kids to come in and help her slaughter the hogs. Greg and I both made a sort of shocked ‘oh!’ noise and his hand jerked toward the off button, but we laughed instead and just kept plugging along.

We had gotten into a conversation by the next song, and so I really didn’t mean to reach automatically for the off button myself when it started up. But I don’t blame Greg for not believing me. It actually might have been a bit of knee-jerk self-preservation when I heard a couple syllables that hardly sounded like English followed by “bluh-whoooo Ch-ristmas without yooooo….”

Yep. It was Elvis singing “Blue Christmas.”

Greg started laughing right away at my unconscious gesture. “You are NOT going to turn off ‘Blue Christmas,” he said. “You’re the one who put on this station. We are having all Christmas music all the time. If you’re going to put on this station, you have to be able to take it.”

I laughed too, but I couldn’t help shaking my head. “Listen to that,” I said. “How did those back-up singers live with themselves?” The song features a couple women singers who accent every line with an ultra-high little up-and-down vocalization that sounds like a soprano owl imitation.

“Well, they’re just helpin’ the King out,” he explained sensibly.

So I didn’t touch that dial. I made it all the way through “Blue Christmas.” It must be December 2, or something thereabouts.

Season’s greetings.

(BTW, on the way to picking up the image of that Torme Christmas album, I came across this great story about him. It’s a fine bloggy anecdote, and might almost make me think twice about the guy.)