Give It a Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

The Christmas season is loud, as it must be, but we mustn't forget the need for quiet.

- Joseph Bottum

Christmas sings and shouts and Christmas roars. The holiday has come around again this year, the way it does, and what we forget in the intervening months is how loud it is. The noise starts its attack on the music speakers in the supermarket around Halloween-then hammers itself on to the rooftops with the rows of colored lights and rings in the season with the bells of the Salvation Army members, puffing out great breaths of steam on the cold city sidewalks as they stand beside their red kettles. Christmas wants to blare and blast, to make itself known, and what Christmas wants, it gets.

How else are we to explain the carols that hunt us down each December and shout into our ears that "we three kings of Orient are" and "little Lord Jesus no crying he makes" and, worst of all, "if thou knowst it telling"? "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" originally had the sense that gentlemen were to rest merry, meaning happily, but too often these days is taken to mean that merry gentlemen need to stop drinking spiked eggnog and warbling in the street.