Christmas music filled the grocery aisles when I shopped this week. It's been playing there since Halloween as I recall, and it might as well have been playing before Halloween because most of the songs are frightful, or at least the renditions selected by whatever fiend chooses grocery store Muzac.

Consider "My Favorite Things." That's pretty fey even performed by Julie Andrews but when it's boomed out, in a manly man manner...Well,what if the Marboro Man suddenly broke out into "Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens." Didn't work for me.

Neither did most of the other arrangements. Do chestnuts need to roast on an open fire to orchestration straight from Mahler? Should "White Christmas" be intoned with all the solemnity of a hymn for salvation? Does Santa really need to "ho ho ho" like an inmate out of Marat Sade?

Still, the maniacal Mr Claus didn't disturb me nearly as much as the faux child who saw mommy kissing him. I'm not sure where the singer got her idea of children from. Imagine a cross between Lolita and Peter Pan as sung by Betty Boop.

By comparison "Jingle Bells" sung in an a British accent so upper crust as to approach twit level, wasn't so bad. As I compared the prices of tinned beans, I could almost feel the singer's joy, as her sleigh dashed past the cheerily lit hovels at the outskirts of the estate giving her a heart warming glimpse of how those quaint little people live.

Maybe I was irritated by the fifties style musical approach even the newer recordings seemed to take. We don't like our parents' music do we? Then again, there was an old style duet of "Baby It's Cold Outside." You know that smirking "he pleads, she purrs" sort of thing they did back then when society was more repressed?

Actually, they definitely had a way with sexy music back in the fifties. Funny I never noticed at the time.

I see snow's on the way and day time temperatures below freezing. Baby that's cold.