It’s past thanksgiving now, and tomorrow is December. I think even the most cynical early-Christmas haters can agree that it is an acceptable time to start celebrating. Trees can be bought and decorated. Lights may be put up. It is now acceptable for radio stations, and more importantly you, to start listening to Christmas music.

Christmas music poses several problems for a person with discerning musical taste:

1) Most of it sucks.

2) There are a lot of tolerable Christmas songs who’s most popular versions are performed by intolerable artists.

3) Even when good songs are performed by good artists, they are overplayed and result in inevitable burn-out by the time Christmas arrives.

In the past, I’ve spent most holidays ignoring Christmas music, or listening to it as little as possible. I’m done being a Grinch though. For 2009 I have devised a strategy which I hope will address all of the problems above.

This is my plan for 2009:

Step 1: Acquire as much Christmas music as possible. Put this in a single playlist.

I’ve stumbled across twenty hours of it in my iTunes library (which is a combination of three libraries). The important thing is to get as much music as possible. Don’t stick to stuff you know you will like or even artists you’ve heard of. I can’t advise how to go about acquiring such music. Just do it.

Step 2: Set playlist to shuffle.

This is important. I appreciate the album as a unit of art as much as anyone, but I don’t think that this applies to Christmas music. The shuffle will break up the monotony of listening to the same sound for an hour, and will ultimately allow you to enjoy more of it.

Step 3: When going through the playlist, skip songs as often as you want, and delete the ones you don’t like.

This step should make each subsequent listen through your playlist more enjoyable.

Repeat Step 2 - Step 3 as necessary

Happy holidays! (and look forward to me throwing up an original christmas song or two in the coming days)