Photography © Shannon O’Connor

 

All I Want for Christmas Is You

You go into the drugstore. You intend to buy shampoo and conditioner. It’s the holiday season, and you’re aware of what could happen.

You spent a few years working at TJ Maxx, where you had been tortured by Christmas music, the same songs droning, “Santa Baby,” “Last Christmas,” “Jingle Bell Rock,” and others just as bad. After that you worked at Macy’s, and it was the same thing, over and over, the songs killing pieces of your soul, and serving them to hungry elves in Santa’s village.

You dash through the aisles because you’re on a mission, but it hits you. That song.

Mariah Carey crooning, “All I want for Christmas is you.”

That’s the song you hate most, the honeyed optimism, the saccharine sappiness. Over and over again it played when you worked retail, and you hoped you would not hear it this year.

You drop your shampoo in the aisle and start screaming.

You don’t know if you’re making a sound, or if it’s all in your head.

The store manager comes, and he asks you a question, but you don’t hear him.

He calls the police and an ambulance takes you away, back to the place you went before you worked at retail jobs. The hospital in Jamaica Plain on Robinwood Avenue. Not Robin Hood Avenue, Robinwood Avenue. Not to take from the rich and give to the poor, to take from the poor because you are the poor.

Because of that song. Mariah Carey.

All I want for Christmas is you.

You hadn’t been in the hospital for longer than you can remember. But you recall what it was like to be insane, you thought the world had ended; there was nothing left except for what you could see in those rooms.

The ambulance drops you off, and you walk in, crying.

“That song,” you say.

“A former retail worker?” the admitting doctor says. “It happens this time of year.”

All I want for Christmas is you.

In the hospital, they don’t play Christmas music because it is full of former retail employees traumatized by the music that brings them back to the days of selling toys and scarves and knick-knacks and socks.

“Back in the time I worked at TJ Maxx, people used to get into fistfights with each other,” you say to nobody in particular in the day hall. “Little kids used to pee in the toy aisle.”

“When I worked at Bath and Body Works, customers would wrestle over coupons that dropped on the floor,” a woman said. “And the place always stunk. I lost my sense of smell working there.”

“I worked at Toys R Us, people used to scream about Barbie dolls,” a guy said. “Every year there was a toy that the parents would come to blows over. Now there are no more Toys R Us stores.”

Patients commiserated about their time at low-paying jobs during the holidays. But it was that one song that was the most hated.

All I want for Christmas is you.

Christmas trauma lives in every retail worker. Nobody knows why employees are tortured with that type of music. You don’t think anyone enjoys it.

You hope that you will not get out of the hospital before New Year’s Day, so you will not hear the dreaded music. You don’t mind being locked up in a psychiatric hospital if it means that you are safe from the songs, and you will not be forced into merriment, because that is not what you want.

You don’t care about seeing your family and receiving presents and eating Christmas dinner and sugar cookies. You want to be safe from the torture of Mariah and the others, the wailing about the holidays and happiness, when you know it’s false.

You and the other patients on the locked ward will eat meatloaf and drink fruit punch, and make holiday ornaments from construction paper and angels out of toilet paper rolls. You will not have to listen to Christmas music, because if you did, you might end up murdering everyone in the unit.

That wouldn’t be the right thing to do on Christmas day.

Christmas is about peace, and the only way to find peace is to be locked away, far from Christmas music that will make former retail workers insane. The best gift is to not have to listen to that wretched music, and that is all you want for Christmas, to be free of the memories that anger you, to be released from the past, to a place devoid of Christmas, in a wrapped gift box with a shiny red bow on top where nobody can find you.

 

Shannon O’Connor has been published previously in Oddball Magazine, as well as 365 Tomorrows, Wordgathering, and The Alien Buddha Press. She tries to avoid Christmas music whenever she can, but sometimes it’s impossible. She lives in the Boston area.