blogger profile

Sabrina Heise

Editorial Assistant

True confessions: * Not as politically aware as I should be. * I bite my nails. * I didn't love the Sex and the City movie. * I am actually, really addicted to sugar and should probably be in a 12-step program. * By addicted, I mean, I lash out at people and get grumpy when I haven't had my sug...

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Christmas Time Is Here...

When I was younger, Christmas was an event. I spent practically the entire month of December breathless with decorating for Christmas, Christmas shopping, Christmas parties, Christmas events, and the like. I couldn’t get enough of Christmas music: songs rejoicing in love, laughter, family and all the things Christmas represents. I lept at the opportunity to help bake Christmas cookies and decorate the tree, all with carols playing in the background.

And then, in high school, I got the brilliant idea to work as a “sales associate” (”indentured servant”) at Gap. They have these Christmas CDs that repeat every three hours...knowing full-well that no customer is going to be shopping for that long, so it’s more than enough time to fill their whole Gap experience with Christmas cheer at full volume, without having to repeat a single song. 3 hours, however, is not long enough for the Gap employees. In an 8-hour shift, this system of repetition allowed you to hear the same, updated, hip versions of the Christmas classics 2.66 (repeating) times.

After a few busy Saturdays of this music, it felt less like holiday merriment and more like mind control. This, coupled with the stress of those charming customers who are lured to freshly-folded sweater piles as moths are to flames, creates a bit of stress, to put it mildly.

To put it honestly, it creates the kind of feeling that when you get sent to the back room to check and make sure that a certain style of jeans is really, truly, honestly sold out in a size 00, that you stop for a moment to repeatedly stab empty boxes with boxcutters.

It got to the point where Christmas music (especially “So This is Christmas” by John Lennon or “Last Christmas” by George Michael) had me almost in tears. “Please,” I’d plead, “can’t we just put CNN on in the background?”

Now that it’s been almost 6 years since my harrowing experiences at Gap, I find myself humming, instead of cringing, to holiday songs. But my traumatic experiences cause me to refold piles of sweaters that I’ve messed up and give sympathetic grins to all of the stressed out (but still smiling!--it’s the mind control at work) salespeople of the store that taught me that Christmas is more than a holiday--it’s a business.