Member-only story
An opinion columnist should not simply share stuff they’ve been thinking about. Readers have every right to expect an op-ed writer to purvey informed opinions; to answer the big questions of the day not with Kerouac-style riffing, but with reasoned logic supported by research, interviews, statistics, and whatever else it might take to give the reader a basis to form their own informed opinions.
If not for columnists like me, people might hear one little news story about some legal or political matter, develop a half-assed opinion on it without knowing how things really are, and go blissfully about their day. My job is to insulate readers from this sort of tragedy. I dive into grim topics and bring you horrible, unvarnished truths — truths which tends to be considerably worse than you might have otherwise thought.
And so it is with bad holiday music, a topic which is not unlike law or politics. People talk about it, they have opinions on it, they think they know something about it. But the few of us who dig a little deeper discover that reality is quite different from what they assumed. Trust me on this: Just because you have a mild distaste for “Little Drummer Boy,” or you’ve been annoyed by a rendition of “Twelve Days of Christmas” in your dentist’s office, or you’ve decided to read your own relationship issues into “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” that doesn’t…
