I don’t want to alarm you but I am asking you to think of me as I head into an operating room for major brain surgery in two hours. It is a very delicate operation, designed to remove the song Holly Jolly Christmas from my mind, where it plays 24 hours a day at this time of year.
The surgeon explained to me that he will be touching a nerve inside my brain with a very cold instrument and if successful, the song should be instantly removed from my thought machine forever. However, and this is a considerable risk, if he happens to miss the mark by even the smallest degree and touches instead an adjacent nerve, Holly Jolly Christmas could very well be replaced by Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree or worse, Santa Baby.
I am willing to take the risk. I first heard Holly Jolly Christmas when I was 10 years old after my parents brought the record home from a store in Mitchell. I have been listening to it for 57 years. Doctors say that even 20 years of exposure to it would have lodged it in my brain, probably forever.
The operation to remove the song is known as The Burl Ives, after the folksinger who recorded it.
Wish me luck!
And have a Merry Christmas. I plan to do the same, hoping it will not be holly jolly. We have a nice tree but I have no plans to rock around it. And I am not a Santa expert, but I am pretty sure, at 1,600 years old, that he is not a Baby.
©2018 Jim Hagarty
