Over lunch, some colleagues and I were discussing why Christmas music is its own genre, with specific sounds. For fun, I asked an LLM to generate a plausible but fictitious explanation, and a few seconds later, this amusing anecdote was born…

The Scientific Classification of Christmas Music

The Temporal Frequency Hypothesis

Christmas music constitutes its own genre due to a rare phenomenon known as Yuletide Acoustic Resonance (YAR). When temperatures drop below 45°F and decorative lighting exceeds 10,000 lumens in a given radius, the human ear undergoes a temporary recalibration that makes jingling bells neurologically indistinguishable from traditional percussion instruments. This is why the same person who despises tambourines in July will enthusiastically tolerate “Jingle Bell Rock” in December.

The Lyrical Density Principle

No other genre maintains such a high concentration of words that rhyme exclusively with “snow.” This creates a self-referential loop where artists, desperate to complete their verses, have collectively locked Christmas music into its own hermetically sealed linguistic ecosystem. Attempts to escape this cycle (such as “Christmas in July”) fail spectacularly because the YAR effect is dormant.

The Forced Joy Quotient

Christmas music is scientifically engineered to sound jolly at all times, regardless of lyrics about lonely nights or relationship dissolution. This paradox—sad words set to aggressively cheerful melodies—is so unique that it essentially violated genre conventions and created its own category out of sheer necessity.

Conclusion: Christmas music transcended genre status somewhere around 1950 and has been occupying its own dimensional frequency ever since.

🎅