Just as I’ve said before; yes you read that correctly and yes I’m serious. While you sharpen your pitchforks, allow me to set some parameters. For the purposes of this article, I’ll be referring to acts of an amateur acapella group traveling from door-to-door singing outdated Christmas songs. While standing in a high foot-traffic public place and performing can also be grating (depending largely on the skill of the performer), that is beyond the scope of my scorn today.
Christmas carolers walk around residential neighborhoods during the Winter Solstice holiday season and knock on unsuspecting doors at night. When the startled resident answers the door, the unaccomplished acapella group begins singing a Christmas tune from hundreds of years ago. The interaction is rarely a lengthy one, often times the homeowner shuts the door on the nonconsensual doorstep concert. However, these mediocre musicians frequently overstay their welcome, acting entitled to a payment for a service nobody asked for.
Compare this to the 2017 WannaCry ransomware attack, in which millions of businesses, households and government buildings across the world were impacted. The malware barged into the digital sanctuary of the victim. The nuisance malware would then overstay its welcome, refusing to leave until a Bitcoin payment was made. Assuredly, nobody asked for a visit from WannaCry. The culprits behind the WannaCry attack instantly drew ire from citizens and governments the world over (deservedly so).
The first scenario is viewed as a quaint celebration, while the other is viewed as a crime. However, when we strip away the cultural window-dressings, the behavior is the same, attempted extortion. Extortion relies on a victim being targeted by a perpetrator; the criminal will threaten to harm (either physically, financially, or by reputation) the victim unless the victim pays the future-inmate. Of course, the victim paying up will ensure that the payment will happen far more frequently than the just one time.
We all need to address the elephant in the room; carolers are privileged, like super privileged. Granted, that is a term that is a bit overused in our modern society, however the carolers exhibit numerous privileges as they shove their tunes down the throats of unwilling homeowners. Firstly, they benefit from Christmas Privilege, in which our modern culture overwhelmingly views the holiday positively (despite the fact it’s mostly just a Q4 marketing campaign now). Something tells me that the typical American homeowner would be far less tolerant of acapella groups coming to their front doors sharing Kwanza songs or Islamic hymns. It’s as if approaching the Winter Solstice shields these carolers from the consequences of trespassing. Although, these unwanted musical porch performances would be far less frequent if I had my way. Next, comes the issue of the chorus demanding payment; many jurisdictions are quick to put up anti-panhandling laws, and even quicker to arrest. However, since these privileged carolers are asking for money for singing and simply don’t look like a panhandler, this somehow makes their activity okay; whatever happened to justice being blind? We could start stepping up police patrols in residential neighborhoods during the Winter Solstice to discourage this crime from occurring; who knows, we might just diversify the prison population by stuffing cells full of carolers rather than weed smokers.
I expect that our radicalized friends on the far-right to accuse me of being part of the War on Christmas. As I’ve stated before, Christmas is a real holiday, despite all of the commercialization. Many of us love to claim to hate the commercialization of the holiday yet see nothing wrong with a misguided band of carolers literally demanding money while they do so under the pretenses of a religious holiday. Carolers are part of the problem despite claiming to be focused on the community.
“Well Dan, you’ve spilled quite a bit of ink complaining about carolers. What do you propose we do?” an annoyed reader of mine will inevitably ask. Firstly, that question assumes that there is a need for proactive action to be taken at all. In case you haven’t noticed, religious affiliation is on a steep downward trend. If this trend continues, caroling will hardly exist in another generation from now. Therefore, waiting for the trend to finally die is a completely legitimate option. “But Dan, that’s boring! Give me something spicy!” a regular fan of mine (just kidding: I don’t have those!) will cry out. Okay fine, as I alluded to earlier, we can start enforcing the damn law. Given that home surveillance cameras are pretty common now, these trespassers can now be caught on camera. Since prosecutors are elected officials that need to pad their stats in order to keep their cushy government gigs; they tend to love slam-dunk cases. Finally, it may sound pretty entry-level, but don’t give them money. If we keep giving these leeches money, they’ll never go away.
We wish you a Merry Christmas, and an extortion-free year!
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