A Teenybopper Christmas!

I never knew the true meaning of holiday stress until I became an elementary school teacher. Man, the turkey was nothing in comparison with the Christmas mix CD. Last year my private lesson students and their slightly overbearing mothers showered me with gifts for Christmas, and I hadn't thought to so much as bring some candy to our last class. So this year I wanted to think of some cool but cheap gift for the six tweenage girls I teach when it hit me: The. Jonas. Brothers. What does a twelve year old girl want more than Kevin, Joe and Nick crooning, "All I want for Christmas is the girl of my dreams"?  Easy, right? And I would feel no guilt downloading their songs off the internet, because these kids (or their exploitive parents) make ten cents every time one of their adoring fans buy a pocket folder.

But from there, in the true spirit of any holiday project it spiraled quickly out of control. Of course I wanted to maximize the educational value too, so I would need to give them the lyrics. And if I was going to give them the lyrics I would need to make sure they correspond exactly to the version I was giving them and were grammatically correct. No one was "gonna" do anything in my libretto. (Eek! Teaching has also changed me from a descriptivist linguist into a prescreptivist schoolmarm.) And if I'm going to go through all the effort to get the words just right, of course I have to present them in a cute little book. And if I'm going to make a cute little book, I'm going to need craft supplies. And before I knew it quick, easy and cheap, became slow, painstaking and not as cheap. And then there's the fact I don't want to hear another Christmas carol for a year. One of the best parts of Christmas ruined.