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In stores and malls, I haven't heard any religious Christmas music since sometime in the 1990s. It's just one billion repetitions of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", "Chestnuts Rosting on an Open Fire", and various pop abominations.
My two local malls (Tysons Corner Center and Tysons Galleria) and the stores in them, in fact, have really been skimping on Christmas decorations in the past few years. In the 1980s, the whole place used to get transformed: tinsel and colored lights everywhere, decorated trees in every shop window. Seeing this used to be one of the things I most looked forward to about the Christmas season.
Nowadays, there are just a few anemic strings of white lights hanging from the ceiling (colored lights seem to be permanently out of fashion for some reason) and almost no stores have any decorations put up at all!
I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the area now has a sizable Muslim population (when I go there now, maybe a quarter to a third of the women are wearing headscarves or hijab) who'd rather not see a Christian holiday celebrated, although I doubt anyone would admit publically that that's the reason.
I think this is part of a wider aesthetic shift towards being sleek/minimalistic that has been happening for a long time. I distinctly remember noticing as a kid in the early 2000s that there was a trend with upper-class people more likely to do white lights and lower-class being more likely to do colored lights. I tried to get my folks to put up colored lights instead of white lights, but the compromise ended up being all one color (I chose blue, which led to people asking if we had converted to Judaism).
Colours can be tasteful if they're used with care but generally less is more. Our neighbours use multicoloured lights but it's offset by each bulb being very small. The bigger the display the more the colours will clash. Red and white could be a suitable combination for the season but monochrome white makes an effective Schelling point for a whole neighbourhood to converge on and create a semi-coordinated appearance.
For me blue lights don't say Christmas (or Judaism), they say either "blue LEDs hit the market and everyone began using them in order to look more futuristic... twenty years ago" or "emergency vehicle". The one positive is that it's not as eerie and unearthly as green. Blue is cold and eye-catching and that's why it's such a confusing choice to have a big bright one on the front of so many TVs, but again: "futuristic". Christmas lights should be warm and festive, like a log fire reflected on a brass coal scuttle or candlelight shining through stained-glass. White lights are bland but at least they're reminiscent of frost and snow and fit a wintertime palette.
I've noticed a lot of people don't distinguish between warm and cold white though and end up using the bluish white lights indoors where a warmer tone would be much cosier and more inviting, leaving their sitting room with a similar lighting ambience to a commercial kitchen.
I guess that now LED ropes are getting cheaper soon everything will look like Tron. "Bloop bloop bloop! Merry twelve slash twenty five."
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I've definitely heard "Silent Night" recently. And the vastly overplayed Trans-Siberian Orchestra compilation includes religious songs.
Skimping on Christmas decorations is probably a result of the general decline of in-store shopping.
YMMV - malls in my area are absolutely packed right now. There seems to be a kind of resurgence going on now that the recession is cancelled.
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