Can't hear Christmas Carols? Try Loud Sox

         Being hearing impaired during the holiday season is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, tuning out annoying, Muzak-y Christmas carols in stores and elevators is easy. Just remove your hearing aid and/or cochlear implant and ta-dah: silent night. On the other hand, hymns and carols you want to hear tend to sound like banshees.

           For me, the season is especially vexing. For all the many years I had good hearing, music was a huge part of Christmas. I’ve heard many a Messiah and I’ve caroled all over, from Mississippi to Minneapolis.  Since I’m not a golfer or much of a Mr. Fix-It, CDs tended to be the default Christmas gift for me from my family. Plus, I had a seasonal ritual of doing my morning stretches to one of a small trove of beloved Christmas albums, among them Elvis Presley’s 1958 holiday classic and A Nonesuch Christmas, a wonderful collection of choral and instrumental music from the Renaissance and the Middle Ages.

          Nowadays, alas, I can barely distinguish Elvis from Alvin the Chipmunk, and the Nonesuch anthology sounds like sonic mush.

           It’s been a few years since my first near-deaf holiday experience, however, and I don’t let the lack of music make my Christmas blue. I’ve come up with alternatives that reward my other senses.

My wife and I go out looking for visual treats, parking on a hill to savor a great sunset or driving around our hometown after dark in search of extravagantly lighted houses.

We decorate the inside our house with evergreen cuttings to indulge my fully able sense of smell.

We bake tasty cookies and banana bread and make a pot of seafood gumbo from an old New Orleans recipe that takes hours and steams up the house.

And when I’m asked what I want for presents, I say I want sox. Give me colored sox, the brighter and wilder the better. I like ’em LOUD.