JIM HENDRICKS: Tuning up for the holidays

“That,” my wife announced recently, “was just mean.”

“What?” I asked, stretching the word out to just the right duration and incorporating the right inflection so that the feigned sincerity would seem, in fact, to be actually sincere to the casual observer, which was a waste of time because there was no casual observer in the room to remark, “Well, that certainly seemed sincere, particularly when you consider the duration and inflection.”

At some point in our three decades of being married, however, Cheryl has developed reasonably accurate sincerity radar, and clearly, to her at least, this was a bogey on the screen.

“You know what,” she said.

And I did.

What I had done, as I am prone to do this time of year, is I left an early Christmas season gift for her in her car.

I am told other husbands do this sort of thing as well from time to time, leaving little notes or small presents. Or maybe not. I could have just seen it in a Tom Hanks movie or, more probably, one of those Hallmark TV ones where there’s a whole flock of widows and widowers — along with this or that single about to marry the obviously wrong person — who establish new improbable relationships during the Christmas holidays that require at least one innocent yet dramatically suitable relationship-endangering misunderstanding before everyone cozies back up under the mistletoe just in time for the credits to roll.

What I did was I left her satellite radio on a certain station.

I have become a big fan of satellite radio for a couple of reasons. First, you never lose the signal, which means if I’m driving I don’t have to flip between channels to try to hear the Braves or Georgia Bulldogs broadcast.

It’s also easier to find music you’re in the mood for, which doesn’t happen much with over-the-air radio anymore. Plus, they have one of my favorites, a radio classics channel that has introduced me to radio shows, some 70 years old or better, that I’d heard about but had never actually heard: Phil Harris and Alice Faye, Jack Benny, Burns & Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Great Gildersleeve, Sherlock Holmes, Our Miss Brooks, My Favorite Husband, Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, Fort Laramie, The Shadow, The Saint and the “transcribed adventures of the man with the action-packed expense account — America’s fabulous freelance insurance investigator,” Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar.

Oddly on the latter, no one seems to notice he’s named after currency, at least not on the episodes I’ve caught.

And then between Halloween and Thanksgiving, they turn on a handful of ‘round-the-clock, seven-days-a-week channels devoted to Christmas music.

Which is what came wafting out of the speakers that Friday morning when Cheryl unsuspectingly cranked up her car.

Early in our marriage — I’ve mentioned this before, I’m sure — we arrived at a Christmas music compromise so that we could avoid a dramatically suitable relationship-endangering misunderstanding that could have led to a TV movie, though probably one for the Lifetime channel instead of Hallmark because it clearly would have been all my fault.

What we arrived at was an agreement that I would not play, sing and/or hum (having worked in the clerk of courts office for a number of years, she insisted on both the “and” and the “or”) Christmas songs from New Year’s Day until the Fourth of July.

Some time afterward, an addendum covered Christmas-themed movies under the same proscription, though I’m considering contesting that add-on. I don’t think she ever got it properly notarized.

Still, with Christmas closing in, do I really want to get on my wife’s naughty list? I could take a second when I get out of her car to turn the channel to 1960s music. Or the Beatles channel. Or the one called The Bridge that doesn’t involve traffic spans or parlor card games.

Nah, might as well stick with the Christmas music. No need to make her waste all that coal mine stock.

Email Jim Hendricks at [email protected]. Follow @ABH_JHendricks on Twitter.