Imagine you are a retail worker who is always bothered by repetitive sounds, and since the Christmas season is fast approaching, you want to learn how to be unbothered when Mariah Carey’s Christmas song, All I Want for Christmas Is You, plays on your workplace’s speakers. Classical Conditioning offers “Counterconditioning” as an answer, where it requires you to take that very song (and your unpleasant response to it) to associate it with something more pleasant, positive, and less aversive—like you are holding your Christmas Bonus and 13th Month Pay payslip. 

So whenever that song plays at work and you intervally pair it to those positive thoughts of great remuneration because of the holiday season, you will later on get counterconditioned to that song and will finally feel good and more unbothered by its repetitive nature because you associate it with an imaginary situation that “once Christmas week comes, I will be rewarded for my perseverance and hard work throughout the most busiest season of the year.”

But really, why do some people tend to find Mariah Carey’s Christmas classic annoying? For me, I believe it has something to do with the more general stimulus of the Christmas season. 

My “Hell-ish” Christmas

Over time, I noticed that there has been an annual online discourse that associates the Christmas season with “stress.” Most narratives that I have encountered came from retail workers because the Christmas season for them is literally “hell week” because of the massive number of people that they have to accommodate or entertain. 

That said, I find that somehow relatable, but in a very different context, because as a university dormer: I find the presence of the big and tall Christmas Tree in Freedom Park, the figurine installation of “The Birth of Jesus” at Carabao Park, and the loud playing of Christmas songs at the D.L. Umali Hall steps during the university’s Paskuhan event, very annoying. Because all of these stimuli remind me of my semester’s final requirements, which are all obviously heavy as they will define the fate of my final grade. 

Therefore, Christmas can also be stressful to me, and I get why some people tend to hate the season… but how did we get to this point? How can this specific, aversive response or reaction about Christmas, which is mostly known for its joyous and yuletide vibes, be learned by someone?

How Pavlov will explain it

Now… let’s get nerdy, shall we?

Using Ivan Pavlov’s Classical Conditioning with my personal experience as a university student, we could further investigate this behavior through the specific conditioning of Sensory Preconditioning, and how the phenomenon of Stimulus Generalization played a role in making this conditioning possible. 

It is said that “Sensory Preconditioning” is a specific process wherein before “something,” that has no corresponding reaction or response from someone (a.k.a, neutral stimulus and response), gets conditioned into a learned behavior with a learned response (a.k.a., conditioned stimulus and response) through pairing it with a reflexive behavior (a.k.a., unconditioned stimulus and response): there has been an another stimulus or a trigger that was previously associated or paired with it. 

That is why, even if only one stimulus, out of the two or more associated stimuli with it, gets conditioned as a conditioned stimulus with a corresponding conditioned response, the other associated stimuli can also be conditioned as such. And in my example of preconditioned associations between the big Christmas decorations and the event in UPLB, this is how it will look through the mentioned process:

Preconditioning Phase: (before any conditioning)
Christmas Tree at Freedom Park(NS1)	“The Birth of Baby Jesus” figurine installation(NS2)	Christmas Songs played at Paskuhan(NS2)
Christmas Season(UCS)	→	Stress(UCR)
During Conditioning Phase: (choose only one NS for the conditioning)
Christmas Tree at Freedom Park (NS1): Christmas Season (UCS) → Stress (UCR)
After Conditioning Phase: (after intervals/repetitions of exposure)
Therefore:Christmas Tree at Freedom Park (CS1) → Annoyance (CR1) Also: “The Birth of Baby Jesus” figurine installation (CS2) → Annoyance (CR1) Christmas Songs played at Paskuhan (CS3) → Annoyance (CR1)

But then, it might get confusing to some as to why the other two stimuli got automatically conditioned even though they were not conditioned as the first neutral stimulus. 

This is where Stimulus Generalization will come into play because this explains that: the conditioned response of a conditioned stimulus can have the tendency to spread out to other stimuli that have similar characteristics as the conditioned one. 

Since “Christmas” tree, the installation of “The Birth of Baby Jesus,” and “Christmas” songs have one similar denominator of “Christmas Season,” that explains why my brain tends to connect and spread this response out to other stimuli that screams “Christmas!” because it has the very “essence” or the “quality” of that very stimulus to which such aversive reactions like stress or annoyance is coming from.

This is why learning and behavior work hand in hand in affecting the ways on how we navigate our quotidian lives on our environment because it is one of the many forms of how we survive as humans: on how we keep ourselves focused and alerted to our own responsibilities as functional beings, on keeping ourselves balanced between managing aversion and receiving reward, and also on how we can make the most with what we currently have in our surroundings. 

After all, “learning is the result of environmental events,” and we have the power to either deliberately change or manipulate it to our own advantage, or let it take its course on us. 

Learning is like Christmas

To end, answering the question of “Why do some people hate Christmas?” might be a very complex task, but somehow, through the Classical Conditioning lens, it all boils down to a specific individual’s learned behavior and their environment. 

Because everything in this world is dialogic: we make everything have dialogue with each other to make meaning out of it, and it is beautiful yet haunting to see how we can make or break a meaning to each other by simply learning. But at least, Classical Conditioning still gives us an encouraging hope that we could still change. 

That there is still a chance to unlearn the aversives that we once learned, and help us move on with our lives through associating positivity with one another in our environment, over and over again—for learning is like the Christmas season… it’s timeless.