Okay, it’s Christmas, and it’s Obama’s second term. I get it. I need to be inclusive. I need to put something out here for everyone.
How about Grace Jones, circa 1990, on Pee-Wee Herman’s Christmas special, wearing a bizarre metallic headdress and breastplate and singing a technopop version of “The Little Drummer Boy”?
Now that's inclusive.
Joyeux Noel.
There are some Christmas songs that I block out of my mind, until I hear them the next December, and think: Oh dear little lord Jesus, I forgot about that one.
This is one of them.
The more Italian you know, the funnier this song gets.
Hee-haw!
The Syfy Channel (I hate that name!) has been showing winter-themed disaster movies this month: “Ice Quakes,” “Ice Twisters,” “Snowmageddon,” and most notably, “The Twelve Disasters of Christmas.” This last one was best of all: a filmization of the Mayan apocalypse that’s scheduled for tomorrow, Friday, December 21, 2012.
Perfect!
We’ve all been joking for some time about the world coming to an end on December 21. And won’t we be all giggly if it turns out to be true!
But I think the end of the calendar year, and the darkness of the season, always makes us gloomy and fatalistic.
I noticed the other day that the asteroid Toutatis passed close to the Earth. Partner told me recently that a new asteroid just buzzed past Earth – closer to Earth than the Moon, in fact. The asteroid was approximately 120 yards wide – about the size of the asteroid that caused the Tunguska disaster in Russia in the early 1900s.
So many little perils! So many things that might happen to ruin our day!
So, while you’re waiting for the end of the world, a little traveling music from Elvis Costello:
The local grocery market is not my favorite place. They are not very good at customer service, and they’re not cheap.
They do one nice thing, however: they give one percent of the money I spend there to the local charity of my choice.
Here’s how it works: I collect my receipts from XX Supermarket, and give them to my local charity. The charity, in turn, submits them to XX Supermarket, and receives one percent of the money I spent there.
It ain’t a million bucks, but it’s something. It’s painless, and it’s simple: all I have to do is collect the receipts and deliver them to the charity.
There is an animal shelter right next to my office. They are very good to the animals (not just dogs and cats, but rabbits and turtles and everything you can think of); they have toys and food and everything. Most of the animals are abandoned or orphaned. I go over and look at them sometimes, but not very often; some are cute and hopeful and playful, but many are worried and confused and sad, and it’s not comforting to see them upset and unhappy.
All of them are waiting for adoption.
So I give my one percent to the kitties and puppies. It will buy them some kibble, and toys, and a soft bed.
And that, Charlie Brown, is what Christmas is supposed to be all about.
Please go see if some merchant in your area does the same thing. It is a painless way to do a tiny bit of good in the world.
I am not feeling much like Christmas this year. My feelings for the holiday have been diminishing for a couple of years now; I used to enjoy decorating, and looking at lights, and giving gifts, and getting gifts in return. Now it’s just a list of things to do: buy a few things, mail some cards, write emails to those people that I’ve been neglecting shamelessly for months now. Partner and I will go away for a few days between Xmas and New Year’s, just for the hell of it, and to break up our routine.
This is exactly the way my parents felt about Christmas when I was a kid. I hated their bad attitude, and swore I’d never be that cynical.
And here we are today.
I have decided, though, that I’m not going to rain on anyone’s parade this year. My mother used to whine and complain about Christmas to anyone who’d listen. I do not intend to follow her example. Why ruin other people’s fun?
Better to light a candle, etc., etc.
But not everyone agrees:
Simon Schama, the British historian, wrote a nice piece in last weekend’s Financial Times about Christmas and Hanukkah. Some years back, he took heat for daring to comment that the emphasis on lights in Christmas (all those twinkly bulbs on the tree!) and Hanukkah (all those candles!) was just a holdover from the very traditional celebration of light at the Solstice.
Hm. Is there really any doubt about this?
Anyway: he repeated a very nice Mishnah story I’d never heard. In it, Adam was very grieved by the onset of the first winter, realizing that he’d caused it himself, and fasted for eight days, right before the Solstice. When he realized that the days were getting longer again, he rejoiced for eight days.
Partner asked me about the timings of sunset and sunrise around the Solstice the other day, so I resorted to Wikipedia. Do you know how many cultures observe the Solstice? Pretty much all of them. And it’s always about light, one way or another.
Okay. Now let’s talk about Christmas tragedies.
This year alone:
- A house burned down in Stamford, Connecticut, killing five people.
Remember the Banda Aceh tidal wave in 2004?
Remember the 2003 earthquake in Iran?
Well – what of it? Bad things happen all the time. There’s no reason that they shouldn’t happen now.
Except that they seem especially painful now, this time of year.
It’s the darkest time of year. The darkness is winning, and we desperately want to see the light triumphant. When we see bad things happen, it’s as if we can actually feel the struggle between light and darkness. And we do not want the darkness to win.
The only exceptional event that I’ve listed above is the man in the Santa suit who killed his family members on Xmas. It makes you think about the expectations of families on Christmas – the desperate effort to believe that everything will be all right – and that these unrealistic expectations might be enough for make someone snap and kill his family.
That’s a special kind of madness, especially horrible. I tried to think about what it would be like to see a family member in a Santa suit come into the room toting a shotgun, and –
Enough.
Let the darkness go. The days are getting longer again.
As I’ve said once before in this space: hail the Unconquered Sun!
Neither Partner nor I practices any particular religion. I spent a couple of years in the mid-2000s trying to recapture my Catholicism, but found it ultimately futile. Partner and I talk about Buddhism a lot, but I am uneasily aware that Buddhism is easier to talk about than practice. (For those of you who use “Zen” as an adjective, I recommend a wonderful and very acerbic book called “What Makes You Not A Buddhist,” by a wonderful Bhutanese lama / film director / author (!) named Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse.)
So how did Partner and I, both filthy heathens, spend this Christmas season?
Let’s see:
- We saw “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” on Christmas Eve.
- We exchanged gifts. Partner gave me a lovely sweater and two lovely shirts. I like pretty colors, but am often confused by the bright lights in the department stores; Partner corrects my fashion sense, and I invariably get compliments when I wear the things he’s bought for me (so long as I wear them in the combinations he very carefully specifies). I gave him, among other things, a mounted 1957 one-dollar Silver Certificate. (I was born in 1957, before the Space Age, so it was a little symbolic.)
- Next morning, we sleepily wished each other a Merry Christmas.
- After some discussion, we went to the closest casino, Twin River, in Lincoln, Rhode Island.
- We left at 1:00 pm with considerably more money than we arrived with. Merry Christmas!
- We went to a Chinese restaurant and ordered everything on the menu.
- We ate until we were sick.
- We took our leftovers and went home and napped a bit.
- In the evening, I baked cookies.
This is the perfect secular Xmas, as far as I’m concerned. And here’s why:
- We both spent it with someone we loved.
And that’s all it takes.
Happy holidays, kids.
You know I usually present something unusual and/or different for holidays. Well, this is Christmas Eve, and for weeks I tried to think of something, but I kept coming up blank.
And then I think I finally realized why.
Christmas Eve was pretty much the only holiday my whole family celebrated consistently. We were semi-dysfunctional: not really Dr. Phil material, but with lots of secrets and dislikes and disagreements boiling under the surface. As a kid, I didn’t realize this. I was much younger than my siblings, and I thought Christmas Eve was terrific: it was all about gifts, right? I couldn’t understand why my mother seemed to dread it so much, and why so many arguments broke out among my siblings, and why my father seemed even quieter than usual.
When I got older and began to get involved in the arguments myself, I understood.
Time passed. I moved out on my own, and I still had this yearning feeling that Christmas Eve was special – magical, somehow – and that I had to observe it. I decorated the house (as my mother always did). I went to Mass sometimes. I listened to music and tried to feel spiritual, or at least uplifted.
Most of the time it didn’t work.
When Partner and I moved in together, I was still decorating, a bit. I like mixing it up: I love, for example, lighting a menorah for the eight nights of Hanukkah. No, I’m not Jewish, but it’s very pretty, especially on the last few nights when lots of candles are burning at the same time and it looks like a forest fire on the mantel. But I used to put up a (small) (artificial) tree, and a crèche, and a little plastic Joseph-and-Mary tableau on top of the TV set.
Year by year, I’ve done less and less.
Now, at last, I understand my mother’s diffidence and reluctance.
And this is why, I think, I have a kind of mental block about Christmas Eve.
It’s Christmas Eve again. I wish I felt magical again; I wish I felt as if things were somehow going to be okay.
But I don’t.
Tomorrow, for Christmas, I promise: something nicer.
But you just wait. If this retreat from Christmas hasn't happened to you yet, just wait. It'll happen to you too.
Do we need a special acknowledgement of the solstice? I suppose so. There was an irruption of the whole stupid “War on Christmas” thing here in Rhode Island this year: the governor, an innocent (and rather dense) Independent named Lincoln Chafee (who’s a very nice guy, and for whom I voted), called the state tree a “holiday tree.”
(Now, to be fair, this was thick-headed of him. As my wise co-worker Eileen pointed out today: the city of Providence puts up a big menorah right alongside their Christmas tree, and they don’t call it a “holiday candle holder.”)
The Providence Catholic Diocese came down on Chafee like a ton of bricks. How dare he demean Christians in such a way! Wasn’t he aware that the Christmas tree was a symbol of the birth of Christ?
(Frankly, I wasn’t aware of that myself.)
The local Catholic parish priests who have been talking to Fox News, and the local idiot bishop, Thomas Tobin, have been mixing up the whole “Christmas” thing with custom, and belief, and observance, and lots of silliness. And naturally Fox has been lapping it up. Apparently having a tree called a “Christmas tree” is vital to the life and health of the Christian /Catholic community, and calling the state tree a “holiday tree” is a slap to all right-thinking and right-believing Christians.
(Evidently the Catholics – or their squad leaders – think so.)
Mind you, I used to be a practicing Catholic, up until a couple of years ago. I struggled mightily to fit their theology into my life. Around 2006, a year or so after the reactionary new German pope took over the reins of the church, I just gave up. To my surprise, several people I know did the same thing.
We all reached the same conclusion at the same time: the Church was not for us, not anymore.
This serves as an excellent explanation for Why I Am No Longer A Practicing Catholic.
Bring on the solstice observances! Hail the Unconquered Sun!
And to hell with both Thomas Tobin and Lincoln Chaffee!
When I was just a kid, and my nearsightedness had just manifested itself (I had German measles around the age of eight, which apparently damaged my eyesight), Christmas was wonderful. The lights on the Christmas tree were dazzling: swirled together and blurred slightly, as if filmed through a Vaseline-coated lens. It made “Christmas magic” seem like a real thing.
I haven’t thought of that in years. Except:
The tradition of Christmas lights has never really died here in Rhode Island. Some communities – East Providence, for example – have whole neighborhoods that blaze with huge displays: reindeer, multiple Santas, wise men, polar bears, penguins, the Virgin Mary, all in multicolored lights. It is a wonder and a miracle.
I noticed last year, and even more so this year, that this seems to be growing more widespread. For a while, the more staid communities only had white lights, or blue, or none at all. Now people are using those wonderful big multicolored lights that we had when I was a kid, and they’re beautiful.
Hey! I thought last evening, while walking through the neighborhood and admiring the neighbors’ lights. I bet, if I take my glasses off, they’ll be so much prettier. Just like when I was a kid.
Well, like so many other things, this little morsel of Christmas magic has been taken from me.
My eyesight has worsened considerably since my childhood. I knew this, of course, but I figured it would make the swirl of multicolored lights even more interesting. Trust me: it did not. It made them sickeningly awful. White lights turned into a nebulous blur; blue lights were nightmarish. Multicolored lights were dominated by red and orange tones, and looked like bloated dying masses of stars, pulsing and heaving inward and outward.
Man, I put my glasses back on real fast after that.
There must be a moral in this somewhere, I suppose.
Happy Christmas season, kids!
Wishing everyone a very happy Christmas 1987: new sneakers, and macaroni and cheese, and a dog with reindeer horns, and Mom chasing an elf out of the house with a broom.
I posted this new Christmas classic last Sunday, but I used the YouTube link, and it got nuked by the copyright police.
So I did my homework, and this link seems to be legal.
“Never fear / 'Cause Minty's here / And he'll make Christmas excellent . . .”
Blogger's rule: if it's a Sunday, or a holiday, or anything even remotely resembling a holiday, I can post something unoriginal and interesting.
This is very interesting.
Ladies and gentlemen: Miss Eartha Kitt (of blessed memory), performing “Santa Baby.”
As a kid, I loved Christmas: toys and lights and reindeer. But I was also vaguely aware that my mother hated Christmas, and I never quite understood why.
Now I am all grown up (and then some), and now I understand my mother's point. Blighted hopes. Overblown expectations. Social obligations.
Evidently my mother and I are not alone.
For some time now, television has been acting out against Santa Claus. Here's a very incomplete incident list, just off the top of my head:
1966: The Grinch. Sort of the Antichrist version of Santa.
1987: Married With Children. A skydiving Santa crashes on the Bundy family's roof, dies, and is carried away on a gurney, sleighbells jingling.
1998: Just Shoot Me. “How The Finch Stole Christmas.” David Spade as the evil Finch spoils everyone's Christmas.
1999: Futurama. Santa in the year 3000 is an evil robot (voiced by John Goodman) who kills everyone who hasn't been good during the past year. And that's everyone.
2003: Billy Bob Thornton as Bad Santa. And Lauren Graham, who has a sexual Santa fetish.
2009: Modern Family. Santa is a homeless ex-con who punches out Cam's hated rival.
2010: Family Guy. Stewie goes to the North Pole to kill Santa. It turns out, however, that Santa is a haunted wreck who hates his own life.
From Graham Greene's “Travels With My Aunt”:
“'It's the festive season,' Major Charge said. He blew another raspberry. '”Hark! The herald angels sing,”' he said in a tone of savagery, as though he were taking some kind of revenge on Christmas Eve and all its impedimenta of holy families and mangers and wise men, a revenge on love, a revenge for some deep disappontment.”
Ho ho ho.
