So it is "that time of year", and - unchurched as I am - I can't dodge hard enough to avoid the reason for the season.
Presents!
In my younger days I labored like a galley slave over the worktable making hand-drawn Christmas cards even though I cared little enough for the day itself.
Well...I'm like anyone else and like the pretty lights and music and the overall feeling of happy anticipation that surrounds the commercial Western Christmastime we've invented since breaking out of the old winter-solstice/dead-of-winter religious holiday binds.
But I'm barely tolerant of religion in general, and Christmas the holiday has become such a grotesque parody of the notions put forward in the Christian literature as to be almost hypocritical.
So I realized at some point that it was ridiculous to put that much work into something stanning a thing I barely cared about. So, I just stopped.
The one thing I kept on with was doing hand-drawn wrapping paper.
That was quick and fun, and was more entertaining than trying to come up with a single card idea. I could knock out a dozen of these little cartoons and they'd actually be of some use for the real reason for the season - loot!
Being retired has given me time to return to this old December tradition.
Drachma the Cat always takes a licking on these. Well, all the pets do; they're cute and easy to work into a vaguely holiday-esque sort of image.
Here's the little fuzzy nutling again:
I'm a huge Gojira fanboi, so of course the Big Green had to make an appearance:
In case it's too small to read, the off-stage voice is saying: "You'll never fit down that (the chimney). You know that, right?" to which Gojira politely disagrees ("Shut the fuck up").
Of course My Bride has to make a cameo as Miss Debra The School Secretary:
She's also thinking about a trip to Scotland this coming summer, where she hopes to take a short course on dry-stone walling, so here she is meeting one of the locals:
Of course there are kiddos, so the Girl showed up having grown up quite a bit:
The Boy...mmmm, maybe not so much:
My Bride's comment was: "A bit too on-point, hmmm?"
Yeah. Well, he is what he is.
Well, that's the first hint of KrisKringlism for 2022. Tomorrow I am due back up in Goble to freeze my ass off testing fucking trench backfill. It'll be bloody awful fucking freezing, and I hope that'll be it for the year, but we'll see.
Hope you and yours are looking forward to a peaceful and happy Christmas season.
...or, in this case, simmering on the stovetop hob; feijoada completa.
If you're not familiar with this stuff it's a stew of beans and meat. Originally from Portugal it is made in most of the former colonies, and in particular in Brazil it has become a sort of national dish, the Brazilian version of spaghetti in Italy or bratwurst in Germany.
There's about a gajillion recipes for feijoada, but they always start with a bean-and-stock base. I make the Brazilian version that starts with black beans. Usually I start them simmering in a turkey or chicken stock; this year's batch, though, was made largely in a spiced beef stock supplemented with commercial chicken stock and water.
Once the beans have softened I added the meats. This year I went with the pig; smoked hock, salt pork, and a sort of Portuguese sausage called linguisa you can find nearly everywhere. After that has a chance to simmer down a bit I added a couple of oranges. It's simmering now to ensure that the hocks soften and disaggregate so I can pick out the tough hide and the bones.
I've sampled it a couple of times this morning. That's part of the fun. It seems like it's going to turn out a little saltier and smokier that usual. Should be interesting; we'll see. I've made some batches that were outstanding, some that were kind of meh, and once one that was just awful and tasted strongly of horse. I have no idea why.
So far the stew, and setting up the tree, are the only real "holiday" sorts of things I've done. The kiddos have knocked out the usual Christmas school activities - gingerbread-house-making and Santa-image-drawing - and my Bride has been shopping for presents, but me? Nada.
Unchurched as I am the religious symbolism is nil, and now that I have an income the whole greed factor is much diminished. My family is all too far away to visit without the ridiculous discomfort of commercial air travel, and my children are of an age and a disposition where Santa is no longer a fact and Jesus is not yet a necessity.
Making matters worse the contrast between the idealized "Christmas spirit" and the reality of trying to shoehorn human nature into either a saint's slipper or a Santa boot just points up how awful we are as groups. People as individuals can be delightful; people en masse are typically wretched; I can't remember where I read that the intelligence of any group can be reliably assessed by dividing the intelligence of the smartest individual by the number of members...but I find that to be depressingly true in general.
Add to that the increasingly loathsome din of modern commercial Christmas and the whole business is really a pain in the giggy. Makes me want to just sing...
...but that's just me snarking. I don't actually feel stabby about The Season. Rather casual, occasionally irked, but largely indifferent. It's nice to have the time off work, it's pretty with the lights and the decorations...but overall? It's just another day approaching the end of another year.
But I hope you are all having a good...whatever you celebrate this time. May your dreidels have always turned up gimel. May your Umoja cup be full to overflowing. May your Christmas star shine brightly. May your solstice candle burn brightly through the longest night of the year. May your Festivus pole...do whatever the fuck poles are supposed to do, and may you have enjoyed a full and weaseliferous Zappadan.
Y'know what? Screw it; if the Christians can move their Savior's birth to December to fuck over the Mithraists then you can damn well dance to whatever festival tune you enjoy.
I got a chuckle out of this since we're planning to go out for Chinese tomorrow. That, and as a tribute for all my friends who are celebrating the holiday without cherishing the Reason for the Season. I have to say I consider that particularly American; we love the external flourishes, we celebrate the trivial while conveniently ignoring the beating heart of the thing.
Jews on Christmas
There isn’t enough soy sauce in the world to feed
Jews on Christmas
Huddled around steaming plates of dumplings
Discussing cinematography
Angioplasty
Lactaid
Who has lived and who has died
Shocked to hear that the hot new Hollywood star is actually half-Jewish
(and not arguing which half)
I don’t see what all the fuss is about Nathan Englander.
Yes, it’s like The Wire, but different,
Costco is a mixed blessing,
Do you trust Yelp?
On our smartphones we subtract the Chinese year from the Jewish year to see how long the Jews had to wait to try egg drop soup.
The laughter of Jews on Christmas
shakes the jade Buddha under the faux waterfall from his
sleepy serenity
And for a moment, the enlightened one opens his eyes,
smiling contently as he joins us to look at pictures of relatives at Harry Potter world.
Now he’s Jewish too.
The Moo Shu comes with little tortillas, pancakes, wraps,
whatever you want to call them.
And we wrap up the mush of last year, with all of it’s regrets and tzuris,
And immerse into soy sauce,
a ritual bath,
three times dipped,
and we say – this is not bad.
Our highest compliment.
~ David Brenner
As a thorough agnostic, I enjoy the unChristmasness of Hanukkah; the trivial little Festival of Lights that our Bible-walloping brethern have tried to make into "Jewish Christmas". So a vigorous spin of the dreidel to my Jewish friends for their contribution to Everything Not Christmas. That, and the fact that cinematic Judaism has not produced anything - not a damn thing - as eye-gougingly horrible as any of the Rankin-Bass Christmas specials, "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer", or nativity scenes with the parties portrayed as chickens, Muppets, or Disney characters.
Although you guys DO have to own up to Eight Crazy Nights; holy fucking Baby Jesus on a stick was that awful.
Quick collection of a couple more of my favorite Wenceslaus songs. Here's a new one, Robert Earl Keene's "Merry Christmas from the family":(h/t to slacktivist)
And a traditional (can two years be called a tradition?) favorite: Sarah Silverman's "Give the Jew Girl Toys"Tim Allen played you!
And - this is really special - here's a Christmas ditty straight from Hell's jukebox: I mean, yeah, I know it was the Sixties, but...WTF?
I gotta get back to my barge. But you have a safe week, paisan, OK?
As John Lennon used to say: "So this is Christmas..." Eric Idle...ummm, didn't say it quite that way.
You know how I feel about this whole business. I'm more with Idle than with Lennon.
Mind you, my likes and dislikes don't really matter. We've had Christmas this and Christmas that and Christmas the other damn thing since practically Halloween. But now that we're on the dark side of Thanksgiving, well...
This year is turning out to be interesting, however. The kiddos are caught up in the usual Christmas greed, obediently parroting the gimme paternoster at every huckster on the television. Missy, especially, is turning out to be a sucker for cheap, shiny plastic crap. A commercial for anything aimed at kids, from Benadroos to Bandryl will produce her immediate Pavlovian"IwantthatcanIhavethatwillyougetmethat?" She's not completely unreasonable - there are no tantrums or tears if she hears "no", but through repetition this does not become endearing.
The Peep, who at seven-and-a-half is a more experienced consumer, has opted for quality over quantity and wants only the largest and most costly Lego toys. These, by the way, I am now utterly unwilling to provide to him based on bitter experience. As objects the damn things are fiendishly expensive; as toys, completely worthless, being both heavy and fragile. The disassociated pieces of but the "Republic Attack Shuttle" and the "AT-TE" walker ,now intermingled with a dozen other smaller Lego objects, stand mute witness to this.His grandparents can bankroll his Lego addiction, if they want. I'm getting him a bicycle.
Oh, and he has decided he doesn't want to kill a tree for Santa. He wants to get a fake tree. No pink ones, mind, and it can't be plaid or otherwise obviously "fake-y". But he wants to get a plain green fake tree. And it can't be before...
Christmas Eve.
I'm tempted to go with it just to see what happens. And then dance an antic hay on the ruins. It'd be the Perfectly Awful Christmas.
But then there's being the grown-up thing. Sigh.
Of course, the other inescapable element of Wenceslausery is the sudden metastasizing Christmas specials and Christmas movies and Christmas television episodes.
Don't mistake me; like any kid of the Video Era I grew up with the idea that television, not the angel of Bethlehem, announced the Savior's Birth. I was raised on Christmas commercials, Rudolph, Charlie Brown, and the Grinch (although I am glad that I am too old to have my eyes seared with the awful Ron Howard/Jim Carrey live-action version; talk about a childhood trauma...) as more important to the Greatest Story ever told as the Big Guy from little Galilee. In fact, I would say that my "Christmas" - the ideas and images that made the holiday a reality for me - came from the cathode ray tube rather than the Bible, the church, or the stories.
Perhaps one of my favorite celluloid Christmases is the one in the George Seaton "Miracle on 34th Street".
C'mon, I know you've seen this thing. It may be the biggest Christmas chestnut after "It's a Wonderful Life", and it's certainly less glurgeworthy. It's a breezy confection of a yarn, with Ed Gwenn as the whiskered gentleman that everyone doesn't quite want to believe is really Santa Claus. John Payne makes a sensible good fellow of a hero as Fred the attorney who defends "Kris Kringle", Maureen O'Hara a gloriously mature and completely desirable Doris, the Macy's executive whose little girl Susan is the pivot on whom the movie turns. Susan, played by a dark and brilliant young Natalie Wood, is the perfect center; wise and foolish, cautious and loving, skeptical and credulous. As a kid she's the cool big sister you wish you had, as an adult, the bright, loving little daughter.And, of course, the movie is full of great little bits of work. Gwenn discovering what people with beards shouldn't blow bubble gum. "Susan" is full of inside knowledge on the Macy's Thanksgiving parade she's picked up from her mother, who has organized it for all her young life. The brilliant gimmick that lets Fred "prove" Kris is THE Santa Claus through the inspiration of the overworked mail sorter who convinces his foreman to send "all them Santy Claus letters" to the courthouse.It's practically perfect; gently sentimental without treacle, loving and respecting its holiday without glurge. It's one of the few Christmas pictures I can sit through without wincing.
Oh, and did you know that 20th Century released it in May? Seriously. Weird, yes, but there it is: May 2, 1947. You can look it up.Now this is America. And as you know, here if something works once, that means it needs to be done over. And bigger. With more stuff. And preferably in color.
And that's what happened to "Miracle". Actually, it happened FIVE times; two one-hour television versions in the Fifties, a musical in the Sixties (but all sorts of awful musicals happened in the Sixties, so it wasn't exactly the worst of its type...), a TV movie in the Seventies, and, finally, a theatrical movie in the Nineties.
The 1994 movie version, for some reason, has been in heavy rotation on the usual calbe channel suspects lately; Lifetime, "Family", Hallmark. Its really kind of intriguing, in a sort of true-crime-story way, to see the difference between the America that had just emerged from the abyss of World War 2 and the one that was the Sole Superpower, the Indispensable Nation, the gigantic economic and political colossus then at the height of its power and wealth.The players are all there; Richard Attenborough as Kris, trying to look Gwennishly charming and succeeding in looking merely dyspeptic. Dylan McDermot replaces Payne, looking more intent but less decent. Elizabeth Perkins, whose ability to play vulnerably intelligent women I truly enjoy, does so here and deftly as always. Mara Wilson does a decent job as Susan, although she never manages Wood's luminosity or her skeptical intelligence (which is a problem, because the story calls for convincing the prenaturally adult Wood to feel and love childishly to be a Santaesque labor, whereas Wilson comes off as just a nice kiddo).
John Hughes directs.
That's not the problem.
The problem is that the story was perfectly suited for the sunny, lighthearted good sense of the Forties. The original never felt strained, never lectured, never brooded or pouted. It was a straightforward tale of whimsy, well-told, but with a good-humored wink towards the audience.
The Nineties version has none of this. It is uneven in tone, sometimes childishly callow, sometimes cynical, and adds a disturbingly strong, wildly out-of-place thread of religious piety to the plot, disturbing since the entire story is based on the central reality of that very Anti-Christ of American commercial Christmas, Santa Claus.
I should add that the religiousness comes across to me as rather mean-spirited, not presented as a sort of warm God-fuzzy but rather as a failure on the part of the irreligious. You first encounter it when Fred comes over to have Thanksgiving dinner with Susie and her mom. They don't say grace, you see, and Doris (inexplicably renamed "Dorie" in this one) is made to act embarassed and contrite about it. Because people who don't have God or religion can't really be good people, right?
The tone is very reminiscent of the sort of "Christmas Wars" then being fought at the time the remake was made, and the film shares something of the sour and accusatory tone of the time. Very unpleasant.
The injection of God and worship into the original cheerfully irreligious story is jarring in more ways than just the way it places God and Santa uneasily alongside each other. It rips the wonderful setpiece out of the climax of the story.
Instead of the endless chain of letter-carriers tromping into the courtroom with their bags and bags of Santa letters - proving that the U.S. Post Office believes Kris to be the "one and only" Santa - we have a very strained and badly skewed moment involving the little girl, a Christmas card with a dollar in it (WTF?) and the motto "In God We Trust" circled with hi-lighter.(Don't get it? Me, neither. The film has the trial judge go into some long-winded explanation about how the U.S. Department of Treasury can believe in God with no hard evidence so the people of New York can believe in Santa Claus in the same way (conveniently ignoring such precedent as Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668 (1984) in which the Supreme Court held that the motto has "lost through rote repetition any significant religious content" and called it mere "ceremonial deism"). Yeah, yeah, I don't buy it, either. It's crap, and badly written crap, at that).Not content with replacing the best scene in the flick with a pottage of claptrap, Hughes then proceeds to add one last bit of bizarre business. His Dorie and Fred get married (at Midnight Mass, no less, slamming your head against the Jesus is The Reason For The Season wall again in case you forgot the whole "In God We Trust" thing) and then go house-hunting.The house thing is right out of the 1947 original, where city-bound little Susan wanted the Forties American Dream House in the 'burbs for Christmas. In that version the house is the setup for the punchline (Kris really IS Santa, see..?) as well as the Fred-and-Doris kiss-and-let's-get-married-and-be-happy-families that makes the Happy Ending of the story. Fade to black.
In the Hughes version, same setup, except instead of just wanting the house for Christmas Susan had Three Wishes (John Hughes - Brilliantly Original Thinker, eh?); a dad, the house, and a baby brother. When they get to the house, Susan announces that she now has ALL her wishes. Fred and Dorie goggle at her, at each other, then down at Dorie's womb. Booiiiinnng! Santa is like Christmas' Fertility God, see? He puts babies in ladies' tummies!
WTF?
Anyway, I don't enjoy the Nineties version enough to sit all the way through it, but it keeps turning up like the mouse the cat keeps dragging inside no matter how often you toss it into the yard. So I've now seen almost all of it mow in bits and pieces.
And between the nonsensical alterations, the strident piety, and the overall dark and charmless tone, the newer version of "Miracle on 34th Street" just seems to me to say something very unkind about us Americans of 1994 and 2010. I know the flaws of the Forties, I know all about the flaws of the people who lived at that time; they were and are my parents.
But it just seems that the sort of people who made that movie were different people than the ones who made the last one, and that based on the difference between the films, the changes that occurred in the people weren't particularly good ones.
