Thanks

I’m busy making furniture today. Actually, “busy” doesn’t cover it. “Going like hell commensurate with not forgetting one table leg out of four or being called ‘lefty’ or ‘old one-eyed stumpy’ for the remainder of your life” is more like it.

But you’re all so nice, I need to thank you for visiting and commenting and buying furniture, and for all your expressions of goodwill and holiday cheer. And hey! we actually got presents for Christmas from some people. So thank you — you all deserve a Russian Kiss from Pat et Stanley:

Merry Christmas, Everybody Everywhere

They were standing in the rubble of a world gone mad. Finally they stood over the stricken bully, exulting only that the thing was done, and offered their hand again to all that would take it. Like all decent people, they did what they had to do, then shrugged and decided to get back to the real business at hand.

I like people that scrape themselves up off the floor and come back swinging. We’ve been swinging ever since, more or less.

Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas, My Brother

Commenter “Deb from Madison” mentioned Christmas wreaths made from computer punch cards, and Christmas trees made from Reader’s Digests and gold spray paint, and I about wept. Talk about a shared experience. A Scandinavian was as rare as a sober Kennedy where I’m from, so they’ll be no Euchre. Italians play Whist, thank you. But it’s just the same, otherwise.

There’s a sort of self-examination rampant in modern life that is corroding shared experience. Nothing is done unless it’s filmed, dissected, and critiqued. We used to just do stuff, and not worry too much about the deeper meaning of it. The deeper meaning was reserved for the impetus of the holiday. Now they’d write ten thousand column inches, footnoted, about the deeper meaning of using computer punch cards to make a Christmas wreath.

Let me shorten it up for the poindexters: We were poor. Christmas was important. We celebrated it as best we could with the materials at hand. And Deb and I, and I’m sure many others, remember that fondly.

I miss my older brother. He lives in California, and likes it. I miss him especially at Christmas. My brother is a fair sum older than I, would come home from collegefor Christmas and sleep until noon every day, and make icosahedron ornaments out of my construction paper. We’d plead with him to take out his guitar, and marvel at the music being conjured out of the dead splits of mahogany and sitka spruce. There was no video cameras then for us, or YouTube, of course. He could probably cook it up fresh for you to this day, but the recipe and the chef is 2500 miles away from me today. I found this fellow on the Tube, and it’ll have to do:

That’s very European, that music. It says snowflakes and sleighs and so forth. Let’s go south for the finish, and let a culture whose simple piety and joyous attitude toward a holiday makes Santa come right out of the desert, too. My brother lives hard by that desert. Here’s hoping Santa comes out of it for you too, my brother.

Feliz Navidad to all, and to all a good night.

Hi Dee Hi Dee Hi Dee Ho Ho Ho

[Editor’s Note: This is a re-run from last year, with a new link to a new Christmas light picture site as the old one seems to be associated with an internet gambling site now. As if the Christmas lights weren’t tacky enough. Anyway, the new site seems to have the requisite holiday spirit. Also, it’s gratifying that last year’s reference to arguing about Christmas seems to be less apt this year. That usually means the side I liked surrendered, and there’s no use talking about it anymore. Whatever; Merry Christmas!}

{Author’s Note: There is no editor.}

I never hear the word “decry” for eleven months of the year, but I get it morning noon and night at Christmastime. Seems like everyone’s decrying some aspect of the Christmas thing, and if you look in more than one place, you’ll find people decrying the opposing angles of the same Christmas condition. Christmas is too religious for some. It’s too mercenary and secular two doors down. Me, I think Christmas is too tasteful.

Now, Christmas was a big deal when I was young and Johnson was president. We weren’t wealthy, and your birthday and Christmas were the only days you’d get any swag. We’d study the Sears catalog like we study Victoria’s Secret catalogs now, make our Christmas list, then we’d be schlepped all over creation — in a Rambler station wagon or a Dodge Dart with a steel dashboard or a Chevy Impala convertible with a hole in the roof — to our relatives’ houses to be spoiled a bit by their generosity. None of them were wealthy either, but they always seemed to have the time and money and affection to get even their most obscure nieces and nephews a little something. The younger you were, the better the present generally was, because after all, it’s easier to buy a present for a child, isn’t it?

What all those homes had in common when we visited was hospitality, and garish and hamfisted Christmas decoration. Jimmy Stewart was very much alive, but Martha Stewart hadn’t appeared on the scene yet, and it showed — metallic white fake Christmas trees with rotating muticolored spotlights aimed at them; big red, blue, and green bulbs strung along the outlines of the house; plastic Santas guarding plaster creches; spray-on frost riming the windows; cheap looking tinsel and home made tree ornaments that looked like you wore your mittens when you made them. It knew no race, or creed, or social station; it was all bad, and lovely.

And your Aunts would hug you, smelling of lilac perfume and the kitchen, and slip you quarters on the way out; your Uncles would tell stories and and roar the loudest at their own japes; and when you got older they’d crush your hand in a welcoming handshake to see if you still squealed.
The music was lively, and sometimes wistful, which was nice. Christmas in 1965 was only twenty years removed from WW2, and thirty from the depression, and most all my relatives were old enough to remember when Christmas wasn’t so jolly. And the perspective that the emergence from true want and danger lent to their mood was like the bubbles in champagne.

I can’t bring myself to decorate in the garish style of my youth. Jimmy Stewart’s passed away, and he’s on the flatscreen at Mr Potter’s now only, but Martha Stewart is in the here and now, out of jail and demanding once more that we straighten up and garland ourselves properly. My Aunts and Uncles have made their way to their reward, many of them, and the others are far away in distance, if not in our hearts.

But I have a weakness now that I indulge by visiting websites devoting to pointing a jaundiced finger at bad Christmas yard displays. I wonder: Am I the only one there, with a tear in his eye, remembering how genuine, and fun, and innocent these things were to the dearest people?

I cometh to bury Caeser, not to praise him.

Still, I’d like to visit one more time; put the kettle on.

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas

It’s possible for a Christmas wish to be something besides an X-box.

Most people have an intense longing for an intense longing. When the landscape doesn’t present an opportunity to desperately want something, we have a tendency to manufacture it. Anyone that has seen sacks of rice tumble off an aid truck in a place where famine rules recognizes the behavior of a crowd at a mall the day after Thanksgiving, in a frenzy trying to buy a Playstation 3. Recognize it, but not understand it, exactly.

I don’t want any “thing” for Christmas. I’m too old for that sort of thing. But Christmas gets me to thinking.

Judy Garland’s singing is lovely in the video. The song is worthy of a compelling performance. People who really knew what they were doing used to write, produce, and perform mass entertainment. And the themes were very adult. Christina Aguilera and her ilk, writhing about on the stage drooling melismas and flashing her naughty bits is really sort of infantile, when considered dispassionately. And while the opening up of all sorts of mass media to the forces of the democratic selection of entertainment is wonderful in many ways, the rise of the amateur has its problems. Shakespeare would not have blogged. Judy Garland wouldn’t have sung karaoke.

It is useful to reflect upon the wistful nature of the song and the images that accompany it. That tableau is being played out in many places in the United States right now, and Judy Garland, Ralph Blane, and Hugh Martin probably ain’t showing up to tell those home alone –some alone forever — that their intense longing is shared by many, if not all of their fellow men.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, now.