Greatest. Christmas. Song. Evar.

There’s no video of Brenda Lee singing this one on YouTube, and all the mash ups stink. The remakes by people like Kim Wilde are uniformly dreadful. You’ll have to make do with just audio.

But what audio! I think the song and the singer and the time and place and cultural context have emulsified into one of dem dere “cultural artifacts.” All the anima is contained in the original.

I’ve performed the song countless times myself, and it’s not that it’s not amenable to performance by others. It’s easy and fun and lively. It’s just that it will always be just an homage to the original. That’s rare, and in this case, wonderful.

Have a big glass of Tang in your free glass from the gas station with your shredded wheat and cream for breakfast. Read a Life magazine while smoking a Chesterfield and waiting for Rob Petrie to come home. Drink a highball, and listen to Brenda Lee over and over while pretending it’s on the AM radio. You can warm your hands over the tubes.

Merry Christmas everybody!

We’re All Scrooge In Reverse Now

Kids like Christmas. Then you grow up and it can wear on you a bit. There’s additional pressure put on you, and you’ve got plenty of that already.

I’ve succumbed to the temptation to become Scrooge in reverse, and I’m sorry for it. By Scrooge in reverse, I mean starting out my life filled with the good humor and wonder of the holiday, and ending up crabby, dyspeptic, and miserly about the whole business afterward.

There will be no Bah Humbug for me this year. I will not execrate my gifts and regale you with stories of dysfunctional family gatherings. I am not already planning on returning anything. If there’s anything bad about the holiday, we bring it along with us. You can always keep your perspective about the thing, ignore the voluminous minefields placed around it by those who do not understand it fully, and enjoy it for the good humor and generosity of spirit that’s in it. No one’s forcing you to be a jerk on Christmas.

“A Christmas Carol” begins: Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.

Kinda grim, huh? It ends with:

..and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God Bless Us, Every One!

There, that’s better. I hereby promise to get it in the right order, just like Dickins, for all the days of my life.

Kissmahhs Twee

Yeah, “Kissmahhs Twee” is exactly how my three year old said it. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do when he starts talking like his older brother, and the toddler euphonium noise is gone from our house.

The little fellow danced around the room, pretending to play a tiny saxophone ornament while we listened to Ella Fitzgerald sing and swing; the older boy waxed poetic about the tree; and finally the decorated tree stood guard over their Christmas dreams for the first time this year.

My wife and I will continue to mispronounce things in the manner of our child, and he will correct us eventually, just like the big one did. We will be proud, and hide our faces and weep.

Merry Christmas everybody. Get it while it’s hot.

I Remember When Rock Was Young…

It’s pretty silly, I know, but I got a kick out of it.

When grown up men play metal, I have a tendency to be bemused. By “bemused,” I mean I think they’re stupid and silly and absurd and a total, utter waste of everyone’s time. But you can reconsider a bit when you see these kids bang away at some silly thing and getting so much enjoyment out of it.

Naming your band the Unholy Slasher Goths of Satan and prancing around like a cross between Richard Simmons and Hannibal Lecter isn’t really all that subversive. The worldview is really more similar to Barney the purple dinosaur than a neo-nazi. Wear a costume, and yammer at children about sharing or Riding The Storm Out or something. I get the same sort of vibe from adults reading comic books. It’s kinda silly, but harmless.

I suppose that we could watch these kids and wish they were a chamber orchestra, sawing away at The Four Seasons. Vivaldi, I mean, not Frankie Valli. But of course that’s adult entertainment, in the true sense of the word. Children prefer mindless exhortations to Rock, because they don’t actually rock yet. Let them bang away.

They won’t be silly until they’re old men, bursting out of their spiked codpieces, their exposed chest hair going gray, wandering around a stage still blabbing about Devil worshipping over three power chords while their accountant buys T-bills for them and their personal assistant hands them Evian.

Rock on, kids!

Ho Ho Yada Yada Mistletoe Blah Blah Blues

My wife is curing me of my ambivalence towards Christmas. She likes it. I like her. There is always a substantial metaphorical breeze that causes a drift towards the enjoyment of anything enjoyable to your coterie of friends, neighbors, and especially your loved ones. It’s why lynch mobs function at such a high level; it’s not just Christmas.

We buy a Christmas tree from the same people every year. Our children act like an odometer for our travel through life over the last eleven years or so. We exchange pleasantries and then count how many we’ve each got, and gauge how tall they’ve gotten in the interim. My older son stood, aw shucks, at the cash register while the owner’s daughter of identical vintage stood next to her mother and rang up our sale. When we first met our spruce suppliers, the Nasrallas, our boy was a tiny infant, and that daughter was a newborn.

It’s happier not to deal with strangers for such transactions. Impersonal things can be bought impersonally. A Christmas tree is not an impersonal thing, or shouldn’t be, anyway. No man that has ever shown me a picture of his children is a stranger.

Merry Christmas, everybody.