Category Archives: General

Instead of being a time of unusual behavior, Christmas is perhaps the only time in the year when people can obey their natural impulses and express their true sentiments without feeling self-conscious and, perhaps, foolish.  Christmas, in short, is about the only chance a man has to be himself.  ~Francis C. Farley

From my home to yours, I extend a heartfelt wish of ‘Merry Christmas’ to you. While part of me tries valiantly to maintain that I would do all of this with or without a group of loyal readers, that’s not at all true. This one goes out to all you wonderful people out there in the dark, the ones I’ve met, and the ones I haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting. Thank you for visiting this crazy patch of the Internet. Sometimes it feels like you know me better, and care more, than my own family and friends. But that’s what keeps me going – it’s the key to my entire psyche, and to change it now would be… incomprehensible to me and all that I know. There is no other way – it’s simply too late. Now go and spend time with your loved ones or yourself, whichever is preferable… (I’ll be doing a little of both.)

He stands before the Christmas tree in his sleeper, the warm and snuggly one-piece pajama that has feet to slide over the carpeted floors. Captured by the flash of a camera, he looks slightly surprised, and a little bit haunted. He will not know why – he will never know why – there is a distance to his being loved. The quiet ones just don’t demand it that way. The wonder of Christmas does manage to transform – for a night, for a day, for the week away from school – and even though he is not in school yet he senses the difference.

In church babies younger than him cry and crowd into the cathedral, with parents dressed up and decked out as if going to a party. They have family dinners to attend, relatives to dismiss and impress, drinks to disguise, and quiet corners to find. We seem to want to escape these days as eagerly as we anticipate them. He knows nothing of this yet, and what he has heard of Santa feels too suspect, too unreal, and his mind will never quite get around it enough to believe. He is, already, inaccessible – perhaps the worst thing for a child to be. But it’s Christmas Eve, and he knows enough to pretend.

Before the snow arrives, as we approach the shortest and darkest day of the year, we invite our friends old and new over to celebrate the season.

Christmas is forever, not for just one day,
for loving, sharing, giving, are not to put away
like bells and lights and tinsel, in some box upon a shelf.
The good you do for others is good you do yourself…
– Norman Wesley Brooks

I am woefully aware that I missed out on the golden age of office holiday parties – those wild and carefree days when you could smoke, drink, and make sexual advances while under the influence of said smoke and drink, and all would be forgiven and forgotten by the next Monday morning. It was the ultimate representation of ‘What happens at the office Christmas party stays at the office Christmas party’. Sadly, those days are done, and there is so much political correctness at the office parties I’ve attended that there is no more room for indecent fun and debauchery. They have been watered down to sanitized versions of their former glory, with no room for outrageousness, and no hope for excitement. I never got to experience the wicked ways of the past, (and I hold little to no hope of having it happen at today’s office party), so I’ll pop in the Christmas episode of ‘Mad Men’ – the one where Joan leads a feisty conga line – and dream of the sugarplums of the 60’s, back when life was quaint, and you could bribe Santa with a nip.

I never realized that Fred Astaire was the voice behind ‘Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town’, which is currently playing in our den. (And who the hell knew that Mickey Rooney played Kris Kringle??) And does anyone call this room a ‘den’ anymore? Forgive me, a trifling of a cold has got me slightly down and delirious, just at the most inopportune moment, but I am determined to lick it quickly and decisively.

It turns out that Burl Ives, Fred Astaire and Boris Karloff formed some of my most happy Christmas memories. I wonder if the stop-motion style of these stories casts the same spell over today’s kids. Incidentally, my favorite song from all of these Christmas specials is in this one – ‘Put One Foot in Front of the Other’ – which I love as much for the tune as for its moment of misunderstood-bad-guy-transformation.