Every day at work this week, the small talk turned largely to one of two topics: “Here, have some sugary snacks!” and “Got your Christmas shopping done yet?” I hate when small talk uncovers a festering wound the questioner didn’t know was there.
Tag Archives: Christmas
A Christmas Tree of Many Kindnesses
In last night’s entry we shared pics of our geek-intensive Christmas decorations, including our collections of Star Wars and super-hero ornaments, a few Christmas-based action figures, and our li’l Charlie Brown tree. Longtime MCC readers were united in their complete lack of surprise at the characters who stand on Christmas watch around our house, bringing festivity and joy and smiles and repulsing any Scrooges or Grinches or ACLU lawyers who would dare darken our doorstep.
Pictured at left is our primary tree, which from a distance looks like any other. To the untrained eye it fits the minimum flair requirements, but you’d never know by looking that this isn’t our normal setup. Compared to the household customs exemplified in the previous entry, this year’s tree theme was, for us, an unusual approach.
Our Very Special Christmas Diorama and Wreaths
My wife and I have our conventional traditions. I drag our Christmas tree down from the attic so we can reassemble it and choose which ornaments see the light of day this year and which ones stay packed. She frees our Christmas dinnerware from the back of our kitchen cabinets. We send and gratefully receive Christmas cards. We watch a few Christmas specials. We avoid Christmas TV-movies. We look forward to Christmas Eve service at our church.
And then there’s our Christmas diorama, a time when geek and non-geek decorations gather ’round our Lord and Savior and celebrate the occasion in their own special ways, without any partisan courtroom squabbling to suck the spirit out of them.
My Super Awesome “Frosty the Snowman” Reboot Pitch
Millions of viewers used to love watching Frosty the Snowman every year when it aired around Christmastime. The beloved 1969 animated special was one of several perennial favorites in my childhood household. We knew the song, we knew most of the lines, we recognized those familiar cartoon voices, and we knew every beat of the story, from the flop magician to the snowman’s parting promise. Frosty was common knowledge among us kids.
See that face up there, full of angst and pathos and magic? That classic hero just turned 45 years old. Isn’t it time for his 21st-century reboot?
I don’t mean as a feature film, because that declining box office is depressing. I also don’t mean another one-time TV Christmas special, because that’s thinking too small. See, I’m thinking live-action regular series. So many facets of this undervalued intellectual property yearn for a modern update with better fashions, extra pizzazz, hipper attitudes, and supernatural warfare. Frosty himself could stay CG, but there’s no reason Karen, her friends, the other townspeople, and most of the town scoundrels couldn’t be played by real actors so we can crank out episodes more quickly and minimize our animation needs. Unless we send this proposal to Fox, animating it will get us nowhere. I say it’s time for Frosty to start over, but this time keep it real.
I’ve taken the liberty of mapping out a hypothetical thirteen-episode first season that would rebuild the Frosty universe from the ground up and make it relevant and “sick” to a whole new generation of impressionable prime-time viewers. This, then, is what my preliminary episode guide looks like for…
SNOWMAN: THE SERIES!
My So-Called “Black Friday” 2014
Hero Blogger Looks for Black Friday War Stories in All the Wrong Places
It was that time of year again! Black Friday has become that highly anticipated, deeply dreaded, beneficial, violent, invigorating, intimidating, fulfilling, decaying, economically necessary, ethically questionable, joyous holiday and/or time of mourning for everyone’s souls. Depending on who’s asking, it’s shopping as a competitive sport, or shopping as the closest American society comes to legalizing The Purge. It’s a great time for rock-bottom bargains, or it’s a time for suckers to get stuck with retailers’ unwanted, defective leftovers. It’s when the Christmas season begins for real, or it’s the ultimate defamation to the name of Christ.
Reporters spend the day prowling for cautionary tales of merchandise hoarding gone wrong, of consumer entitlement run amuck, of retailer manipulation backfiring, of fisticuffs and gunfights, of hair-pulling and cheek-slapping. Somewhere out there, shoppers will be boxing for the privilege to take home a ten-dollar panini maker that the manufacturer discontinued due to exploding wiring, and any number of news crews mean to catch it on tape before some lucky amateurs capture and post it on YouTube first. Everyone tells themselves it’s all part of the Game and complains about the system while continuing to do their part.
Black Friday used to be my thing. In recent years I’ve scaled back my expectations and participation. No more arising at 4 a.m. or earlier like a shopping zombie that thinks “doorbusters” is a synonym for “brains”. No more scheming for the largest tech items that’ll be stocked at a maximum of two per store. No more long shopping lists requiring fifteen or twenty stops’ worth of hunting and gathering.
This year I implemented more modifications to my approach. This is how my Black Friday 2014 turned out:
Mamaw’s Christmas in November
“Merry Christmas! ‘Tis the season! Deck the halls! Buy me now! The wallet wants what it wants!”
Each year my wife and I take her grandmother to Indianapolis’ own Christmas Gift & Hobby Show at the Indiana State Fairgrounds. Now on its 65th year, the Show is always held in the first half of November, shortly after Halloween and well before Thanksgiving. Judging by popular internet sentiment, you’d think there would’ve been protesters marching outside, picketing and demanding it be postponed till the weekend following Thanksgiving or else. Judging by the steady crowds packing every aisle, apparently the average citizens don’t much care about popular internet sentiment. I’m surprised we didn’t receive word of a shutdown from the Christmas fire marshal.
Holiday Snacktime Overload
Behold our leftover cookies as of today. Most of these will be shared with others in the days ahead. This photo would look a lot more appetizing to me if I hadn’t just spent the last seven celebratory days enjoying sugar as an integral ingredient of every other meal.
Christmastime Moments in Downtown Indy
With uncharacteristically minimal preamble, we present random relevant pics we took in 2013 during our varied experiences in downtown Indianapolis so far this season. Consider it a bold experiment to see if I have the willpower to publish an entry under 200 words. Also: because Christmas!
All the best companies downtown have large holiday displays. Pictured here: the lobby of the OneAmerica Tower.
2013 Road Trip Photos #27: Christmas at Ralphie’s House
[No, loyal MCC readers, you didn’t sleep through a few missing weeks like Rip Van Winkle, and I haven’t deleted any entries lately. I’ve chosen to warp space-time with a very special flash-forward for the sake of holiday synchronicity. We’ll backtrack for the intervening installments in due time.]
When we told friends and family we would be spending an entire day of our vacation in Cleveland, they thought us mad. In the old days Cleveland was a frequent punchline whenever a movie or TV show needed a throwaway reference to someplace vastly inferior to a given cast’s current setting. Nowadays they’re more likely to use Detroit or New Jersey, but Cleveland suffered that role on numerous occasions. Exhibit A: all of Howard the Duck.
In the course of our research, we were surprised at how many geek-based tourist attractions the city had to offer. We eventually concluded that it deserved much more than a lunchtime layover. Thus were we compelled to spend all of Day Eight driving around the city in a carefully mapped arc, beginning with our south-side hotel, looping around and northward toward Lake Erie, and back around again.
First stop: the house where several key scenes were filmed for that beloved American holiday juggernaut, A Christmas Story — an underdog flick that changed the course of millions of lives in my generation and monopolizes the TBS airwaves for twenty-four hours out of every year, much to the chagrin of the generations before and after us.
Fans will be thrilled to note one of the first items that greets you upon approach is a Major Award. It looks seriously weird in daylight.
Stalking the Great White Elephant
Like too many others, our extended family on both sides has given up on the ancient tradition of buying gifts for everyone they love. Few of us can afford to buy that many gifts, and it’s likely that the affluent minority wouldn’t have a clue about our interests, hobbies, or character traits. Heck, I don’t even know what some of them do for a living.
Some years we’ve agreed to buy gifts only for the kids, who were easier to treat as interchangeable when they were younger. As they’ve aged, they’ve become just as finicky and inscrutable as their parents. The process might be simpler if we lived near each other and/or spent time together. I hear that works well for some families. It’s not that we hate each other — if that were the case, Christmas gatherings wouldn’t be scheduled in the first place. But we seem to be a bit more fractured and preoccupied with our own doings than those families you see in movies or TV shows that do everything together. We can glean minutiae about each other from Facebook, but in most cases it’s not enough to influence our major Christmas purchasing decisions.
For the last few years, some factions in our families have livened up Christmas gatherings with a white elephant gift exchange. You chip in for a gift; you receive a random gift in return. It’s a way to say “I acknowledge you as part of the family” without designating a specific person as the recipient of the sentiment. More succinctly put: “Dear whoever: you technically matter.”
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 