A rather long and rambling series of thoughts on Christmas

Christmas 2000. (Yes, just eight years ago, much too recent to be nostalgic. Just work with me here!) The end of finals coincided with a big snowstorm, and heaven knows New Haven looks a lot better under a blanket of fresh snow. I’ve been out Christmas shopping, and on arriving home I park the car and looking up at the kitchen window to see the lights on while the roomies are cooking dinner while the snow falls beautifully in the dying gray light. Inside, I hear a CD blasting on my roommate’s stereo – a CD I had bought for her and left on her pillow that morning. When she sees me stumbling in the kitchen door with an armful of gifts, there’s an enthusiastic thank you that greets me along with the heady warm air from the stove, and my cup of cheer most certainly runneth over.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to let this memory get too treacly. You see, that shopping trip was the one on which I bought my then-sweetie a pair of gloves for Christmas. She’d said she needed a new pair, and these were her favourite color. They matched the scarf she used to wear all the time. But...and here I must pause and remind those of you who knew me in 2000 that you know which ex this is, and of course there was going to be a “but” here...but being who she was, Christmas morning, she took one look at the gloves and asked me if I had kept the receipt. (I had, but I don’t recall if I ever gave her a straight answer or not.)

And that’s perhaps the all time best example of why every Christmas, I look forward to the big moment when you know the craziness is over and you’re free to just enjoy the moment on your own. Really, the whole Christmas season tradition was always a bit oppressive to me even when I was a kid. I always looked forward to the peace and quiet of whenever the craziness ended. The downright sadistic parties at school, the get-togethers with neighbours and family that nobody really enjoyed, and the constant barrage of saccharine television commercials that just screamed “your Christmas sucks and everybody else is living in a Thomas Kincaid painting”...sooner or later all of it would finally be in the rearview mirror and wherever you were, that’s when you could bask in the Christmas Spirit in your own special way, remember?

Usually I didn’t – and still don’t – know just when moment would occur, but I would know it when I felt it. Watching a favorite Christmas episode of some show on TV maybe, or listening to the oldies station under the covers after bedtime, that’s a fine memory. In college, it was usually sometime after Waltz. For the vast majority of my readers who did not go to Grinnell, Waltz is...well, think of the senior prom, only with decent music and nobody bothers with pretending not to be drunk. It was usually a lot of fun, but usually really tedious too. Every semester I would seriously consider not going, and then I would go and have a wonderful time in spite of myself, but I also found I was always a bit relieved the whole thing was over. Yeah, I’m a lump of sugar and all that, but I usually do a pretty good job of hiding it even from myself. Anyway, after Waltz it was usually about two weeks to finals, and after the calm inevitability of finals and the slow realization that they hadn’t really been that bad, and then there would be a glorious three or four days before heading home where you could just hang around with your friends and bask in the relief. And the seasonal joy, if you wanted it.

In DC, Christmas usually coincided with a bunch of housemates leaving. It put a bittersweet damper on the barrage of Be happy, dagnabbit!, but it was also an excuse for spending plenty of quality time with people you actually enjoyed spending time with. I have a number of especially fond memories of dinner at Childe Harold on Dupont Circle with various soon-to-be-scattered friends, and then there were the late drinks at Eagan’s. That’s one of the few things about DC I still miss since I wore out my welcome there last time around. At Yale, well, see the beginning of this entry. And since then? Well, it’s been almost too low key for the past several years, usually because I was either busy studying right up to the last minute or living in a country where Christmas wasn’t a big deal.

But what about this year? Actually, this Christmas season has been just as quiet as the last several, and I like it that way. But this time around, there was no real “moment,” because for once there was no serious buildup of gun-to-the-head cheerfulness. There’s been plenty of garish decor (Singapore being Singapore, there always is anyway), but the hot weather has kept it from feeling like the cheer-up-or-die business I had come to identify with the 25th and the several weeks before it. With work keeping me fairly busy up through Wednesday and the better half off visiting her parents in Abu Dhabi (yes, I’ve been seeing somebody and yes, there’s a reason why I haven’t mentioned it on here before, but it’s nothing the least bit sordid), it was easy enough to forget the whole thing. Wednesday night, it was off to the Hard Rock Cafe for dinner – my gift to myself, and I was quite happy with it. It was raining, but the lights strung across the street were beautiful despite (or even because of?) the weather. After dinner, it was across the street to an Irish pub where I had a bit too much, ensuring a late Christmas morning while my roommates celebrated the big event with their two year old.

Okay, that’s actually a little depressing, isn’t it? Trust me, I had a nice time whether it sounds like it or not. Hope everyone else had a happy holiday as well, wherever you all are and whatever you’re up to!

Smart baby

Passed on without further comment...

Every time a kid shoots his eye out, a bell rings

I see the annual love-to-hate-It's a Wonderful Life fest is in full swing at the New York Times. This might surprise some of you, but I agree completely with the article. I had thought of some of those things before, of course, especially the fact that the "bad" Bedford Falls looks like a lot more fun. But it had not occurred to me before that all those manufacturing jobs George brought to town arrived just in time for an economic slump in Upstate New York that is still in full swing six decades later. So he just set the town up for an even bigger fall than it otherwise would have had. Ouch. Note that he also makes the case that the movie has some brilliant acting and some well-crafted scenes - just that the "happy" ending is still pretty depressing. (And also inaccurate, since he still probably would have gone to jail.)

Now, here's what I want to know. When are the Scrooges (and Potters) going to start in on A Christmas Story as well? Take away the warm fuzzies and what is the real Christmas Story? Well, Dad goes behind Mom's back to buy their son an extremely dangerous gift - with some potentially ugly hints at his future to boot - and then the kid comes within an inch of exactly the disaster that everybody warned him about, but he escapes any consequences by lying to his parents about the whole thing. That's it! It makes me want to run and hide behind a stack of videotapes of Very Special Episodes of every bad eighties sitcom.

On a less cynical note...I've been saying for years, the best way to illustrate who was the creative genius of The Beatles was to listen to John and Paul's respective Christmas songs back to back. It hardly even seems like a fair comparison, the former is so superior to the latter. Apparently somebody else has figured that out too, because twice in the past two weeks I've heard both songs played back to back in stores and restaurants. Don't take my word for it, listen
here and (or not) here. Not even close, huh?

Just a friendly reminder of what we're still up against

One of the many interesting things about living with three Ukranians is their unique, mostly blank-slate perspective about American politics. I was reminded of this just the other night, as the latest wingnut cause celebre - "Obama wasn't born in the US" - made its way over here. It was just a minor story in the paper, nothing that would surprise anyone who paid any attention during the Clinton administration (and its accompanying sideshows with congressmen shooting pumpkins in their back yards to prove something or other about Vince Foster, etc.). You and I know nothing is going to come of it.

Not everybody who read that article did, though, and when I arrived home the other night, my roommates were dying for the inside scoop. "Dave. What is this with Obama not becoming president because he is not really American?!"

That's right, they believed it. I don't mean this as a knock at them in any way. They're intelligent, educated people who read in the paper that there may be a wrinkle in US law that keeps Obama out of office. Not the kind of thing people from a place like Ukraine expect to pop up in the Land of Liberty unless there really is something to it. And that's their first mistake.

Anyhow, just wanted to bring this up because I know a lot of Obama supporters out there seem to think the partisan excesses of the past are now going to stay in the past for some reason. Not as long as the right wing s**t machine can still generate enough momentum behind a completely baseless story to send it halfway around the world and fool anybody who trusts America to live up to its reputation. Here, you don't even get Act II, in which the manstream media wrings its hands and wonders how these ridiculous tall talles always slip into the public consciousness, totally oblivious to their own role in making it happen. All people here see - unless they really go looking for more information - is an article in a mainstream paper reporting that somebody somewhere thinks Obama was born in Kenya. Or Indonesia. Or England. Or something.