If there's a War on Christmas, I sure as hell haven't seen it. For the uninitiated, I live near Paramus, New Jersey, which is without a doubt the Mall Capital of the World. Within a five-mile radius, there are no fewer than four major shopping malls. OK, one of them is in Hackensack, but it's spitting distance from Paramus, so who's counting. And then there's the monstrosity that is Palisades Center, but that's maybe fifteen miles away and Willowbrook is about twenty. Suffice it to say that there are plenty of malls around here, and that's not to mention the smaller strip malls housing everything from Dick's Sporting Goods to Blinds To Go. If you live in this area, you can pretty much forget about getting anywhere without aggravating yourself to death between about the week before Thanksgiving and the second week of January. A trip to Trader Joe's for organic frozen spinach can take an hour -- and the store is barely three miles from my house.

One of the common refrains of the Walking Wounded, which is what I call those of us whose spouses have died (I won't say "lost" our spouses, because as the Dowager Countess so rightly noted, we didn't lose them, they died; it isn't as if they are wandering Bergen Town Center somewhere looking for spats at Saks Off Fifth) is this idea that everyone is enjoying the spirit of the season except us. It's sad, really, when I read these people posting about all the happy couples they see shopping, or the families with children whose visions of sugarplums are palpable. I don't know where these people live, unless they live in Hobbiton, because if you live near Paramus, New Jersey, what you see are angry people -- people fighting each other for parking spaces or left turns, people angry because Toys R Us is out of whatever plastic gewgaw that is guaranteed to be in heavy rotation at next summer's garage sales is the Latest Hot Toy. The diners are full of children running around endangering the waitresses while their exhausted parents choke down a cup of coffee in a vain attempt to stay awake through all this. Routes 4 and 17 are in perpetual gridlock. So I don't know where all these happy people are.

Here at Casa la Brilliant, we're not exactly in the spirit of the season either, for obvious reasons. Oh, I made four different kinds of hand-frosted and hand-decorated holiday cookies, mostly because a) the friends I'm spending tomorrow with mentioned cookies, and b) I thought the neighbor kids who've been shoveling my driveway might enjoy them. But one thing that hasn't changed about this ritual is that every time I do it, I swear I'll never do it again. This year was no different. I'm a bit weepier than I've been in a while, but a lot of that is because Miss Maggie, my remaining cat from the Mr. Brilliant era, has a very bad upper respiratory infection in addition to her hyperthyroid and IBD, and is resisting about half the meds I'm trying to give her, most of which have to have been invented by someone who never tried to medicate a cat. She is giving every indication that, at age 14, she is getting ready to join Mr. Brilliant and Miss Jenny-Lee. This strikes me as being horribly unfair; why should he get BOTH of the cats we shared our life together with? I mean, I love Eli the Little Guy with all my heart, but he is still relatively new on the scene, and a new little sister for him would mean I have no pets with whom Mr. B. was seriously bonded. It all seems too much New Year New Start New Everything and I'm not sure I can take any more deaths right now.

But here we are, it's Christmas Eve Day in New Jersey, and everywhere you look, there are lights and decorations and "Keep Christ in Chritmas" signs on lawns, right next to the cheap plastic inflatable Santa in a hammock between two palm trees drinking a margarita. My neighbor's kids and grandkids all showed up wearing matching Santa hats (thankfully not rapping about their Christmas jammies). The local "soft pop" music station has been playing 24-hour Christmas music for weeks, for those of you who haven't heard "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" enough times in your lives. There's even a nativity on the town square in my little home town full of Republicans. And yet, out there in Wingnuttia, there's still this idea that there is a war on Christmas and that Christians are being persecuted.

I don't know about where you live, but around here, no one is rounding up Christians and putting them into camps. No one is talking about "ethnic cleansing" of Christians. No one is throwing Christians into prisons and forcing them to undergo daily gynecological examinations. So what is this "persecution" of which they speak? Who is really waging war here? In Las Vegas, a Salvation Army bell-ringer says she was assaulted by one of these Christian Soldiers for saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." In southern New Jersey, other Christian Soldiers torched a billboard which read, "Keep Saturn in Saturnalia."

Here's what I don't understand: If Christians are so upset about the banishment of the Baby Jesus from the public consciousness, why aren't they out picketing the malls and decrying the orgy of consumption that typefies the season? Why aren't they calling for the banning of Christmas trees and mistletoe as pagan symbols? Do you think for one minute that when Sarah Palin, the High Priestess of Christian Grievance, shops at Nordstrom's with her wallet stuffed with SarahPAC money so she can buy presents for her various bastard grandchildren, she is thinking of the Baby Jesus? Or is she thinking how lucky she is to be able to rile up a bunch of yahoos enough that they keep her wallet stuffed?

Here in the Mall Capital of the World, here is one Jewish Pagan who is all for keeping Christ in Christmas. Let there be wonder at the inexplicable. Let there be hope of peace on earth. Let a little child inspire the world. At least that way I can buy a bag of frozen spinach to make myself the Casa la Brilliant traditional Christmas Eve Indian dinner without it taking an hour.

Labels: Christmas, War on Christmas

Christmas sort of sneaked in on little cat feet this year, even though they were the little cat feet of Maggie, who true to form, was yowling at the door at 5:30 AM demanding her breakfast. Ever since Maggie has been on the prednisolone for her inflammatory bowel disease, she's been like a pothead in a Pathmark, constantly wanting to eat. But aside from Maggie, there's a stillness in the air this morning -- a stillness I usually savor on Christmas Eve, but this year we skipped our traditional Christmas Eve Indian dinner in favor of an aggressively unhealthful lunch at a local many-beers-on-tap local pub with my sister and brother-in-law before seeing them off to their home in North Carolina, to which I too will soon be traveling to begin the daunting task of sorting through our hoarder mother's worldly goods, separating the wheat from the chaff. It's enough to make me want to conjure up the old Clean House gang.

Mom always hated the holidays. I blame Norman Rockwell, for conjuring up images of happy families in a timeless America. Mom always felt like the Little Match Girl during the holidays, looking in on mythical images of happy, harmonious, loving families gathered around the Christmas tree and eating a lovingly-prepared meal. In her fantasy world, grandparents were loving, children were appreciative, and she could feel like she belonged. Mom would get depressed every year around this time, and this only became worse after her husband died right before New Year's in 2000. She never was able to let go of her grief for the next twelve years, which might make you think that hers was a lovely story of second chances at true love, were it not for the reality that six months before her husband became ill, she told me she wanted to leave him, take their Rottweiler and move to New York City. It wasn't that he was a bad person, it was simply that he had been unable, despite jumping through hoops for a quarter of a century, to fill the giant, gaping void at the center of her soul. It wasn't until much later that Mom figured out that it was SHE who was unable to be happy, not that others couldn't make her happy.

Mom had almost departed in late September, when the COPD she'd developed after surviving over two decades since lung cancer surgery while continuing to smoke resulted in a dangerous hypercarbia. She'd had a psychotic episode and landed in the hospital, where she insisted that she'd been picked up in the gutter in Philadelphia while wearing a leopard coat at a protest of some sort, she'd been taken to a basement where they'd cut her hair and tortured her in vile ways. It was at least a week before she realized it had been a hallucination. They didn't do anything in the hospital except keep her oxygenated, and after about five days, we were able to get her a placement in an assisted living residence so that she could be released from the hospital.

She'd been deteriorating again the last week or so before my sister was able to line up help so she could go home. She'd been in hospice care for a while, and when she'd become agitated, the hospice people would give her anti-anxiety medications so she wouldn't gasp for breath as her failing heart and hopelessly damaged lungs became unable to do the job any longer.

She died peacefully in her sleep less than thirty-six hours after entering her house. We think that either her heart just finally gave out, or that the hospice medications allowed her to relax enough to let go. She'd been terrified of an end in which she'd be in agony, gasping for breath (and so were we), so it's a blessing that she was able to depart quietly without knowing it was happening. We just had no idea it would be this soon.

It's never spoken of, but when someone dies after a long and deteriorating illness, there's always a sense of relief that it's finally over. For all that Mom had been of varying degrees of suicidal for as long as I can remember, she, like her mother before her, clung to a life from which she had derived no pleasure for a long time.

And yet, I don't feel any particular grief, or even loss. It isn't as if I could ever rely on my mother for reassurance, for emotional sustenance, for anything -- because she was so needy herself that she really had no room to nurture anyone else. It was always all about her -- her problems, her needs, how my problems affected her. Growing up with her neediness, her depression, and her frequent rages was often nightmarish -- it wasn't until much later on that I realized that being interrogated for hours after visiting with one's father was not actually a normal function of a divorced parent. I long ago forgave her for my childhood, because I know that she just was not equipped from her own abusive childhood to parent us. But we have done the hard work of coming to terms with that childhood and moving past it into successful adult life -- something she was just never able or willing to do.

Tomorrow I head south to help my sister sort through the mountain of stuff in her house -- all that stuff that she said she would miss most when she was gone. Part of me is excited at what we might find, and about some of the beautiful antiques from furniture to teddybears to marcasite jewelry that I hope to give a good home. But part of me thinks I may shed the only real tears I will have shed over this entire week, at the utter waste -- the money wasted on handbags and shoes and jewelry and sweaters purchased in an effort to fill the void in her soul and never worn because they were always being saved "for good wear"; on antique dolls and teddybears and magazine subscriptions and exercise equipment never used and all the things ordered in the dead of night from QVC because the nice ladies on TV helped salve the loneliness that no husband, child, or even dog, could salve; and at the sheer waste of potential -- of a sharp mind and a wicked sense of humor that could never quite overcome the deep-seated self-loathing she had.

I can't be sad that she is gone, as I see the end of this part of her journey as a blessed release from her burden of living inside her head for eighty-five years. But I can be sad at the many "second chances" she was afforded in her life that she never could allow to flower.

Be at peace, Mom. At long last, be at peace.

Labels: Christmas, families, personal musings

We seem to be at a peculiar spiritual crossroads in this country as we on the east coast survey the wreckage of so many lives, mull over the impact of the last election, and head into the maelstrom of yet another holiday season that increasingly demonstrates everything that is wrong with our country -- the selfishness, the greed, the utter contempt for the other human beings that populate our communities, never mind our nation or the world at large.

If you do a search on "Christmas" in this blog, you'll see that I always tend to get thoughtful around this time of year, as I deal with the problems of just getting around when you live near Paramus, New Jersey, widely known as the Mall Capital of the World. More so even than Easter, which really SHOULD be the holiday that makes those of us who were born into the tradition of the Old Testament feel like outsiders, Christmas is really the biggest Us vs. Them holiday of the year. Every year it's the same old tired battles over what religious symbols should be on municipal property, the same old tired nonsensical rhetoric from the right about how secular liberal Jewish Communist Homosexual Pornographers are waging a war on Christmas, which As We All Know Is The Official Holiday Of Virtuous Christians Like Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, and Bill O'Reilly.

Every year we have people injured or shot at or killed by fellow human beings while working or shopping on the unfortunately but perhaps aptly named Black Friday. Every year the 24 x 7 news-o-tainment cycle is filled with footage of stampeding shoppers looking for the best deal on the latest XBox or flat-screen TV, which always makes me wonder where in the Jesus story I can find the passage about the Three Wise Men camping out at Wal-Mart for two days to be first in line for the Doorbuster Special on frankincense and myrrh.

Every year I bring up this Christmas post I did on Christmas Eve 2007. I bring it up because of the over 10,000 posts that have appeared on this blog since July 31, 2004, it may be my favorite thing I've ever written. I also bring it up because as the years go by, and as Christmas as it's celebrated in the U.S., with its emphasis on economic activity and crass materialism, looks ever more sour in the face of a declining middle class, I find myself thinking of the Nativity and thinking, "How did it come to this?"

The Jewish comedian Marc Maron, who has been written about so many times on this blog that he has his own tag, had an unforgettable bit on Conan O'Brien's show a few years ago, in which he mused about going to the mall dressed as Jesus during Christmas and walking around shaking his head and saying "No....NO! This is NOT how it's supposed to be, people!" Of course then, being Maron, he talks about going up to the mall Santa Claus and saying "Hey, fat man, you're just the clown at my birthday party." But in this day and age, when Jesus has been appropriated by the venal, the craven, and the greedy; when ever more of this nation's treasure is shoveled into the pockets of those for whom no amount of money is enough; to bankers and CEOs and billionaire inheritors of their fathers' wealth, I find myself wanting to admonish people to keep Christ in Christmas. Let it be about mystery and wonder and hope and joy -- the joy that comes when something truly marvelous happens -- the miner who crawls out alive from the collapsed mine; the hopelessly ill person who manages to beat the disease; the woman told for many years that she will never be able to have children who confounds all the doctors by conceiving.

It isn't that I "find God" at Christmas. On the contrary; what I find as I get older is that I'm pretty much done at "Well, there's a man who lives in the sky...." And recently I had my sister in stitches while I recounted what a completely fucked-up Jewish parent the Old Testament's YHWH is. I mean, what kind of sicko do you have to be to tell someone to demonstrate his love and devotion to you by taking his beloved son up to a mountaintop and sacrificing him in your name, then at the last minute saying, "Hah! KIDDING! Just wanted to see if you'd do it!" No wonder we Jews are fucked up; look at what goes on in our so-called Holy Book? Look at what kind of Ultimate Parent we have! Supposedly the New Testament gets somewhat better, once this Jewish carpenter with the charisma of Bill Clinton starts growing his hair long, wearing sandals, and telling people they should be nice to each other and help the poor, but the people who have appropriated him would just as soon spit on the poor and kill everyone in their path who doesn't agree with them.

The right-wing religious kooks get crazier and crazier the more they start to realize that the world they have built is crumbling, to be replaced by one populated with multiracial secular people whom I hope do a better job of stewarding this planet than those who cling to life at the same time as they regard themselves as having two tickets to paradise have. And yet, at the same time, there seems to be a current fascination with people who have long eschewed the life of gadgets and materialism for a more simple life.

You were wondering when I'd get to the Amish, weren't you.

When the movie Witness came out, I didn't know anyone who after watching this scene:



...wasn't ready to pack their bags and go.

Intellectually we always knew about the backbreaking work and the oppressive religiosity and some of us even were dimly aware of the reality that 20% of the country's puppy mills are nestled in the bucolic Amish communities of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Missouri. But the fascination with the Amish lingers, while similarly insular communities such as the Lubavitcher Hasidim of Crown Heights, Brooklyn and the Satmar Hasidim of Kiryas Joel do not draw such fascination.

It used to be just a question of curiosity about the plain clothing and bonnets of the women purveying pickles and shoo-fly pie at farmers markets, but with the respectable NatGeo running the thoughtful reality-based ex-Amish Mose Gingerich's efforts to help other renegades in Amish Out of Order on one end of the spectrum, and the tawdry TLC's phony hit Breaking Amish that The Channel Which Brought You Honey Boo-Boo is now going to follow up with the even MORE phony Amish Mafia on the other, it's clear that Amish is the new Black.

And so it was while going through my annual existential Christmas season pondering that I stumbled upon XAmishAtheist, and I became so engrossed that I didn't even look up for a full hour. Any blog this interesting should be on our blogroll. So whether you're interested in the Amish, in the journey from Christianity to atheism, or you just want in-depth coverage of the dirt behind the appalling Breaking Amish, it's all here.

Labels: Christmas, religion, War on Christmas

It's funny how certain things have become holiday traditions. Yesterday I was at the archetype of New Jersey malls, Paramus Park, blowing my flex account money on three new pairs of glasses. My prescription has changed since 2007, which was the last time I had a new prescription, and I've been having some trouble with night driving, so I decided it was time to spring for new glasses.

When I was in North Carolina last month, I somehow managed to lose what I called my Nerdy McNerdlingtons, which were these wonderful thick-black-rimmed sunglasses. So I went to Lenscrafters hoping to not just replace them, but to replace my twisty-kid-frame computer glasses with something nerdy as well.

I was greeted at the door by the store's "frame stylist" (yes, there really is such a position at Lenscrafters), who sported a tag with the inevitable name "Giancarlo". Giancarlo was maybe twenty-five at the most, and I assured him that I was about to become his worst nightmare customer of the day, because I was looking for nerd glasses, and they had to be the RIGHT nerd glasses. Well, Giancarlo looked at me and saw just a fat, middle-aged lady, and proceeded to show me frames more suitable to Jewish Grandmother In Boca circa 1972, so I sent Giancarlo on his way and went in search of Just The Right Frames That Would Not Cost Me An Arm And A Leg.

I've never understood the appeal of designer labels. I've never understood why anyone would want a Louis Vuitton handbag, which to me is just an ugly plastic thing. To me, the $79.95 eyeglass frame looks no different from the $249.95 frame with the peel-off sticker that says "Ralph Lauren Polo" and the little gold polo player on the side of the frames. Ralph Lauren is very adept at creating a kind of faux-nostalgic American classic look, but when he looks in the mirror, what looks back at him is still Ralph Lifshitz from the Bronx whose parents came from Pinsk. And he has about as much to do with those eyeglass frames as does Hesh Liebowitz the Optician from Grand Street.

Anyway, after a half-hour of trying to explain to Giancarlo who Nate Silver and Rachel Maddow were as avatars of the kind of Cool Nerd look I was after (he had never heard of either of them, which made me weep for our nation's future), I finally sselected two nerdy frames for my prescription sunglasses and computer glasses, and some functional black-wire-rims for my night driving glasses. Then I was passed along to Patrick the Sales Writer, who regaled me about his experience last year with an electric turkey fryer, and Anthony the Optician, who shared the story of how annoyed he gets as group texts (heh), which is sort of like having all your Facebook friends and all THEIR Facebook friends and then all of THEIR Facebook friends text-reply to you all at once.

So by the time I left to kill an hour and a half in Paramus Park Mall, a smallish mall by contemporary standards, but like most malls filled with stores where there is absolutely nothing a sane person would want to buy, Patrick and Anthony were like my new BFFs and the $700 that I'd spent on three pair of glasses had absolutely nothing to do with it, I'm sure. An hour and a half later, after looking at some hideous clothes at Chico's (what has happened to them, anyway), saying a prayer of thanks to the Goddess that I do not have a young female child who wanted clothing from a store called "Juicy", which looks like an emporium for underaged street hookers, and browsing the rather lame bookstore, I went back for another half hour of stimulating conversation about coffee and text messages with my new BFFs Patrick and Anthony, before I was finally released to go home around 6:30 PM, went home, watched TV, went to sleep and didn't get up until this morning, after Maggie (who is back to her old bad self) had howled at me for two straight hours.

But anyway, holiday traditions... Remember holiday traditions? This is a post about holiday traditions.

Today is Thanksgiving -- the carbo-loading that takes place before the shopping marathon to come. For all that there are far too many retailers so hungry to squeeze every last dollar out of the public that they're depriving their employees of one of the only two actual holidays on the retail calendar and opening today, it's a quiet respite between the workday and the torture to come. It's a torture that consists not just of shopping for tchotchkes for people who don't need more tchotchkes, but also of a relentless barrage of Christmas music and TV specials, each more nauseating than the one before. There's plenty of time for that tomorrow. But today, we're celebrating the most important of all the holiday traditions -- more important than the turkey, the football, the pumpkin pie.

Yes, friends, it's time for the annual playing of "Alice's Restaurant." I kind of like this version from the 1990s:



... but if you prefer the original, it's here:



Have a great day, everyone!

Labels: Christmas, holidays, Thanksgiving

If God himself was behind the Denver Bronco's recent run, then He sent Tim Tebow a little message about humility yesterday.

Merry War On Christmas, everyone.

Labels: Christmas, Christofascist Zombie Brigade, football, War on Christmas

No macaca moments in this one, and there IS something kind of cool about seeing a politician (or a would-be one) show his true colors after he thinks the camera has been turned off. But if this goes viral, George Allen's attempted comeback could find itself in trouble:



Every time I see George Allen, I think of Bob Roberts:

Labels: assholes, Christmas, hypocrisy, morons, phonies, Republican brownshirts, Teh Stoopid

There's some rumbling afoot that Joe Scarborough is considering a run for president in 2012.

The mainstream media won't bring this up, but just in case you've forgotten, go read this post from July at Brendan Calling.

Could be nothing, as we found out with the Chandra Levy murder. But that doesn't mean it should be swept under the rug if Joey the Scar decides to be a candidate for the highest office in the land.

And while you're over there, you may never buy another real Christas tree again after reading this.

Labels: Christmas, Joe Scarborough, Washington scandals

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!

It's easy to forget, when you see teabaggers foaming at the mouth on cable news about birth certificates and lazy unemployed people and immigrant drug dealers and treasonous liberals, that even these most vile of people were once children.

Santa Says is a blog by a guy who seems to do seasonal work as a mall Santa, who posts his experiences dealing with children at Christmas time. What may surprise you is that for all that Christmas is the season of unbridled avarice (cf: Jean Shepherd), children really do get what's going on the world around them:

Today a boy gave me a small baggie of coins that were his own funds and when asked he said he wanted me to use them to buy toys for kids that might not get any. In fact I have received such gifts before from children But this year I have gotten 2 to 3 times as many and I believe that even young children can be aware of hard times for others and respond with compassion and touching gestures especially involving other kids.

A 5 year old girl ends her letter to me, “Don’t forget about the poor people. Take one ting you would give to me and give it to a poor child!” Alexander gives me a few buttons and says, “These came off of my Buzz Lightyear. I thought you could use them to make another boy a new Buzz.”

Morgan writes, ” Pleas bring all the sick kids a toy or a book and something to eat.” Breanne, “I now there are lots of kids out there that do not have iney toy’s so if you Do not have unaf of toy’s pleys giv those ones that Do not hav toy’s”

After 9-11 one youngster asked me to “take toys to the children of the terrorists so they won’t hate us so much”.

There's a journey from being children like these to being the kind of willfully ignorant, hate-filled lunatic that just elected what will be perhaps the most loathsome House of Representatives in this nation's history. Your children don't have to take that journey. You can set them on a different path. The raw material is already there.

Labels: Christmas

I know that the holiday season is one of sad memories and loss for many people. It seems that a disproportionate number of people lose loved ones during the holidays -- parents, spouses, even children. I think of Elizabeth Edwards' young children, still raw from the loss of their mother, trying to find a way to observe Christmas in some way that doesn't make it worse. I have a friend who lost her husband in the fall and her father last week -- a double 4th quarter whammy. Colored lights and TV commercials showing large, loving families sometimes just serve to rub salt in the wounds.

Still, the fact that between 2 PM yesterday and 10 AM this morning I heard Joni Mitchell's "River" not once but THREE SEPARATE TIMES on the radio makes me wonder. I know we all feel that if we have to hear "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" one more time a well-placed icepick embedded squarely in one's own frontal lobe sounds like an appealing prospect, but I'm not sure that "River" is the answer.


It's one thing to be a brooding, depressive adolescent, writing sad poetry in a blank book while sitting alone at lunchtime at school and coming home to listen to the Blue album and crying. It's quite another for the very same people who perpetrate Burl Ives on us every Christmas to decide that the presence of the word "Christmas" in the first line makes "River" something to which even the loneliest, most depressive adult in the world should be listening on Christmas.

If you've got the blues on Christmas, there are far better choices. Like Sonny Boy Williamson's Christmas Blues:


Or Charley Jordan's Christmas Christmas Blues:


Or Eric Clapton, Crying Christmas Tears:


Or Blind Lemon Jefferson, Christmas Eve Blues


Or if your mood leans more to rage and cynicism than tears and depression, there's Maxine of the Hallmark Cards, Crabby Christmas Blues:


Or Ray Davis, in a solo performance of the Kinks, Father Christmas:

Labels: Christmas, music

It seems suddenly timely:

Labels: Christmas, movies

Christmas may now proceed:

Because it's not Christmas until and unless Darlene Love sings.

And of course there's always this:

Labels: Christmas, music

Labels: Christmas, Comedians, Marc Maron

via Lynn:

Labels: cat blogging, Christmas, cute things, War on Christmas

Those of you who are longtime readers know how we here at B@B loves us some Darlene Love. Christmas may be over, but you can enjoy it all over again listening to The Great Darlene this year in her annual rendition of "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" on Late Night with David Letterman:

Damn. This woman is sixty-eight years old and The Voice is better than ever.

Labels: Christmas, music

Chak de Punjab Bhangra Dancers at a 2008 Christmas concert:

Labels: Christmas, music

Christmas. Ur hearin it wrong:

Labels: Christmas, comedy, Marc Maron

As Lynn says, "And they say people who believe in astrology are crazy..."

What a bunch of death-centered lunatics these end-timesers are.

And yet, despite the insanity and longing for death that some of Christianity's practitioners exhibit, there's one thing I like about Christmas, especially Christmas Eve. It's when I remember what their religion was at one time supposed to be about. I wrote about it two years ago, and in a tradition that's right up there with the Brilliant Duo's annual Christmas Eve Indian dinner, I'm linking to it again.

Labels: Christmas, Christofascist Zombie Brigade

I've long found it fascinating how a celebration of someone born in the warm, dry Middle East became so associated with cold and winter. They didn't have spruce or pine trees in the Holy Land, nor did they have mistletoe. The Three Wise Men weren't an old fat guy with white hair and a beard dressed in a red suit bringing toys to children. And no one brought a turkey so that Mary wouldn't have to try to cook in a place filled with flammable materials. As someone once asked me, "How did Christmas become German?"

It's sort of like trying to determine what the relationship is between the resurrection and fluffy bunnies and eggs. And why "Easter" sounds so much like "estrogen".

The answer, of course, is that just as Oasis ripped off the Beatles, so did the early Christians rip off the pagans. Add to that some good old fashioned commerce, and you have the Christmas celebration that people like Bill O'Reilly regard as being somehow mandated by God himself.

The Independent (UK) has the straight poop on the trappings of Christmas:

Why is Christmas Day on 25 December?

The Bible offers no date for the birth of Jesus, which probably was not in the year 1AD, but a few years earlier, and may or may not have been in December. The celebration of the birth of Christ on 25 December dates back to the fifth century, when Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.

The date was chosen to coincide with the winter solstice and the Roman festivals associated with the shortest day of the year, which falls between 22 December and 25 December. This was seen as the day when the Romans celebrated Dies Natalis Solis Invicti – "the birthday of the unconquered sun". It was also Jupiter's birthday and, further back, the birthday of his Greek equivalent, Zeus. In Eastern Europe, the various Orthodox churches – the Russian, Greek, Armenian, Serbian et al, follow the old Gregorian calendar, and in which Christmas Day is 7 January There is no Santa Claus in the Gospels.

Where did he come from?

Nearly 1,700 years ago there was a bishop of Myra, in Asia Minor, who was imprisoned under the last pagan Roman Emperor, Diocletian, but reinstated under Constantine. A cult grew up around him in Greece and spread outwards, and he became the patron saint of children, among others. An old legend about him is that there was a poor man who could not afford dowries for his three daughters, until bags of gold were tossed through an open window by St Nicholas, landing in the stockings drying in front of the fire. In Holland and Germany, there was a custom that St Nicholas was the secret bringer of presents for children on 6 December, his feast day.

When did he start sliding down chimneys?

After the American revolution, New Yorkers tried to rediscover their Dutch roots, and revived the feast of St Nicholas, and his legend. The writer Washington Irving took the mickey out of this revived cult in a satire published in 1809, called Knickerbocker's History of New York. In it, St Nicholas appears as a fat, jolly figure, dressed in fur, with a clay pipe and beard, who slides down chimneys.

There's more here. Of course if your name is "Bill O'Reilly", you might want to pass it by. After all, why would you read something that deprives you of a weapon?

And for those of you not inclined to snark today, you may want to revisit my post from Christmas Eve last year, when for one brief shining moment, I was able to give my cynicism a rest.

Joyous Yule, everyone.

Labels: Christmas, snark, War on Christmas

Labels: Christmas, movies

And last night, it wasn't Chinese food, it was Indian food, at Teaneck's famous Taj Palace, where the Lamb Saag was even better than usual, and the place doing a brisk business dishing up curries for Jews, Indians, and other heathen.

I don't have that "Little Match Girl" thing that some Jews have on Christmas. I long ago learned that the way to deal with the notion that everyone has a big Norman Rockwell Christmas except you is to demystify the holiday and turn it into a day off from work and an excuse to make evil things like ham and macaroni and cheese. And finish putting together that damned TV stand so that when the Dish guy comes the week after New Year's, there's something to put the set on.

But for those who still feel left out, here's a little something for you (via Sam Seder)



And this oldie but goodie:



Buck up, folks! In 3-1/2 hours it'll all be over, and you'll be the one at work tomorrow without post-Christmas letdown.

Labels: Christmas