Mainlining Christmas

I actually considered skipping the write-up for this two-parter or combining it with the following year's Christmas episode, How the Ghosts Stole Christmas , but decided it really needed to be considered in its own right. The first half focuses entirely on Scully, who's gone home to spend Christmas with the members of her family who weren't killed in earlier episodes. Scully is shocked to receive a phone call from her dead sister, who simply says that someone needs her help. Apparently calling rates from the great beyond are low enough to allow ghosts to place calls but just a little too high for them to have time to offer any useful details. Scully immediately has the call traced and finds it was placed from a house where a woman has just apparently killed herself and not been murdered at all. Later investigation will reveal - I hope you're sitting down for this - that she actually was murdered, and that the murder was made to look like a suicide. As I recall, th

A Christmas Journey Anne Perry, 2003 Premise: A bunch of rich snobs drive a young lady to suicide at a Christmas party and then make another lady travel to Scotland because she feels guilty. What in the hell did I just read? It wasn’t a romance. It wasn’t suspense. It barely had a plot. I guess it’s tepid historical fiction? It was really odd. I liked the beginning, I thought maybe it was going somewhere. I liked that the main character’s name was Vespasia, that’s dramatic even just to read. However, as the insignificant details mounted, and discoveries came to light about a character who really got very little page time prior to her death, I just couldn’t bring myself to care. There were some almost okay parts where Vespasia reflects on her friendship with Isobel and how it brought them both to the back end of Scotland in the dead of winter (to carry the news of the deceased young lady to her mother). But sadly, most of it was just navel-gazing. Boring navel-gazing. Vesp

25 Christmas Eves pushes on. Today's installment is a short piece of near-future science fiction titled, "Last Minute." By: Erin L. Snyder Adam’s car broke down on the way home, courtesy of a faulty valve. It took the internal diagnostic system almost twenty minutes to identify the issue and, thanks to the strain the holiday season was putting on the network, another five to download the schematics. And of course the emergency 3D-printer in the hatch required another fifteen to replicate a replacement. Then the site streaming the walkthrough crashed twice while he was installing the damn thing. All of this in the middle of a snowstorm, too: it was like something out of an old holiday movie. It was after seven before he made it home, which meant arming his eleven year-old son with a world-class extortion scam: “You left me alone... on Christmas Eve! I had to order my own dinner! I had to watch a movie... by myself!” And so on and so forth. Fortunately, Adam was u

I sat down with Glenn Beck's famous Christmas story expecting to hate it. I started with low expectations - possibly some of the lowest I've ever had for anything, ever. But then something unexpected happened: something that can only be called a Christmas miracle: I hated it even more than I thought I would. The story of "The Christmas Sweater" is loosely based on Beck's childhood. The introduction seems like it's intended to mislead you into thinking it's a true story, but it's almost immediately obvious that's not the case. To be fair, Beck includes a section at the end offering a quick overview of what's true (the name of his parents' bakery) and what's BS (pretty much everything else). There's a lot to hate about this. The humorous bits aren't actually funny, the characters don't come close to feeling real, the last 99% of the story drags, and the writing's about as bland as fiction can get. But, more t

Thanks to a clearance DVD called "Disney Channel Holiday," we wound up with a bunch of holiday episodes of shows from the Disney Channel. Several are absolutely abysmal, but a few are fascinating. It was difficult to focus on this one since the lead is portrayed by an extremely young Shia LaBeouf portraying the exact same character he played in Transformers. It was actually kind of surreal. The episode itself had highs and lows. Surprisingly, the highs were really quite good. The plot started with Louis (LaBouf) locating the Hanukkah presents and opening them early. In a botched attempt to conceal them afterward, he inadvertently destroyed them and was (of course) punished. He then wished he'd never been born, transitioning to a "Wonderful Life" story. What should have been derivative was saved by some innovative twists. When they introduced the "guardian angel" stand-in as a stereotypical old Jewish grandmother, I cringed for the worst, but I wa

Seattle Center is all lit up for the holidays, so we took a few pictures. Sponsored, as you can see, by T-Mobile. Here's another picture of some of that view: That is a radio or cell tower that's all lit up in the center, and it's actually pretty far away from where I was standing. We went indoors for a bit, and found some more decorations and a model train. (see separate post on that) Sort of cute snowman with freaky-looking deer. Back outside. Erin walked down to play in the projections. The fountain was still running in the dark, and still blaring music from the 90's.

I ask you, what's Christmas Eve without pirates? To correct that omission, here's a short fantasy piece titled "One Night's Work," the newest addition to our 25 Christmas Eves project.  By: Erin L. Snyder You could see it in the men’s faces even if you couldn’t feel it: they were getting older. There were few of us, fewer every time you’d look around. The English colonies pinched us from the south and the Americans’ navy pressed us in the north. Their ships were getting faster and their captains smarter. The days of the pirate were waning, and we were dying. The era of legends was a hundred years gone, and we felt dwarfed by their shadows. Against the tales of Black Bart or Morgan, how could we see ourselves but as common thieves? I was the youngest man on the Red Gull, and I’d been at sea more than a decade. I’d sailed with Laffite before I landed on the Gull, and I knew as well as any of the others that our days had all but passed. I think we all kne