Mainlining Christmas

That's right, kids. Another year's come and gone, and Mainlining Christmas is getting washed away like the batch of eggnog that went rancid before you got to it. We had a lot of fun this year, though, didn't we? No. Not really. Mostly we just sat through an ass load of holiday specials that were, on average, even worse than the ones we sat through last Christmas. Sure, there were exceptions. The Kung Fu Panda Holiday Special, the Community Episodes, Futurama, Arthur Christmas... and so on and so forth. But, God, those didn't make up for the rest. If I never sit through another version of the Nutcracker, it'll be too damn soon. And you know what the difference is between a good version of A Christmas Carol and a bad one? NOTHING: there is no difference. THEY ARE ALL THE SAME. We listened to more Christmas music than most people think exists. Hell, we're over 1200 tracks now, and still growing. I forced more fiction down your throats. Or, I guess down your e

This year, for Mainlining Christmas, we watched 77 things, by my list: 6 Shorts, 21 Movies, 27 Episodes and 23 Specials That includes eight Christmas Carols (versions of or episodes inspired by) and five Nutcrackers. We also branched out a bit, with quite a few music and book reviews. By this time last year, I was experiencing extreme time dilation. I had been convinced the next day was Christmas for about three weeks. This year I'm feeling a bit of the reverse. I feel like we have weeks still to go. This sense might have been exacerbated by the fairly high temperatures we've been having here in NYC. Best and Worst lists are a bit tricky this year; my response to the vast majority of what we watched this year was "meh". Even the things that were great would have a difficult time going up against the best of last year, when we watched our very favorite specials and movies. Hell, things that I loved this year have a hard time beating out some great stuff I could

As we've continued to expand our collection of Christmas music, I keep finding new songs to enjoy. This year, listening to nothing but holiday music was hardly a trial at all. Here are some of the new tracks that got a lot of play on my iPod this month. Broadway: Carols for the Cure Volume 13 (Various, 2011) There are plenty of fun tracks on this CD, but I kept coming back to just a few. Because I can't point you anywhere to hear these recordings, I'm excerpting a bit of lyrics of each. St. Nicholas Sky This rock anthem from the cast of Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark is better than any music actually in that show. I really warmed to this song quickly, and I think they did a great job with it I dream the (light?) with open arms and wander out into the stars Remember when the world was ours - I look for you. And I - all I have to do is close my eyes, and I will (watch?) the darkness come alive And, how I wish that you could be with me tonight, under the cold St. Nich

I've spoken here before about my long-standing struggle with Christmas music . I like a lot of it as music, but I don't get on board with the whole Jesus thing, so I feel awkward about the fact that I like it. This year I have found a solution to my problem. It occurred to me that there are plenty of Kings and Princes and Lords whose birthdays I would be happy to sing about. Won't you join me? Come they told me, Pa rum pa pum pum The newborn King to see, Pa rum pa pum pum We three kings of Orient are, bearing gifts we traverse afar,  Field and fountain, moor and mountain, following yonder star Uh, you might not want to follow that particular star, guys. Hark the herald angels sing, glory to the newborn king! (Hallelujah Chorus) ...And he shall reign forever and ever, King of Kings, and Lord of Lords Oh holy night! The stars are brightly shining It is the night of the dear Savior's birth  O come, O come, Emmanuel A

I've been listening to a lot of Christmas music recently, and reflecting on the difficulty of The Twelve Days of Christmas . It's a long song, and while it can be fun to sing counting songs like this one, it can be dreadfully boring to listen to them. Hence why most successful recorded versions of 12 Days include jokes, asides, or other little tricks to keep your interest. I'm going to provide a bunch of decent versions of the song below, let's see if I can get to Twelve. 1: The Muppets and John Denver Here you can see some classic tricks: different voices on each verse, some humorous asides, including Fozzie forgetting his lyrics. They actually redid this version almost moment for moment with Jimmy Fallon a few years ago, but the internet does not seem to want to provide me with the video of that. 2: Straight No Chaser This a cappella group does a really fun medley mashing up 12 Days with a ton of other holiday and non-holiday tunes. The hu

So, I entered this holiday season with 1049 holiday songs, and I decided it only made sense to start out by listening to each and every one of them. That adds up to about 59 hours, in case you were curious. I decided to go in alphabetical order by song title (I actually put a lot of thought into this beforehand and came to the conclusion it would actually break up the slow parts more than going by artist or album name). I had so much "fun" doing this, I decided to share the experience with all of you. What follows is not meant to be comprehensive. It's just a series of notes I compiled highlighting, by letter, the songs that left an impression. Because I was listening while doing other things, I'm sure I glossed over some good and bad songs while I wasn't paying attention. Further, because I was busy, many of these notes were written at the end of the day (or even a few days later), when I got around to it, so I'm sure I'm forgetting things that see

At this point, Black Friday has more or less completely consumed Thanksgiving. If people still bother with the feast, it must be to store energy for the long night ahead. As co-founder of the internet's self-proclaimed premier holiday blog, I've decided to dub the night between Thanksgiving and Black Friday "The Blackest Night." In case you're either living under a rock or enjoying the holidays with loved ones instead of watching news reports of disgruntled shoppers pepper-spraying a crowd, the old-fashioned 3AM door-busters are an antiquated notion of a bygone era: Black Friday begins, at the absolute latest, at the stroke of midnight. Some retailers aren't even satisfied with that: Toys R Us and Walmart opened for Black Friday at 9 and 10 PM, respectively. Yes, Black Friday officially started on Grey Thursday, Black Friday Eve; the Blackest Night. There was no way in hell we were missing that. Lindsay and I arrived at the Queens Toys R Us around 10.

Do you believe in Christmas? Do you love Christmas? Most people would answer yes to those questions without a moment's hesitation. And that's a shame, because it means they're not considering the implications. It means they don't actually know what Christmas is. To many people, Christmas is silver bells, angels, and love. But that's not Christmas. Christmas is an angler fish a thousand feet long from the space between worlds; its tinsel and decorative lights are lures to draw us in, so the jaws can snap shut. You think I'm being harsh? Think I'm just cynical? Then you don't know a damn thing about Christmas -  you've never seen its teeth. Have you listened to 20 versions of Silent Night back to back? Have you stared into the abyss long enough to see the icy stare of a snowman gazing back? No? Then you don't know Christmas: you know only its shadow. Last year, we descended into the wide maw of the holiday. We stared down its throat and

Before I go, I'd like to pass along ten observations I've had about the holiday. 1. The human capacity to stand any non-parody version of The First Noel is inversely proportionate to the clarity in which the lyrics are sung. 2. Really awful Christmas specials and movies are nowhere near as bad as mediocre ones. 3. The Christmas Story is not, in fact, the "greatest story ever told," however the version told by Linus in It's Christmas, Charlie Brown is the greatest version of the Christmas Story that's ever been told. 4. Gaudy Christmas lights can be beautiful, but only in extreme concentrations. 5. Inflatable Christmas lawn displays were conceived of and produced by the Devil. 6. With very few exceptions, parodies of Christmas songs are superior to the originals. 7. As a general rule of thumb, the less appropriate a holiday episode is to any given television series, the better the result will be. 8. Among the thousands of forgotten Christmas specials, there are

Well, I didn't learn to appreciate Christmas, although my uneasy truce with the holiday may be a trifle less Grinchy. I'm looking forward to escaping the time vortex effect. For several weeks, I've ben unable to shake the feeling that Christmas was “tomorrow”, even when “tomorrow” was Dec 5th. I expect that sensation to fade soon... right? I'm also looking forward to not listening to holiday music for a while... I am pretty darn burnt out on it. I actually took off my headphones in the Laundromat the other day when I realized that they weren't just playing Christmas music, unlike all the stores. We watched about three-quarters of the list of specials I compiled at the beginning, and finally just ran out of time. So long for now, me and my copy of The Atheist's Guide to Christmas have a holiday to get to.

We're coming upon the end of this Christmas experiment - at least for this year - and, as such, I'm legally obligated to offer some best of/worst of lists.  I don't think it's fair to group movies and specials together for the "best of" list, so I'm going to set the three best movies aside now.  In no particular order, the best holiday films I saw this year are:  Nightmare Before Christmas , Miracle on 34th Street , and Elf . I'm not going to differentiate between Christmas specials and holiday themed episodes, though I am going to set one ground rule: these need to be full length.  This eliminates some of the best - including The Spirit of Christmas South Park short where Jesus fights Santa. Here, then, are the top 10 Holiday Episodes or Specials: 10. Christmas With the Joker : This is a tough one - a case could easily be made that Holiday Knights or Comfort and Joy are better.  But I'm going with my gut and picking the classic.  All three a

We watched an approximate total of 75 movies, specials and episodes this month. Sheesh. Here are a few stats I put together: Based on my List, we watched 16 Movies, 36 Specials, and 23 Episodes 9 of these were in some way a version of A Christmas Carol 6 had sizable references to Twas the Night Before Christmas 3 had spins on It's a Wonderful Life 3 had a version of The Gift of the Magi 25 had Santa as a major character (Real Santa, more than one line, significant part of the piece) 6 had Jesus as any size character, (basically on screen at all) plus 2 more used him as a good sized plot point. My 10 favorite things we watched, in no particular order: The Snowman Mickey's Christmas Carol A Muppet Family Christmas The Nightmare Before Christmas Blackadder's Christmas Carol Animaniacs: A Christmas Plotz/Little Drummer Warners Prep and Landing Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas BtAS: Holiday Knights The Powerpuff Girls: Twas the Fight Before Christ

In Attleboro, Massachusetts, there exists a magical place where, every year, the baby Jesus spits up two metric tons of Christmas cheer. This place is La Salette. La Salette Shrines is a ministry which takes the holidays very seriously.  How seriously, you might ask.  Well, to put it mildly, they bring in a fried dough stand. Yes, their grounds includes numerous shrines and sculptures, all of which are wired up in the gaudiest Christmas lights imaginable.  They have an animatronic Virgin mother, and a real live donkey for kids to fawn over. The following slide show offers a vague idea of the magnitude of the place, but it's something you really need to see for yourself. Before leaving La Salette, we picked up a mug of cider, which came in a commemorative plastic cup.  I think, better than anything else, this captures the spirit of La Salette.  The spirit of Christmas:

I've already offered some thoughts on the cultural battle I enjoy so much every year, but I wanted to approach it from another angle, as well.  Specifically, I want to discuss Hanukkah, and the push to get displays included in public places along side Christmas ones. You might not know it from my involvement with the site, but I'm actually Jewish.  I'm non-practicing, but that doesn't change the fact I'm in the club (lifetime membership, and all).  My mother was raised Jewish, and my father was raised Christian.  Neither of my parents were ever what I'd describe as religious, but they respected tradition. As such, I grew up celebrating two holidays every year.  The larger gifts were saved for Christmas morning, but we usually received a few small items and candy throughout Hanukkah.  You might think that would make Hanukkah irrelevant to a kid, but that wasn't the effect.  My family would gather together, sing Hanukkah songs as best we could (my mother w

I have a fairly complicated relationship with Christmas carols.  I was a fervent believer in the separation of church and state from a young age, as well as a fervent non-believer in Jesus, but I love to sing.  This caused few problems in grade school, in which most music was of the non-challenging but secular-ish type: Up on the Rooftop, Here Comes Santa Claus and all that lot. As I got older, more religious music came into the “Winter” concerts, as they were called, and the teachers always tried to balance the songs out: a few explicitly Christian, a few holiday/secular, and one leftover slot for a Hanukkah tune. They didn't have a very large library of Hanukkah songs; I've probably sung “Hevenu Shalom Aleikhem” more than some actual Jewish kids. I grumbled privately about singing religious songs in school, but for the most part those songs have really lovely music, so I didn't grumble much. For a while I was obsessed with this version of Do You Hear What I Hear tha

Apparently, the war on Christmas just took a turn for the worse .  A pastor in Denmark executed a stuffed Christmas Elf by hanging.  He soon found a collection of garden gnomes in his front yard, which the media has dismissed as being from neighbors upset at the statement. That's because they don't know the code.  Christmas Elves don't operate within the law; that doesn't mean they're without order.  You make a Christmas Elf mad, you can expect to hear about it.  For the little things, they'll mess with your shoes.  Cross a line, and they'll hire a team of dwarves to go to town on your plumbing. But if you go after them personally - if you cross the elf family - they send you a message in gnomes.  Then it's just a matter of time.  Maybe days.  Maybe weeks.  Maybe years.  Sometimes they like to do it quick; sometimes they like to let their enemies sweat. But in the end, they'll demonstrate what those gnomes are for. For hundreds of years, Chri

I'm underwhelmed by Macy's "Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus" themed window display. Technically, it's actually quite impressive: there's some ingenious design and use of movement and perspective at work, and, thanks in part to a voice over, they actually manage to convey the story in a manner you can follow. No, my issue here isn't technical: it's personal. "Yes, Virginia," in all its incarnations, grates on me. It brings out my cynical nature. Oddly enough, I actually kind of like the editorial itself. Sure, its got logic problems (the burden of proof always lies on the party proposing the existence of the entity in question: come on, that's obvious!), but it's also really pretty. Plus, in the part everyone cuts, Church talks about fairies. And I've always really liked fairies. No, my real issues aren't with the editorial: they're with the story itself, starting with the deification of Virginia O'Ha

As Erin said, our conceptions of 'proper' Christmas decorations differ because we both have strong memories of what was done in our parents' homes. I just don't understand what he has against multicolored lights.  I'm with him on the Victorian all-white look: it's kind of bland and boring.  But all blue makes the room look cold. There's another issue at play here, though: 'real', i.e. dead tree, or fake tree? My parents had a fake tree that they hauled out every year, and my mother had me convinced that this was the environmentally and morally responsible thing to do. But here's Slate.com's take on the environmental impact: http://www.slate.com/id/2180086/ Sum-up of the article: Many fake trees can break down and release nasty chemicals into your air, but years and years of real tree transport is more polluting than shipping a fake tree once from China. So it's almost a wash, with a slight advantage toward real trees because of

Among the many aspects of Christmas Lindsay and I don't see eye to eye on is what decorations belong on a Christmas tree.  She seems to think that Christmas trees should look the way they did from her childhood, while I, being far more open and objective, hold that decorations should mirror the look of Christmases from my childhood. The real crux of the issue comes down to the lights.  She's a fan of a traditional assortment of multicolored lights, while I'd rather a tree have nothing but blue lights.  At present, our debates are mainly theoretical: we don't have space for a tree in our Queens apartment, so the issue is largely rendered moot for the time being. Growing up, most my family's trees were trimmed in this style.  We had a good sized place in Maine, with a dining room who's primary purpose was to house the tree (it went largely unused the rest of the year - more often than not, we ate in front of the television in the living room, like any well-adj

My favorite fight of the holiday season isn't between parents trying to kill each over the last doll on the toy shelf or crowds ready to push their neighbors on the ground to try and reach a $20 microwave before Walmart sells their last - though both events are immensely fun to watch.  No, my favorite fight of the year is one over semantics: Merry Christmas vs. Happy Holidays. Every year, competing boycotts pop up targeting stores on the basis of company policy.  If employees are told to wish customers a "Merry Christmas," secular groups encourage their members to shop elsewhere.  If the rule is to say "Happy Holidays," religious groups take it as an affront to their beliefs and protest. I can only assume that national chains analyze the demographics of their clientele before making such determinations.  After all, we're really talking about a function of marketing, which is focused on increasing revenue, not making a religious or philosophical stateme