Mainlining Christmas

Yes, there’s a Christmas episode of Pokémon. Don’t blame yourself if you didn’t know, though. This episode is actually a little challenging to get your hands on in America. It was dubbed and aired with the original run, but not much since. The episode opens with Jessie of Team Rocket pretending to be asleep until a snare net goes off, trapping Santa, who had been coming in through the window. Of course, this was a test run, and “Santa” was actually James. Jessie is pleased how well her trap works, and indulges in a brief flashback to being a bratty child, waiting for Santa, only to have a Jynx Pokémon dressed as Santa come in and steal her favorite doll. Meanwhile, Ash and friends are on the beach when they spot a Jynx, holding a boot. Now, Jynx is the reason for the problem with this episode. Jynx is vaguely female-person-shaped, and has black skin with big eyes and giant pink lips. Yeah, you probably know why this episode isn’t aired now. It’s unclear how much blackface icono

We just watched the new Sense8 Christmas Special, and we’re mentioning it because they literally titled the episode “A Christmas Special,” although only about a quarter or so of it was actually set at Christmas. I’ll start off with the most important point - if you haven’t seen the first season of Netflix’s Sense8, this would be a terrible introduction. I have seen the first season, and I still spent the first fifteen minutes thinking: “Okay, wait, what was going on with that character? I guess that happened, okay… and that, and...right, right, I sort of remember that plot.” This means I’m not going to synopsize this. I’ll just give you the premise: Sense8 is about eight people from around the world who are mentally connected. They can share memories, thoughts, and abilities, and other people from various shadowy government/corporate agencies, some with similar powers, are after them. The special is two hours long, but I’m not sure that more actually happened than would have ha

A sitcom aired this year that I’ve never heard of? That… that sounds right. I'd be more surprised if I had heard of it. So, this new sitcom is about an Irish-Catholic family in Chicago who, after propping up appearances for too long, are forced to deal with a series of reality checks. This includes the parents’ divorce, and one of the sons (Kenny) coming out as gay. In this episode, the mother, Eileen, is determined to lead the church choir to victory in a caroling competition. Kenny is part of the choir, and supports her efforts at first. She also sends her athletic, if dim, older son Jimmy to spy on the Episcopalian competition. Meanwhile, the father Pat is with their youngest, Shannon. (All of the kids are teenagers, close in age.) She is a sardonic, intelligent kid, excited that her boyfriend has given her what she considers an excellent Christmas present: a watercolor of her hero, financial adviser Suze Orman. She declares that she has to give him a great present in

I saw this episode was available on Hulu, read the description about reuniting a family, remembered that this show might be decent, but nothing else about it, and clicked play. I got a bit more than I bargained for. First, a little background. Hey Arnold is a late-90s product of Nickelodeon, and it focuses on a group of kids in a fictional city that’s sort of a hybrid (according to the creator) of Seattle, Brooklyn, and Portland (Oregon). Arnold lives with his grandparents, who own a boarding house. This episode starts off simply enough - scenes of urban holiday fun, kids playing in a snowbound street, that sort of thing. Helga and her friend are walking down the street. (Helga is generally a bully, although she has a secret crush on Arnold.) Helga explains that she’s been asking for the hottest present of the season, official “Nancy Spumoni” snowboots, for months, and if her parents know what’s good for them, she’d better get them. We switch over to Arnold and his best frien

These last two months have been really hard. The Christmas standards haven’t really been doing much for me this year, but music has still been a touchstone for me. Here’s a short playlist of some songs that are speaking to me today. There is a lot of Melissa Etheridge’s album A New Thought for Christmas here, because I’ve basically had it on repeat for all of December. Winter Song (Sara Bareilles, Ingrid Michaelson) Let’s start with some melancholy mixed with hope. I still believe in summer days, the seasons always change, and life will find a way. O Night Divine (Melissa Etheridge) This track takes a song I don’t much like, gives it a rock opening and new lyrics about the human need to face “the longest night.” This year I find the climactic statement more defiant than hopeful, but it’s still incredibly powerful. There’s Still My Joy (Indigo Girls) The most "Christmas" song here; a song about grief and change. I’ve read so many terrible things in the last mon

Well, that was odd. We’d never seen an episode of The Amazing World of Gumball before, and it seems unlikely that we ever will again. Not that this was bad or anything, it just seems like the kind of thing you might watch if A) you had cable and B) you had a lot of time on your hands and were prone to watching whatever came on next. I mean, it’s on Hulu, but so are a lot of other things. This show seems to follow a family of animals - the mom’s a cat, the dad’s a rabbit, and there are three kids: a cat, a rabbit, and what Wikipedia tells me is an adopted goldfish. Eh, all the character designs are round enough that the distinctions don’t seem to matter. The animation style is the most striking thing about this show - highly stylized cartoony characters are layered over real-world backgrounds and combined with occasional CG and stop-motion. This episode opens with a little Christmas singing, abruptly cut short when the dad hits a man with his car who’s dressed a little like

Huh. This was much better than I expected. Not quite solid enough for me to go back to being a firm fan of DC, but enough to get me cautiously hopeful that some of their comics might not suck right now. This thick prestige issue consists of ten shorts and an interstitial framing device: Harley Quinn throwing a star-studded holiday special. The frame story is mostly funny and cute, completely surreal and not even bothering to pretend to be in continuity with anything. The best stories, in my opinion, are “The Last Minute” and “The Night We Saved Christmas.” The first has a lot of the superfamily stuff that I adore that was missing from the DCU for a while. It has Superman and Batman being friends, Superman (I like this Superman! Yay!) shopping for a last-minute gift, and Damien Wayne and the new Superboy (Jon Kent) being adorkable. The second is a Detective Chimp adventure with Batman as a supporting player. It’s funny, snarky, and thoroughly enjoyable. There’re two one-page p

If you like crazy Christmas stuff the way we do, or if you like zany superhero/magical girl hijinks, you should probably go ahead and see if you can find a copy of this on YouTube. This was a ton of fun. Miraculous (for short) is a CG show from France about two superhero teenagers. Marinette is an aspiring fashion designer, and she transforms into Ladybug. Adrien is a young fashion model, and his superhero identity is Cat Noir. They don’t know each other’s secret, which leads to a classic secret identity plotline where Marinette has a crush on Adrien, but Cat Noir has a crush on Ladybug. Their powers come from little (alien?) creatures and are channeled through items known as the Miraculouses: Marinette’s earrings and Adrien’s ring. There is a villain (Le Papillon in the original French) who wants to steal these items. In each episode, the villain senses someone feeling a strong negative emotion (anger, fear, jealousy, etc.) and sends an evil butterfly to possess them. That’s wha

At one point while we were watching this, Erin turned to me and asked in disbelief, “You’ve watched this before?” What can I say, I used to work a lot of nights before we had Netflix; on many afternoons PBS was my background-noise companion. Super Why! is one of the least interesting of the PBS kids shows that I’m familiar with from this era. It’s not so annoying that I would necessarily turn it off, you know, if my hands were covered in paint or something, but I wouldn’t seek it out. The show follows Whyatt and his fairytale friends who live in Storybrook Village (which is a CG land hidden behind a secret door on a library bookshelf). In each episode, Whyatt (his big brother climbed a beanstalk), Pig (of the Three Little), Red (Riding Hood), and Princess Pea have a question to answer. They seek the answers by becoming the Super Readers, magically flying into another storybook, and helping the characters there. And yes, we’ve got a bit of book-within-a-book-world going on. The

Jingle Belle - The Whole Package Paul Dini, et al., 2016 Premise: Santa’s got a daughter, and she’s been a rebellious teenager for longer than most humans live. Apparently Paul Dini has been writing short comic adventures starring Jingle Belle, Santa’s spoiled teenage daughter, off and on since 1999. This thick volume collects nearly all of them: 28 short pieces according to the credits pages. I was actually pleasantly surprised by some of the early stories - despite being very slapstick on the surface, Jingle’s mix of anger, mischief, caring and defiance often felt like a fairly honest representation of a teenage girl. Jingle’s been a teenager for a long time, too. Her mother is queen of the elves and her father is Santa, so she’s been “sixteen” for many years. She doesn’t have patience for holiday sappiness, and she’s usually lazy, thoughtless and out for herself. She’s eternally frustrated that no one in the world at large knows about her. When she does try to be “good,”

A few years ago we chronicled some of the odd uses of peppermint that appear in stores around this time of year. Here’s another for the list. Andes Mints are, of course, already mint, but these are both explicitly peppermint and in shiny red packaging. Between this and the Peppermint Crunch Junior Mints (which are back this year, by the way), we've learned that the way you make something mint more Christmassy is by adding crunch .  I did not know Christmas was crunchy.  I assume that in both cases it's intended to be like bits of broken candy cane?  The candy wrappers definitely have a candy cane thing going on. The actual mints are... okay. They aren't as good as normal Andes Mints, the white chocolate-ish substance is okay, but the crunchy bits actually take away from the texture. This is actually my favorite part. The package has some extra cardboard on the sides to prevent the mints from getting crushed (I believe this is the case

We’ve had a lot of firsts here at Mainlining Christmas. Our first movie, our first book review, our first watch-all-the-holiday-episodes-in-a-series binge… but this one is special. This is our first Christmas movie starring Nicolas Cage. Trapped in Paradise is the story of how Erin and I were trapped in hell for a very long two hours. The movie follows Bill (Cage) and his two idiot brothers, who are getting out of prison early for Christmas. One brother (Alvin, Dana Carvey) is apparently a kleptomaniac and the other (Dave, Jon Lovitz) is a liar and schemer. Bill hates them, yet is too stupid too see through a series of pathetic ploys that send them all fleeing New York for Paradise, Pennsylvania. Ostensibly, they’re there on behalf of a fellow inmate, who asked Dave to intercede with his estranged daughter. In fact, they’re there to pull an easy bank job and steal the town’s Christmas fund. Or something. The explanation for what the money is and how the town functions is pret

I don’t have much time these days for Studio 360. A radio show from WNYC about art, creativity and culture, I have loved some episodes and been bored by others. Even if I wanted to listen to it more often, it’s a weekly show that’s an hour long in full, and that’s a time commitment. I do sometimes check out the podcast feed to see what’s been on recently. I have always loved the shows they’ve done about great American art and artists. This year, the podcast replayed a fantastic interview from 2012 about the composition of the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas. Even a Grinch like me likes the music to A Charlie Brown Christmas. Even if you’ve never been curious about the composition of “Christmas Time is Here” and “Linus and Lucy,” the piece is only 7 minutes, and it’s definitely worth your time. Hear from Jean Schulz, Jerry Granelli (the drummer who played with Guaraldi), and Lee Mendelson, the producer who worked closely with Schulz on the Christmas special, on St

I have enjoyed what I’ve seen of The Great British Bake Off (aired as The Great British Baking Show in the U.S.). I love how friendly and good-hearted the competition is. It’s an elimination-based baking competition that takes place over ten weeks. This is one of the spin-off specials that are formatted more like a cooking show. The two judges from the show, Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry, make recipes to inspire the viewer. I’m not sure whether I was inspired to try any of these, but if nothing else, it was interesting to see some British holiday desserts. There’s no pudding here, but nearly all of the desserts involve fruit and custard and I think everything involves alcohol. The six recipes outlined in this hour are a pavlova (meringue and custard); spiral buns containing dried and fresh fruit and jam; a fancy trifle, a turkey, ham, and leek pie; a ridiculously pretty thing made of sponge cake, pastry cream and candied orange slices; and a pandoro (Italian sweet bread/cake).

Last year’s special was fun, so I was excited when I heard there would be a sequel. I was more excited when I opened to the table of contents and saw a story by Ryan North called “I Saw Spidey Kissing Galactus, The Bringer of Gifts.” That gives you a little taste of what you’re in for. The book opens with the beginning of Gwenpool’s story. (Gwenpool, in case you aren’t up on your Marvel trivia, is Gwen Poole, a comic fangirl from a “real” world who is stranded in the Marvel Universe. She is basically unbeatable because she understands the fictional nature of the world.) Gwen is getting ready to celebrate Christmas with her teammates, but they seem to be preparing for a very different holiday. One where Galactus brings presents to good children and you express your caring for others by giving and wearing hot pants. She quickly determines that something is screwy and heads off to the North Pole to get to the bottom of it. Then you’re treated to three short stories set in this a

With the cold weather comes an uptick in tea-drinking, at least for me. The third or fourth time I saw a display with these Twinings holiday varieties, I decided we should try them. Christmas Tea This is described as a spiced black tea. Unfortunately, it mostly just tastes of black tea, although it smells of cloves and cinnamon. It also seems to smell faintly of citrus, but that might just be a mental association with cloves. It’s not bad for black tea with a slightly spicy aftertaste, but if I wanted something that mostly tasted of black tea I’d just buy black tea. Winter Spice I love herbal teas, and I love apple-flavored tea, so this should have been a slam dunk. It smelled nicely of apples while it steeped, but once done, it only smelled faintly of apple and something floral. The taste is too mild for me, at least when steeped for only the recommended time. I don’t mind chamomile, but the chamomile overwhelmed the apple and spice notes. These are bo

If you don't have small children or regularly shop for toys, you may be unaware of this popular show. On a moral and personal level, I think it's awesome that this show is popular. It wears its feminism and positivity on its sleeve, which is great. It's kid-friendly to a fault, though, and the songs weren't very good. The main character, “Doc,” is a little girl who has a knack for fixing broken toys. (She is following the example of her mom, who is a doctor.) With that premise, of course there's a Christmas episode. As someone who spent a lot of time and love fixing toys as a kid, I found this show somewhat charming, despite the simplistic writing. Erin felt less charitable toward it than I did. The main premise of the episode is that an elf named Tobias dropped a toy he was supposed to deliver for Doc’s little brother, breaking it. He's distraught about the implications for his career, (seriously, he won’t shut up about it) and Doc and her cadre of stuf

I love podcasts, and one that I quite often find charming is The Allusionist, a series about language, etymology, verbiage, puns, and other wordy pursuits. The most recent episode is a bit of a holiday special. It’s all about Winterval, a portmanteau invented in 1997 in the British city of Birmingham to market all of their winter and winter-holiday events together in a grand festival. Of course, someone took it the wrong way, someone was quoted out of context, and a poisonous myth was born about “political correctness gone mad.” This is an interesting entry in the history of Christmas, culture, and a timely example of how repeating a story doesn’t make it true, but it can make people believe it. All that in 15 minutes. Check it out at: http://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/winterval

I do like a well-done television spot; it’s like a tiny short film trying to get you to like a brand. I appreciate that Britain and other parts of the world really get into impressive Christmas ads, rather than wasting their money and effort on ads for some sporting event. I’ve seen a lot of Christmas ads making the rounds this year; here are the ones I’ve liked the most so far. And if you haven’t seen these yet, you’re welcome. Christmas with love from Mrs Claus This is from Marks and Spencer, a British retailer which sells clothing, home goods and some food items. It’s pretty great, giving Mrs. Claus a Christmas wish to grant and a whole set of shiny secret toys of her own. The story of the family she visits isn’t surprising, but I thought the acting sold it. Also, I laughed out loud at the title of the book she’s pretending to read at the end. Czego szukasz w Święta? | English for beginners This one is from Polish online auction website Allegro. You will see the emotiona

Sweet, another fantasy holiday revisited! The first holiday episode strained our tolerance, but this one was actually adorable. Sofia is excited that it’s Wassailia once more, and she’s made a special gift for Cedric, the court magician. It’s a wand case she made by hand. When she and her rabbit Clover approach his study to deliver the gift, however, she overhears him ranting to himself about the useless trinkets people burden him with every Wassailia. Sofia decides that her gift isn’t special enough and she’ll need to find something better. A chance comment tips her off to a magical flower - an Ice Lily - that sounds like a great gift, so she and Clover head out. Clover calls on a friend who knows the forest, a fox named Whiskers. (I don’t know why the fox and the rabbit are friends either, but you forget about that because the fox is busy being super sassy about the rabbit’s cushy life in the castle.) On the way to find the Ice Lilies, they hear some beautiful music and stop