Mainlining Christmas

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 recent experiences with this show gave me doubts about this episode, and while I don't enjoy the series as wholeheartedly as I did in 1995, I was sucked in for this episode. Jubilee is excited about her first Christmas as an X-Man.  But when she is out shopping with Wolverine and Storm, they run into some Morlocks stealing medical supplies.  They learn that Leech is sick, and the Morlocks resent that Storm (their putative leader) hasn't been there for them.  So they go to try to help, and possibly hope for a Christmas miracle. Overall it's a cute episode. It's fairly well written, though some of the jokes fall flat. I couldn't resist the silliness of Jean Grey and Gambit fighting over holiday cooking, although I would completely understand someone cringing at those scenes. The animation is oddly static in places compared to what is commonly done now, particularly in characters' faces.  It wasn't too distracting, but it is sometimes hard to see muc...

This is video is freaking hypnotic.  Thanks to Nils for the heads up.

This one hurt a bit. I don't think I've ever actually seen this before, at least not in its entirety.  It's not exactly a bad movie, but it's got a lot of problems, starting with the pace.  This movie crept along at a painfully slow pace, and I was ready to slam my head into a brick wall before this was a third of the way through. Unfortunately, that wasn't part of the deal.  I said I'd watch it, so watch it I did.  Through the slow-moving songs, the cheesy villains, and the entire swirling technicolor nightmare. The sad thing is that I can actually respect this.  Sure, it's slow and tedious, but it's also quite beautiful.  The sets are incredibly inventive (even if they do look like a closed-down amusement park), and the ingenious use of animation to weave comic-book like sound effects into the imagery predates similar techniques in movies like Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and Speed Racer by half a ...

The Real One By: Erin Snyder This is the North Pole.  Or it might as well be.  It's a tundra, desolate, empty.  Cold.  The heat's barely on during the month before Christmas.  A week ago, there were so many shoppers it was eighty-five.  Day after Thanksgiving, ninety.  But now, tonight, Christmas Eve, it's freezing.  Even under this coat and white polyester beard, it's freezing. My legs are stiff from sitting all day, from kids jumping up and down on my lap or kicking me again and again while they swung their feet.  It hurts to walk, but at the same time it feels good to be on my feet, to be moving. I give them everything I've got.  All that energy, all that time.  For what?  Ten bucks an hour?  A month's worth of work. I reach the food court and stumble over to Starbucks.  The clerk smiles out of one side of his mouth and calls me Nick.  I force a grin and ask for a coffee, taking out my wallet.  ...