Okay, it is just three weeks until 2025, so I may be considered late. But have you considered the possibility that I am just really, really early for NEXT ear? (Yeah, the IRS never buys that one, either.)
Anyhow, I thought I would take this opportunity to promote a holiday moratorium. I have had no luck so far with Thanksgiving. My tactic of jumping in on the “Frank” when someone starts to say “Did you know Benjamin Frank….” by screaming, “YES! Yes, I do! I have been told Benjamin Franklin suggested the turkey as our national bird instead of the bald eagle! I have been told that four times a year since Kindergarten, and twenty times a year since the invention of the Interwebs!” has done very little good to change the situation. (And all those appearances in court for disturbing the peace cut into my time for eating leftover pie.)
But if, in some slight way, I can divert a few people from those social media posts and conversational gambits, I MIGHT be able to stay out of court during this festive season. (It isn’t the judges and lawyers so much: it’s whoever decided to send a Yuletide gift to the holding cell which included mistletoe.) If you’re doing little known facts about Christmas this year, how about some new ones, like the long hidden story that “Blue Christmas” is really a reflection of Elvis’s unrequited passion for Smurfette? (Long hidden because I just now made it up.) So could we kind of hold back on letting everybody know that:
Charles Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol” to make money. Um, yes. Writers do write things to make money, a concept frequently forgotten by today’s publishers. So why pick on Dickens? A Christmas Carol is NOT an anti-money tract. Ebenezer Scrooge makes the Cratchit Christmas happier by promising Bob more money.
Judy Garland made the lyricist change the words of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”. Yep, heard that one two or three times a year for most of this century. I AM grateful to the person who posted this and sang us the original lyrics, showing Judy absolutely knew what she was doing. (“Have yourself a merry little Christmas: it may be your last.” Not Top 10 material.)
In many cultures, instead of leaving coal, Santa Claus whips the naughty children. Okay, maybe our mass market homogenized way of celebrating the holiday DOES miss the True Meaning of Christmas. The Santa character in some cultures, in fact, spent a LOT more time walloping kids than distributing candy. Other cultures split the job into halves, using a second character to do the whipping; there are even cultures where one figure brings goodies and two or three chastisers concentrate on different childhood sins. (That gigantic Christas cat who devours kids who won’t wear the new clothes they got for Christmas strikes me as interesting, but over-specialized.) Krampus, one of these chastisers, gets a lot of coverage these last twenty years or so, and no one, telling me about him as if he’s totally new to me, has explained why he’s so popular. I’m sure Santa Claus is better for the economy.
The poinsettia is poisonous. I used to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner with the world’s greatest expert on botanical poisoning, who got calls every year to help out reporters writing about the dangers of decoration. The fact is that the poinsettia isn’t THAT poisonous, coming in around 2 on a scale of 1 to 10, ten being “goodbye” and one being “Maybe you should sit down for a while.” I will cut some slack to people who insist on telling me the plant with the bright red foliage is name for Joel Poinsett, our first ambassador to Mexico. If you keep reminding me, I MAY someday remember how to spell “poinsettia”. (Admit it: you want to make it a POINTsettia, too.)
Santa’s reindeer are all female. It seems to be one of this year’s particular favorites: male reindeer, see, shed their antlers in winter, so those pictures of antlered reindeer pulling the sleigh MUST denote an all-female crew. Show me your data on the antlers of FLYING reindeer, and I may believe you. Personally, I believe it’s a plot to show Santa Claus is a multinational trillionaire using his money for social modification. (See, because he has lots of doe. Yeah, if you stop posting these things it’ll cut back on MY posting jokes like THAT. Sounds like a better cause now, eh?)
Blogsy Babbles 