The Defanging of Dickens' A Christmas Carol

On my Substack this week I discussed how Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is the most popular work of capitalist critique in the English language. For that reason, modern day adaptations tend to downplay those elements. I think Apple TV's Spirited is especially egregious in this regard. 

Quarantine Christmas

Today was the first Christmas day I have ever spent at home with only members of my own household. Even when I spent a year living abroad in Germany I trekked to my mom's cousin's house a couple of hours away. This wasn't by choice, of course. My daughters testing positive and the general omicron surge meant my parents were not able to fly our here as planned, and quarantine meant we could not be with my wife's parents. (We will get to see them in a couple of days.)

I've been fortunate to not catch COVID from my kids, and that they've pretty much been asymptomatic. This Christmas has been a kind of throwback to the early days of the pandemic, when everything was put on hold and the world outside of the four walls of my home seemed to disappear. Then as now this meant more time with my children, which I cherish. The demands of my job often make it difficult to get any quality time with them in the normal run of things. 

Christmas is a time of reflection, which is the kind of thing that can bring on the holiday blues. That's been particularly intense this year as I have been unable to celebrate it with my parents. That in itself is a reminder of how much has been lost over the last two years, and I've even been one of the the lucky ones. Friends of friends and relatives of friends have died from COVID but so far no one directly connected to me has (touches wood.) Nevertheless, I have missed out on a lot of time with my parents and sisters, and that weighs on me.

The Christmas reflection gets more intense from me as a teacher, since going from ten hour days of intense work to two weeks of break gives me whiplash. I get too much time to think, too much time to contemplate the scary state of the world today, too much time to get depressed. I read a recent medieval history at the start of break, and one of my takeaways is that I now get why people like St. Benedict just went out into the desert to live as isolated monks. Maybe this broken world just cannot be fixed. Christmas is the ultimate promise that somehow, some way the world can be set right, but I am not feeling that spirit this year.

Of course, I can't just quit everything, put on a brown robe, and move to the desert. It's not feasible, and more importantly, I don't really want to. Quarantine Christmas has reminded me that everything I need is right here in front of me. I will draw from it as much as I can in the coming months, since it's the only thing that gives me any kind of faith in the future. 

Searching For Hope In The Second COVID Christmas Season

This has been a rough week for me. My daughters' friend tested positive for COVID. My daughters are in quarantine (they just got their second shot) and tested negative on a rapid test after a positive result on a home test. (I guess the PCR will tell the tale in a couple of days.) My parents canceled their trip out to see us due to rising infections. One of my daughters asked us today if we will be in "COVID times" forever.

Back in January, when I got my first shot, I felt pretty confident it wouldn't be like this. Oh how wrong I was.

Last year I probably went a little too over the top with Christmas. We showered our daughters with gifts and drank and ate to our heart's content. It was a needed kernel of hope after months of death and fear. This year my thwarted expectations have left me feeling much less Christmas cheer. Due to quarantine it will be just us at home this year (with some time with my wife's family two days late.) 

It feels especially cruel because hope is the essence of Christmas. People talk about "keeping Christ in Christmas," and for me, lapsed Catholic that I am, this means the belief that this broken world can somehow be redeemed. After all that's why the shepherds rejoiced and the three kings followed the star to Bethlehem. It's the thing I am clinging too in my heart when my mind tells me the recent escalation of cases is a sign that we are in for another punishing winter of discontent. 

So I search for ways to find rays of hope. I'm planning on making Christmas cookies with kids, trying to repeat my mother's alchemy. I will try as hard as I can not to think of how she was supposed to be here this year, passing on her secrets to my daughters. We will watch our favorite Christmas movies together, and are working on a family play adapting A Christmas Carol. (I am told I get to play Scrooge!) I will remind myself that as horrible as COVID has been, it has given me so much more time with my children than I otherwise would have had. I truly cherish that time.

After all, Christmas is a yearly reminder of where we are at in life. You can't celebrate it without thinking about Christmases past, and where you are in relation to them. As trying and difficult as these past two years have been, they have forced me to take stock of what truly matters in life. We only have so much time and only so many Christmases. Despite my sadness and fear this Christmas season I just need to remind myself that it's a time to be cherished for what it brings that I never get to have in other parts of the year. I hope you and yours find some scraps of hope this holiday season. 

We Need A Little Christmas

I was looking through my old Christmas-related posts on this blog, since 'tis the season for self reflection. I noticed that in the past I had written a lot about the awful consumerist ethos of the season and how it should be counter-balanced with other Christmas values of generosity, kindness, and a sense of responsibility for others. This year the consumerist orgy of Christmas has been bugging me less. This is partially because my headspace has more immediate concerns, but also because Christmas in quarantine seems to have dampened the usual ostentation. 

Growing up Christmas was a magical time, and not only because of the presents. Back then I was a very devout Catholic, and at midnight Mass I would get a jolt of reassuring feeling in my spine that things would be okay. That's the ultimate message of the holiday, after all. Even those of us who have drifted from the faith still have that feeling in our hearts. We live in a broken, corrupted world, but the hand of grace can somehow offer the hope of redemption.

While I have not recovered the faith (and doubt I ever will), I haven't lost the feeling of hope. This year I we need it more than ever. Thousands die of disease every day while one political faction has openly flouted the rules against mitigation. The president is undermining democracy and pardoning his criminal associates who helped cover up his crimes. The police continue to murder unarmed Black people with impunity. People are losing jobs and businesses and aid is not coming. 

I also try to remember that there are rays of hope. Trump lost by seven million votes. Republicans can still lose the Senate. People are starting to get vaccinated. Perhaps all is not lost. That's the one thought that is sustaining me this Christmas. It's a time of year when I might be able to believe that things can actually get better.

My Family's Uncensored Christmas Letter

[Editor's Note: families often write Christmas letters that put their life in the best light. I've decided to theorize what an uncensored one would look in my home. Names have been changed to protect the innocent and any resemblance to persons dead or alive is purely coincidental.]

This year was not as bad as 2018. Dad's most-played Spotify song of 2018 was "Weightless Again" by the Handsome Family, and in 2019 it was "Mariner's Apartment Complex" by Lana Del Rey, so he's slightly less of a sad old dad than the year before. That might have to do with a happier work environment that no longer makes him crack open a beer after getting home from work and screaming his frustration.

In the midst of a booming economy Dad and Mom didn't get a raise last year, which is to be expected when working in education. They got a lot of appreciation for their work, but appreciation doesn't pay for the kids' college. Considering the pace of global warming, perhaps college will be irrelevant in ten years.

Mom and Dad stayed politically active, but attended far fewer events and rallies than in years past. Dad and Mom's hope that any brighter future is possible might have finally been broken. They still spend too much time on Twitter and watching TV news getting mad and sad about the state of the world.

The children played softball in the spring. One played with gusto, the other mostly played with sticks in the outfield. Half the games were rained on. Mom and Dad decided not to do any summer camps this year in order to spend more time with their kids. Well...this was less decided and more being too insanely stressed to meet the deadlines for camps. And also not having gotten a raise. This strategy worked out well for the first month of summer, then basically meant weeks of breaking up fights and warding off requests to use the iPad.

Dad's parents visited and the whole gang took a trip to Maine, which was a lot of fun. Well, except for the cheap hotel Dad booked in Brunswick with weird activity at night and Mom getting a strange bug or spider bite. Dad also took a trip to Colorado to see his grad school friends. His main response was to feel depressed about living hundreds of miles from his closest friends and family.

The family has mostly been in good health. Mom just recovered from a nasty stomach virus that happened to coincide with a major initiative at work. Dad has had some dental work done, and the painfulness of eating has been the best thing for his weight control in years. One child threw up in class and Mom and Dad hope this didn't cause any emotional scarring on her or them, since they disbelieved her complaints of a stomach virus that morning. The morning routine is usually so hectic and stressful that human needs get lost in the shuffle.

Despite all the difficulties they all still love each other. In fact it's probably the only consistent thing they can all count on. Regardless of what happens in 2020, there's a comfort knowing that's there.

Losing My Christmas Spirit

Current Christmas mood

The past few years of my life have been full of Christmas spirit, mostly because of parenthood. It's been a truly great thing to vicariously experience the holidays through my kids and to remember my own Christmases. I was a misfit in school growing up but I was lucky to have a very warm and loving family that made celebrating Christmas fun.

For some reason this year I am not feeling the spirit. Thanksgiving weekend will come and go without us putting out our decorations. My wife is feeling the same ennui, and our children's enthusiasm is not enough to shake us out of this.

After some reflection I think this has to do with Christmas on the meta level. Once you strip away both the consumerism, it is a holiday about hope. On the pagan level, it is the hope for the spring to arrive as we sit in the depths of winter darkness. On the more Christian level it is the hope that the birth of Jesus, savior of the world, represents. Christmas means that the broken world can indeed be saved and a kernel of that exists in even its more secular permutations. In recent years that hope has probably had a lot to do with my increased Christmas spirit, even if my children's zeal is the primary factor. In fact, the two intertwine because nothing forces me to think about the future and nothing absorbs as much of my hope as my children do. 

I think my loss of Christmas spirit reflects, deep down, my profound pessimism in this moment. In world affairs the dominoes keep falling, from Poland to Bolivia. In this country evidence that the despot has committed high crimes is out in the open and it will not lead to his removal. The 2020 election will be marred by voter suppression, disinformation, foreign meddling, and the reality that the electoral college will very likely preserve minority rule. (This is currently my prediction, btw). The world is burning up and apart from people posting Greta Thunberg memes little to nothing is being done to stop it in this country. In fact, our government's policies are hastening the apocalypse.

So what is there to look forward to? I think of the world my children will inherit and am filled with the deepest sense of helplessness and sadness. The last handful of Christmases I knew things were bad but I could still take heart in the promise of the holiday. Maybe I will eventually get there this year, but it will take some doing.

Christmas Music That Doesn't Suck

Hello folks! It's the holiday season, and we know what means: godawful Christmas music played everywhere. It's always the same lame songs done in a halfassed fashion. Either that or an artist's original composition that's even worse. My love of the farty synth on Macca's "Wonderful Christmastime" is the result of a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. The next time you're at a holiday party and they play that shit, commandeer the stereo and put these selections on.

Miles Davis, "Blue Xmas (To Whom It May Concern"

The whole song is just one long critique of holiday consumerism with some fantastic Miles Davis trumpet playing underneath it. A real palate cleanser after having been subjected to the Beach Boys' "Little Saint Nick" for the hundredth time.

Free Design, "Close Your Mouth It's Christmas"

The jazzy late 60s sophisti-pop sound won't freak out the squares but it's just weird enough to give a change of pace to your holiday guests. I've had it in my head all day long today.

James Brown, "Santa Claus Go Straight To The Ghetto"

You can never, ever go wrong with the Godfather of Soul, of course. He put out some great Christmas music, but this is probably my favorite. There's a whole subgenre of Christmas music about imploring or forcing Santa to redistribute the wealth to poor children. This song is among the best of the type.

Otis Redding, "Merry Christmas Baby"

Speaking of soul music, Otis Redding could cut a Christmas track, too. I love this one both for his typically sweaty delivery, but also for Booker T's holiday organ sound. Why on earth this song isn't played at the malls instead of the lame "Jingle Bell Rock" is totally beyond me.

Jimmy Smith, Christmas Cookin'

And speaking of the organ, if you want a whole Christmas album to put on, I'd recommend Jimmy Smith's. He does some jazz versions of holiday standards, but the organ gives it an especially Christmas-y sound even if the music itself gets really far out at times. One of the few Christmas albums that actually feels fresh and original.

Reece Shipley, "Santa Miss Those Missiles"

If you REALLY want to get real far gone listen to this track, a fine example of the lunacy of the Cold War.

Ernest Tubb, "I'll Be Walking The Floor This Christmas"

Ernest Tubb reconfigured his biggest country hit, "Walking the Floor Over You" into a depressing holiday tune. As we all know, the holidays can bring sadness and dredge up bad memories. Rarely do the songs blasted out in waiting rooms and grocery stores go to those places.

Tom Waits, "Christmas Card From A Hooker in Minneapolis"

Speaking of sad Christmas songs, there's always this Tom Waits gem, one of the greatest portraits of ordinary despair ever painted in a song.

Bessie Smith, "At The Christmas Ball"

Before the nineteenth century's cult of domesticity, Christmas was less about family time and more about making merry and having a ball. That spirit still lives on in the people who get blitzed at their company holiday party. My favorite song for THIS Christmas spirit comes from Bessie Smith, Queen of the Blues. Basically this song is about wanting to go out on Christmas and tie one on.

King Curtis, "The Christmas Song"

I'll end on a sweeter note, though. King Curtis could wring emotion out of the sax like no one else, and it's a damn shame that he's not a household name. If you want to kick back in front of the fire with some very heavily spiked egg nog this is just about the most perfect thing.

The Perfect Gift For A Non-Consumerist Christmas

For a long time in my adult years I saw Christmas mostly as an annoyance punctuated by holiday parties. The holiday's consumerist orgy would often leave me feeling depressed and let down. Now that I am the father of two young children, the Christmas spirit has been much revived in me. Watching how much my daughters enjoy the holiday season just gives me so much joy.

Of course, the same pitfalls of consumerism remain, and I still break out Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping to expel the demons of capitalism from my holiday celebration. This holiday ought to be about more than buying boatloads of cheap shit. We still buy gifts for each other in my family, but we try to keep it pretty low-key and humble.

There are gifts that can be given much more valuable than anything that can be boxed and wrapped. They are the gifts I am trying to give out more often during the Christmas season. Today I was reminded of one of the best.

Every year the college counseling office at my school throws a little after-school party for all the people who wrote letters of recommendation for our students. This year was actually a personal record for me, with 27. For the first time that also made the teacher at the school who wrote the most letters. The counselors gave me recognition and a nice bottle of wine, but there's a much richer gift waiting for me. Sitting on the table right now is a stack of envelopes full of appreciations from my students. I am hesitating to open them because they never fail to hit me straight in the heart.

If you are looking to give a gift this holiday season that's not ordered on Amazon, give the people in your life the gift of appreciation. It is a precious thing we get so rarely in our society. Bosses treat workers like expendable commodities who should feel lucky just to have a job. Service workers deal with asshole customers on a constant basis. Teachers often leave a pint of blood in class every day with little to no encouragement from their overlords or their students. These times are really bad, and we all need to be taking care of each other. A little appreciation goes a long, long way. 

A Secular Humanist Argument For Keeping Christ In Christmas

Today is Christmas Eve, the most magical day of the year when I was a child. Very little of my German ancestry's culture survived down to my parents' generation, but we did keep to the German tradition of opening presents on Christmas Eve night. My family also went to mass on Christmas Eve, rather than Christmas morning. When I was an undeniably doubtless true believer, the midnight mass on Christmas Eve swelled my soul like little else. It was not just the music and the incense and the weirdness of being at church on a pitch black night, but also the promise that the world, so broken and sinful, was in fact redeemed by the Son of God.

Last year when I went to Christmas Eve mass with my parents I got much of the same feeling, even if I am a lapsed Catholic agnostic who attends Episcopal services. I have been thinking about that experience for a year now, and have come to realize that there are completely secular reasons to "Keep Christ In Christmas," as the bumper stickers say.

What I mean here is the idea of Christ and what he represents. Those who are not believers could still take heart in the idea of redemption offered by Christmas. It is a chance to look out at our broken world and all of its problems and to think about redeeming it. Instead of looking to divine favor, Christmas could be a time to think about how we, in the here and now, can bring about that redemption.

That thought would also be necessary antidote to most of what Christmas has become in America. Its ridiculous, vulgar consumerism is the opposite of redemption. The idiotic culture wars over saying "Merry Christmas" are divisive and chauvinistic during a season that should be about acknowledging our common humanity. This is perhaps why I love the Charlie Brown Christmas special so much. The consumerism of his sister, dog, and friends has left Charlie Brown exasperated, and when he asks if someone can tell him the true meaning of Christmas, Linus quotes from the relevant passages of the Gospels.

I watch it nowadays with my children and see it less as an expression of Christianity and more as a plea to treat Christmas as something more meaningful than an orgy of materialism. This Christmas, as the Scrooges in Congress have voted to shovel more money into the bloody maw of the Moloch that is this nation's plutocratic class, it's more relevant than ever. Let's use Christmas to think about what kind of world we want to live in, and how we will bring that about.

The Enduring Relevance of Dickens' A Christmas Carol

[I wrote the following essay four years ago, and I figured now was a good time to dust it off. With Christmas approaching, Paul Ryan and his gang of Scrooges are about to take from the poor and give to the rich. The Republican Party is indeed the party of prisons and workhouses.]

My first brush with Dickens did not impress me.  We read A Tale of Two Cities in my tenth grade English class, and I came away turned off by his anti-revolutionary politics, sugary sentimentality, and ridiculous plot devices.  (How many Dickens novels are there that don't feature crazy coincidences or orphans with mysterious parents?)  Around that same time I started reading serious literature on my own, not just Stephen King novels and the Dragonlance series, but didn't pick up a Dickens novel again for about a quarter century.  Having grown many years older and more open minded about my reading choices, a close friend during my Michigan days convinced me to pick up Bleak House, saying it would change my opinion of Dickens, and he was right.

Three Christmases ago, when I was still deep in my Dickens phase (I read Little Dorrit, for cryin' out loud), I decided to finally read A Christmas Carol.  I was well familiar with it, of course, through countless reinterpretations and retellings, from the Disney version to the movie Scrooged, which was a particular holiday favorite in my family.   Reading it I fell in love, and also soon realized that Dickens' highly political message had been drained from the various adaptations.  A Christmas Carol is not just about Scrooge's redemption, but is also a critique of greed and laissez-faire capitalism.  That critique is just as relevant now as it was then, in the midst of Britain's rough transformation into an industrial society.

Near the beginning, when he is asked to give money to assist the poor, Scrooge famously roars "are there no prisons?" and notes that workhouses, the treadmill, and the Poor Law are all in full effect.  When those asking for a donation note that many would rather die than subject themselves to such cruel institutions Scrooge replies: "If they would rather die...they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."  As a historian of the 19th century I knew when I read those words that Dickens was calling out the cruel economic philosophy behind what Pope Francis has recently deemed "unfettered capitalism."  Through Scrooge Dickens was trying to expose a hard-hearted way of thinking that was only increasing the sufferings of the poor.

These days our conservative politicians are not so brazen as to openly call for the poor to be killed off for the good of society, but as my friend Chauncey DeVega has theorized, that thought may very well lay behind the recent attacks on Food Stamps and other aspects of the welfare state.  These same modern Scrooges are more than happy to spend money profusely on prisons while they slash school funding, and those of Newt Gingrich's ilk have even openly called for disadvantaged children to clean toilets.  More than one Republican has likened welfare recipients to animals.  Just as in Dickens' time, these apologists for the status quo think that all poverty is deserved, and that those who profit handsomely from the system do not owe anyone else anything.  Scrooge's rants about the surplus population have come down to us in Margaret Thatcher's infamous dictum. "there is no such thing as society."

Scrooge's attitude toward the poor is echoed in his treatment of his employee, Bob Cratchit.  Cratchit is given hardly enough coal to warm himself in a cold office, is paid the absolute minimum, and has to beg to get Christmas off.  Scrooge gives him the holiday, but only after grumbling that providing a Christmas holiday is "a poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December."  Reading these words I cannot help but think of the retail workers who are now being forced to give up their Thanksgiving holidays, or the companies that are chiseling their minimum wage employees further through fee-laden debit card payments.

As the story goes on, Scrooge learns the error of his ways.  As the ghost of Christmas future reminds him, the wages of sin is death.  Make no mistake, Dickens judges Scrooge to be a sinner, and his mistreatment of his employee and his cruel attitude towards the poor to be great sins deserving of damnation.  That is essentially the same moral framework that Pope Francis has been advocating recently.  When he wrote that a two point drop in the stock market was news, but a homeless person dying of cold on the street wasn't, I heard in those words the spirit of A Christmas Story.

As in Dickens' time, we live in a society where wealth is being generated on a massive scale but is going into the hands of fewer and fewer people who have abdicated any sense of social responsibility.  Their arrogant disregard for the sufferings of those below them -the surplus population- is trumpeted throughout our public discourse under the guise of conventional wisdom.  It is time we follow the lead of A Christmas Carol, and shame those who so easily deny the needs of those less fortunate than them.

A Christmas Eve Epiphany

My rate of postings has slowed down here in the last week due to the holiday and my good fortune at having my parents here to visit. This has actually allowed my mind to work and wander more, generating more and more ideas that I don't have the time to write about. Such is life.

One of those ideas hit me very strong on Christmas Eve. I went with my family and my parents to Christmas Eve mass, and despite my status as a lapsed Catholic agnostic Episcopalian, I felt something very, very strong, even if it was not what I was supposed to feel. Being with my parents at Christmas Eve mass again reminded me of my childhood, when my beliefs were pure and simple. The joy expressed at the coming of the Savior felt very real to me back than. My heart exulted, my spirits lifted, and my soul felt warm.

As I got a little twinge of that long absent feeling, I also began to feel extremely melancholy. For a believer, Christmas holds the prospect that this awful, corrupt, wretched world can in fact be saved. That belief has echoed in so many ways in the intellectual history of the West, even in the thought of those who were non-believers. Marx dreamed of the revolution that would end history and destroy alienation. Nietzsche foresaw humanity moving into a higher stage of being.

Standing there singing the old hymns of salvation I realized that I could only go half way. I do not think that this world can be saved, nor do I believe that there is any moral arc to the universe, as badly as I want to believe the famous words of Dr. King. I think that, as Werner Herzog has said, the universe is indifferent to our existence.

The election of Donald Trump has only confirmed the darker thoughts I've been having in recent years. I am beginning to think that all of the bad historical trends that I have been noticing for decades now have actually converged to create a new, much worse historical reality. Like the Soviet citizens of the Brezhnev era, I've noticed the rot but never thought this meant that the current political reality was going to undergo a revolutionary overhaul. I doubt that the international order will survive the next four years, and I doubt that the remains of the shredded social safety net will either. The police will be allowed to be even more murderous, and the strides made by gay and trans people will face setbacks.

The center will not hold, as the poet said, and no one will come to save us. We will have to somehow find a way to save ourselves.

Clarence Carter, "Back Door Santa"

In my continuing quest to find good Christmas music, I recently discovered Clarence Carter's "Back Door Santa," which I never knew was the song sampled on Run DMC's classic "Christmas in Hollis." I've always loved Carter and the school of funky, rough and tumble of Southern soul he subscribed to. (Let's just say I'm the kind of guy who bought the nine disc Stax singles collection despite being poor as dirt in grad school at the time.) As always Carter has just the right amount of grunt, and you can practically hear the sweat.  Considering the fact that this man had his biggest hit with a song about stroking, the title "Back Door Santa" is not surprisingly a single entendre.

In recent years I have rekindled the excitement I used to have about Christmas. Having children of my own has allowed me to experience the holidays vicariously through them, and get enjoyment from their enjoyment. This year, with the world seemingly gone insane, I am also milking the comfortable repetitions and rituals of the holidays. I've been doing that with a lot of things, not just the holidays. Old favorites are coming back. I'm rereading books and digging up good music that I've let slip from my life. Southern soul music, like a big holiday glass of mulled wine, has never failed to warm me up. With the things being the way they are, I'll need it.

The Free Design, "Close Your Mouth (It's Christmas)"

From now until Christmas I am making all of my tracks of the week holiday songs. For many years I could've taken or left Christmas, but since getting married and having kids I've been enjoying it a lot more. Seeing the joy in my children's faces has rekindled my love of Christmas. This year, with all of the impending doom in the air, I need the distraction of the holidays more than ever.

In recent years I have also been searching out holiday music that doesn't suck. It is probably the most wretched genre of music, where even great artists like Paul McCartney and the Beach Boys produce atrocities like "Wonderful Christmastime" and "Little Saint Nick." Most of the time I stick to jazz interpretations of holiday standards, old school country Christmas songs, and the Christmas songs of James Brown and Bessie Smith. Last year through a podcast I discovered a totally different song by The Free Design, an obscure vocal pop group of the late 1960s-1970s.

"Close Your Mouth (It's Christmas)" is jazzy with the same subtle bongo drums that underlay the original Star Trek theme. This is the kind of thing that 90s neo-lounge groups like Saint Etienne drew inspiration from. The mood is relaxing, and not stereotypically "Christmasy." There's no bells or glockenspiels or overly earnest lyrics. Nope, it's a nice little chill tune about putting away the "bank book" and enjoying Christmas as a time for connection and family, not for consumption. I appreciate how this message gets delivered without the usual treacly sentiment or over the top bombast so common to Christmas music.

Being A Parent Makes Me Both Hate And Love Christmas More

After yesterday's consumerist orgy it's time for some preaching by Reverend Billy

One of the biggest cliches in the book is that parenthood changes everything, and it's a cliche because, well, it's true.  In many ways this is obvious.  I usually subsist on six hours of sleep a night, and have cleared the eight hour mark maybe a dozen times in the last three years, usually only when I was too sick to sleep less than eight hours.  Smaller things have changed too, like Christmas.

Through most of my adult life, Christmas was pretty ho-hum. With two three year old girls, that has changed drastically, and Christmas has become a lot more significant in my life.  In many respects, this has meant that I love Christmas the way I loved it when I was a child.  My daughters take such joy in the Christmas season, from the songs to the gifts to the time with family.  It's very difficult for a lot of that not to rub off on me.

At the same time, however, it is extremely difficult for me not to develop great levels of hate and resentment against Christmas.  The Christmas season is perhaps the biggest reminder I have of how much power the broader society has in shaping my daughters and how hard it is for me to instill the values I want to impart.  In the first place, the consumeristic side of Christmas is especially pronounced with children.  I don't know if there has been a change in this since my childhood or what, but every year my children are buried under a tide of toys and trinkets.  I blame the Wal-Martization of America, which was not yet complete when I was a tyke.  It's easy, without thinking, to buy a child a mountain of toys, since they come at dollar store prices.  They also have dollar store quality but never seem to leave the house, forming a giant mass of cheap plastic crap to take up space, be stepped on, and constantly clutter living spaces up while rarely being played with.

The people giving the gifts have great intentions, and I really don't fault them for anything, obviously.  It's more that the Christmas season injects the usual consumerist ethos with steroids. And I guess it would be a real dick move to ask that any money spent on toys just be put into my daughter's college funds.

What's harder to stomach is the enforcement of patriarchal norms.  My daughters love Star Wars and superheroes, but for those who don't know them well, they default to all manner of pink princess stuff.  My daughters practically get buried alive in it.  What is even crazier is that they get non-princess toys, like cars and airplanes and even mini-baseball bats, in special pink, girl forms.  The message is pretty clear: being a girl means having a gussied up, less realistic, less REAL version of what boys have, because deep down cars, and trucks and baseball bats are for them, not girls.

Even if they were getting gifts I liked more, the whole thing would make me uneasy because of the massive waste of it all.  The sheer scale of gifts is frightening in its extremity; so much so that we barely give them anything for Christmas because we know that the deluge is coming.  Seeing the massive pile of presents in our living room right now is actually making me feel sick at the waste and decadence of it all in a world where so many have so little.  It's not because this stuff cost so much, quite the opposite.  It's the thought that this bounty of stuff is the result of exploited labor, both in the factories where it's made and the stores where it's sold.

Beyond all that, Christmas events encourage them to get all dressed up, and what's wrong with that? Those who know me know I like to dress up.  But for my daughters, they are quickly turned into little objects, told they are pretty, etc.  There's nothing wrong with being pretty, but when that's the one thing other people want to notice about them, the patriarchy is lurking.

So now that I am a parent, Christmas is filled with vastly conflicting emotions.  On the one hand, I feel such happiness at the smiles on my daughters' faces, and the cheerfulness they showed when racing down the stairs yesterday morning.  It's great to see them interact with their extended family, especially their cousins.  On the other hand, I feel so trapped and horrified when seeing them buried under mountains of cheap crap produced by exploited labor that reinforces sexist gender roles.  Maybe next year I can develop some counter-programming.

December Sunsets and the Velvet Underground

I was looking through the back pages of my old, and defunct blog, and found a memory worth sharing from 2005, ten long years ago.  It comes from my last year in graduate school, right before I attended my first American Historical Association conference and slowly began to realize that my future was about to get really rocky.  Something about the winter solstice really resonates with me, and instead of trying to write something new, I thought I'd share something old that better articulates the feelings that this time of year can give.  These are feelings independent of Christmas, but of the elemental effect of the longest night of the year, the reason why the ancients decided we needed some times of good cheer to counteract it.  Here it is below, complete with reference to a discman.  Dolores the cat, I can gladly say, still lives:

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December sunsets, I love them so. So today, after feeding my friends Rachel and Ed's wondrously lustrous feline Delores, I took a walk around in the late afternoon, listening to the Velvet Underground's first album on my discman. It's one I love, especially in December, it just sounds wintry to me for some reason, even though I first started listening to the album in the spring of 1994. Nico's voice (or Nordic foghorn, more accurately) is like a chilly north wind, and the sparks of feedback courtesy of Lou Reed's guitar shoot into my skull like the cold air knifes through my coat. When I listen to "Heroin" or "All Tomorrow's Parties" on that album, though, they seem to physically warm me somehow.

John Cale's background drone on "Heroin" replicates the hazy feeling of a December dawn. The setting sun today created that orange-grey dusk that somehow sets my heart affire in ways that I cannot comprehend. It is ethereal, as if I am on another planet further from the sun, where the sun is more of a star that provides light but no warmth, and a dim light at that. Perhaps it is in the shortest days of the year that we come closest to seeing universal death, and it just might be that brush with mortality that gets me every time.

Or maybe just memory. Growing up, my family would go to Mass on Christmas Eve at 5PM, the church's "children's Mass." Because my parents have a pathological fear of being late, we always arrived more than half an hour early, able to take any seat in the church, and right as the sun was setting. The church lay in a spot where the sun would strike the stained glass quite directly, flooding the church with a golden bath of color and warmth. It would set before the special Mass so full of ritual, and in a child's eyes, magic. (When a child is very young, that's what religion is to them.) The setting sun of Christmas Eve was probably the closest I came to religious ecstasy in my life, and I guess there's a piece of that exhilarating feeling in the sunset I saw today.

You Can't Go Home Again (For Christmas)

The holiday season does strange things to me.  I tend to get hyper emotional, in good ways and bad.  This evening my daughters wanted to watch the Garfield Christmas special (don't ask), and I started getting a little misty-eyed over a piece of supremely cheesy entertainment.

In case you haven't seen it (and why would you), Jon takes Garfield and Odie back to his parents' farm for Christmas.  His grandmother is also there, and she talks of the lonely nights petting her cats thinking about the past, now that her husband has been gone.  This about had me lose it, since my own grandmother, who had spent sixteen years alone, died not too long ago.  And yes, when we would get together for my mother's family Christmas, it was at my grandparents' farm.

I haven't been in Nebraska for Christmas since 2012.  We were going to go this year, then an unexpected financial burden put an end to it.  With two three year olds it is a difficult undertaking, involving four pricey plane tickets and renting a car to drive the 150 miles from the airport to my isolated hometown.  Wrangling toddlers in the airport and getting them to not act like insane monsters on an airplane for over three hours is a task too difficult for the labors of Hercules.  The treacherous and unpredictable winter weather on the plains also makes the venture especially risky.  Back when I used to drive home from Illinois and Michigan I would hit blizzards, even getting my car blown into a ditch near Council Bluffs one time.

I've also come to realize that the Christmas of my youth can't be recaptured, which is cold comfort when I'm feeling down about being so far from home on Christmas.  We used to gather around noon at my grandparents' house, their farm about an hour's drive west.  The best part was the trees surrounding the farm yard, where I would play with my cousins and build forts out of junk.  We handled so much old rusty barbed wire that I am surprised that none of us got tetanus.  I also loved playing with the many farm cats, who we gave eccentric names to.  After a bit we'd be called in for Christmas dinner, which usually involved both ham and turkey. That was usually just a prelude to the pies.  My grandmother made so many of them, from banana cream to pumpkin to cherry, seemingly never-ending.

 I usually brought the toys I just got for Christmas, so my afternoons were occupied in a state of concentrated playing in my grandparents' living room at the foot of the aged fold out couch and massive picture window that claimed a few confused birds in its time.  When I got older I might be reading the books I got, which also fit with my teenage antisocial tendencies.  The adults would play pitch (a four handed card game rarely played outside of Nebraska) while drinking pop and snacking on Christmas cookies.  The supply of food was pretty much never ending, and for some reason around 5 they would reheat lunch and I would still manage to cram some more of my grandmother's mashed potatoes in my mouth.  (They were truly amazing.)  On our way out the door my grandma would usually give all of us cousins (and there were a lot of us) a bag of her homemade kettle corn, and sometimes a hand-knitted blanket or afghan.  (I still have them today, and they somehow still carry the slight whiff of the farmhouse smell.)  In my head I can still hear the quiet cacophony of car wheels on a gravel road underneath an impossibly black winter solstice sky as my family departed, my grandparents waving good-bye from the yard.

The thing about holiday rituals is that they provide comfort in their repetition, the comfort of memory.  By doing the same thing you did the year before and the ten years before that you revive the memories of all the Christmases past and simultaneously live them out.  Losing these rituals completely throws off the equilibrium of holidays, and is why I am desperate to go home for Christmas.

The more I think about it, however, the more I realize that the ideal Christmases of my memory ended much longer ago than I first realized.  At some point some members of my family insisted on renting a banquet room at a nearby Holiday Inn rather than doing the traditional farm house Christmas.  This, I believe, was due to the sour nature of some of my family members, who simply wanted to cut the time with their extended family short.  I found these Christmas gatherings to be positively miserable.  There were no trees to go exploring in, no yard cats to play with, and no dusty basement to go poking around in.  It was a lot of adults talking and tepid hotel buffet food. If I was lucky I could cadge some quarters from my dad and go to the hotel arcade (remember those?) and play some games of Operation Wolf.

Later on, after my grandfather passed, we started getting together sometimes at my aunt and uncle's house, which while fun, wasn't the same.  These days there's no gatherings there, or anywhere, for that matter.  The submerged tensions and antipathies that had been festering for years between my mother and some of her siblings have broken out into open warfare.  I'd rather not get into the details, but things have been said that cannot be unsaid, things so odious that I can't and won't ever forgive them.  My cousins and I are still on good terms, but we have been flung far and wide to the four corners of America, from Portland to Mobile to Denver to New Jersey.  The farm where so many of my childhood memories are located is now owned by someone who out of spite would probably never let me visit it again.

It would be great for my immediate family to make our own new traditions, so my daughters and nephews and niece could have their own memories together, but being so far away means that this won't happen.  The land of my birth is probably destined to be a distant and strange place to them. I wish so badly I could share my grandparents' farm with them at least, but that will likely never happen.  At least my wife's family has some good traditions.  We eat Cuban food from a venerable place in Union City on Christmas Eve, then feast of roast pork the next day after my father in law makes a delicious garlic shrimp brunch.  It's great, but it does not have the comfort and resonance of the rituals I grew up with.

This Christmas I am going to try to do it a little more Nebraska style.  I am planning on replicating my Mom's delectable Christmas treats, from nut clusters to Ritz crackers filled with peanut butter and dipped in almond bark.  Maybe I will try to teach my New Jersey relatives how to play pitch, too.

Of course, it's not all bad.

Track of the Week: James Brown "Go Power at Christmas Time"

Christmas brings us wretchedly saccharine television programming, an orgy of wasteful consumerism, and worst of all, wave upon wave of godawful music.  Back home in Nebraska there are actually radio stations that play that crap for a month solid, making resistance futile.  Going out in public means having one's ears assaulted by tuneless rubbish, often created by people who ought to know better.  It is only in the last five years or so that I have managed to find good Christmas music, the vast majority of it hiding out in obscure corners that streaming services like Pandora and Spotify have shed new light on.

I never knew until this week that James Brown had put out quite a lot of Christmas music.  Like the best of this genre, his holiday tunes are not retreads of the same old standards, but original creations that break from the usual formulas.  "Go Power At Christmas Time" is a classic hard groove like the rest of his output in his late 60s-early 70s glory days.  The piano and bells sound a little Christmas-y, I guess, but the song is hardly drenched in the usual holiday garlands.  It's really more about the JBs getting tight and funky, and the Godfather of Soul pulling out all the vocal stops as only he can.  What I would give to hear this great slice of pure energy blasting at the mall instead of the usual limpid Christmas fare.  In any case, put this one on at your holiday party if you want to start cutting the rug.

Good Artists Making Terrible Christmas Music

This time of year brings with it the unbearable onset of awful holiday music blaring just about everywhere.  While there might be different performers and versions of songs, it's always the same twenty or so songs I keep hearing, over and over and over again.  Three years ago I made a list of Christmas music I actually like, and through the magic of Spotify have managed to find great country, R&B, and jazz takes on the form that can wash the taste of the crap out of my mouth.  Of course, that's not what they're playing when I stop into the Walgreen's for diapers. What amazes me is that there are often great musical artists who become the worst hacks when it comes to Christmas music.  Here's a randomly organized list of the worst offenders.

Beach Boys, "Little Saint Nick"
This may very well be the worst offender on the list.  Unlike other Beach Boys music it sounds completely joyless, as if someone had them in the studio at gun point.  The lyrics are beneath stupid, I think I lose brain cells every time I hear it.  On top of it all, Mike Love's adenoidal yelp never sounded more grating.

Bruce Springsteen, "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town"
I really think the Boss is capable is giving us a great Christmas song, and not of the traditional variety.  I would love to hear an acoustic weeper on the lines of the Nebraska album about a laid off worker trying to not to let on to his children how he is selling plasma to buy them presents.  Instead we get this lame take on an annoying Christmas chestnut, one that my friend (and Springsteen superfan) Debbie has called "Saint Bruce's one sin."

Paul McCartney, "Wonderful Christmastime"
Good Lord is this an annoying song.  The synthesizers are so bloody awful that they are almost (and I mean almost) transcendent in their wretchedness.  What really makes it rotten is that Macca knows how to write a catchy hook, so this song will get in my head for hours.  I honestly wonder if it was originally written to be used by the CIA in its torture chambers but rejected for humanitarian reasons.

Band Aid "Do They Know It's Christmas"
"Do They Know It's Christmas" has got to be the most patronizing, ignorant Christmas tune ever written.  Do they know it's Christmas in Ethiopia?  Well considering that Christians were there well before they were ever in England, yes.  A lot of artists I like had a hand in this mess.

Chuck Berry, "Run Run Rudolph"
Berry is really phoning it in on this one.  He goes through the motion without even a hint of passion, which makes me think this song wasn't his idea.  I would hope not.

Track of the Week: Miles Davis "Blue Xmas (To Whom It May Concern)"

When the holiday season began, I was in a fantastic mood.  I really got into the spirit, started listening to my favorite non-shitty Christmas music (trust me, it actually exists) and sipping egg nog at the end of the day.  Now, as the day approaches, I am burnt out on Christmas.  I certainly enjoyed shopping for gifts after work today, but the public discourse around the holiday is wearing me down.  I am just sick and tired of the idiotic "War on Christmas" bullshit, which seems to be a ploy for middle-class white Christians to think of themselves as victims.

Year after year I get depressed when I hear someone say "Merry Christmas!" as a weapon or political statement.  (The way it's practically spat out of the mouths of certain Fox News viewers is a dead giveaway.)  There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that so effectively drains the joy out of the season than that.  Ironically, it is the supposed defenders of Christmas like Bill O'Reilly, who have killed its spirit deader than any Scrooge or Grinch could have hoped for.

It is with that knowledge that I recommend that you listen to "Blue Xmas (To Whom It May Concern)."  It's an odd track, because Miles Davis is the last guy you'd expect to cut a Christmas song, and it has a vocal over it by Bob Dorough to boot.  The words pretty baldly criticize the consumerism, cynicism, "bad taste" and increased hassles that come with the Christmas season.  At its base, it laments the joylessness of what's supposed to be a joyful season, which is all too appropriate living in a time when the same people who get apoplectic over someone daring to wish them a "happy holidays" are more than happy to cut off unemployment benefits right after Christmas.  At least when I listen to this song I can get an antidote to all the hypocrisy, with some tasty jazz licks to go with it.

The Case For Diner As a Classic Holiday Film

It's that time of year again when horrible dreck like the Beach Boys' "Little Saint Nick" invades public space and all manner of sugary, treacly holiday films and specials take over my television.  I tend to avoid this stuff by re-reading Dickens' A Christmas Carol, which has a truer and more political core to it.

In my quest to find holiday entertainment that doesn't give me a sugar-induced bellyache, I've realized that Diner, one of my favorite films, is in actuality a holiday classic.  In case you don't know, it's a film made in 1982, but set in 1959.  The main characters are men in their 20s living in Baltimore who are no longer teenagers, but are drifting and haven't quite yet made the transition to adulthood.  Having spent the bulk of my twenties in grad school, it's a feeling I know all too well.  They go out, hang around, and always end up at the end of the night at their favorite diner for conversation.  It really captures a certain time in life, and a life transition that is awfully tricky to handle.

There are some plot points, like one character owing money to bookies, another having troubles with his marriage, and another about to get married while feeling ambivalent about it.  However, it's mostly a character study of a bunch of guys going through their lives over the course of a week.  The week itself is significant: the week between Christmas and New Year's.  

Plenty of holiday movies use Christmas and New Year's for their setting, but Diner is the only one, to my knowledge, that gets at the supreme importance of the days between those holidays.  At the fraught, early 20s age of the characters, that week is when you visit home, catch up with old friends, and generally have time to kill with your buddies.  It's a time when I always feel, even to this day, that I am recharging my batteries and can afford to get a little silly.  

Holiday fare tends to emphasize the role of family, but the holidays are also an important time to be with your friends.  For years, every New Year's Eve I would visit a close friend in Lincoln, Nebraska, and we would spend the evening with his circle, eating an elaborate home-cooked dinner topped off with wine and a bottle of quality Irish whiskey.  We would then spend the next day watching samurai movies, preferably by Kurosawa.  Now, with my family responsibilities and the greater difficulty of journeying home, this wonderful ritual is no longer part of my life.  I've long made the transition to settling down, but what I would give for one of those New Year's celebrations with my friends.  That Diner understands the meaning of friendship in the holidays is why it ought to be screened just as much on cable TV this time of year as It's a Wonderful Life.