Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts
As I spin my lonely dreydl on this Christmas eve, I wish my goyish friends a happy holiday. I’m a little jealous. But not because I don’t get any presents, but because Christmas music is way cooler than Hannukkah music. The closest we get to popular holiday tunes are an Adam Sandler song and the Klezmatics’ album of Woody Guthrie penned Hannukkah music.
OK, so most contemporary Christmas music sucks. I know -- I worked at a record store for five years, during which we were forced to play Christmas tracks around the clock every December. I knew all the words to Rosie O’Donnell’s A Rosie Christmas the year that one was released. I’ll spare you a hyperlink.
But if Bob Dylan can get into Christmas music, I guess I can too. After all, Darlene Love boasts that it took three Jews to write what she terms the greatest Christmas song of all time:
Darlene returned the favor some years later with “Christmas for the Jews”, an instant rhythm and blues classic if there ever was one.
Here’s Miles Davis on Christmas:
“Blue Xmas” is on a compilation CD called Hipsters’ Holiday, which I recommend, although I have found that evangelical East Texans don’t like it. But they spin Bob Wills tunes in Aggie country, and that’s OK too (Aaah-Aaah!). My next pick probably doesn’t go down very well down there either, but I understand that its quite popular in the UK around Christmastime, where they presumably have a better collective sense of humor:
No knocking Darlene Love, but “Fairytale of New York” might just be the greatest song of all time, Christmas or not. Those three Jews were seriously bested by a couple of Irishmen. I tend to listen to “Fairytale of New York” on repeat whenever I dig it out.
Here’s Miles Davis on Christmas:
“Blue Xmas” is on a compilation CD called Hipsters’ Holiday, which I recommend, although I have found that evangelical East Texans don’t like it. But they spin Bob Wills tunes in Aggie country, and that’s OK too (Aaah-Aaah!). My next pick probably doesn’t go down very well down there either, but I understand that its quite popular in the UK around Christmastime, where they presumably have a better collective sense of humor:
No knocking Darlene Love, but “Fairytale of New York” might just be the greatest song of all time, Christmas or not. Those three Jews were seriously bested by a couple of Irishmen. I tend to listen to “Fairytale of New York” on repeat whenever I dig it out.
Happy Chrismukkahzaa everyone. Sorry about that war on Christmas that we started. Maybe the above illustrates that to a large degree, as a culture we've already moved past narrow definitions of the holiday season, both in terms of those that would privilege a false sort of authenticity that legitimizes hierarchies of moral authority, and those that would place the crass commercialization of the holidays above discourses that poke holes into Christmas mythology, or those that celebrate charity and community. Yes, the radio still plays Mariah Carey way too much. But these are not really obscure or "indie" genres or artists that I've selected either. (Sorry that there are no heavy metal Christmas tunes here, E.)
Now then, about that whole peace thing:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
--Robert Frost
The Giant Menorah: A New Superweapon in the War on Christmas
Earlier this week, a county snow plow caught fire in the suburban town of Prior Lake. Fortunately, its driver escaped without injury, and nobody else was hurt. No one knows what lit the plow aflame, but a full tank of gas aided in its immolation. According to the local fire chief, “That’s the reason there was a lot of fire.”
Further east, a suburban home in Apple Valley burned down after a troubled woman doused it with gasoline, struck a match, and tried to kill herself with a screwdriver. This news reminded me of Drowning Mona, a movie about people who drive Yugos. The film starred Neve Campbell, whose good looks and snowy forename embodied the aesthetics of a frosty and fiery winter apocalypse.
In my opinion, one of the best recurring moments of fire and ice is the Winter Olympic torch—the flames I mean, not the related ceremonies. I think it’s great to watch televised Nordic ski racing, even if you have to listen to Al Trautwig’s stupid commentary. But since we can’t look forward to that again until 2014, it’s good to have other icy hot distractions.
Torche's Volcanic Album Cover
Snowy volcanos usually do it for me. Right around our first snowfall this winter, I started listening to the band Torche. Because I’m not super hip on the music scene, I sometimes fall a few years and/or decades behind the state of the art. In this case, I was blasting “Snowblind,” the classic Black Sabbath tune, in honor of our forthcoming snow-mageddon. Then I realized Ozzy’s howling was not literally about snow, but about cocaine. Pleased at having unraveled this metaphor, I decided my chops were in shape for something more current. I came across Torche while browsing “top-rated” heavy metal playlists on the iTunes music store; although, technically, I think their genre is something more like sludge rock or stoner metal. Their melodies whirl atop heavy, drop-tuned guitar riffs, but in major keys. And I think this what really elevates them over any other “metal” band I’ve heard; it transforms the doom and gloom into something more ambiguous and interesting.
Yesterday evening, we endured the winter solstice and crossed into Rumple Minze season. If there’s ever a beverage that represents fire and ice, it’s the oddly-fascist 100-proof peppermint schnapps. Rumple Minze is to your esophagus as Gold Bond is to your dermis. The frozen menthol burn pairs well with hot chocolate, offering a sultry taste redolent of a tryst between the Swiss Miss and Princess Teegra. Another good winter cocktail is the “Grolar Bear” (Ursus horribilus maritimus), a beige blend of peppermint schnapps and bourbon.
In the spirit of the season, let's raise our glasses to the heroes and champions, artists and adventures, lovers, brothers, sisters, and Others that make the world hot and cold. Cheers, and happy holidays!
“If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding.”
Frankly, I think Scrooge was onto something—I say we start with that little wanker, Tiny Tim.
Mercifully, though somewhat surprisingly, this year has seen relatively little outrage (with the notable exception of Sen. Jon Kyl) over the alleged “War on Christmas,” a controversy so obviously contrived and stupid that it seems more like an ironic statement on the poverty of American political discourse than anything. That controversy has become such a predictable, borderline traditional, part of December in the United States that it's actually remarkable to think it really became a national political issue only five years ago when conservative commentator (and noted Max Headroom-impersonator) John Gibson published The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday is Worse than You Thought.
 |
The War on the Pompadour: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the World’s Greatest Haircut is Worse than You Thought by John Gibson
|
Here is where I would normally explain Gibson's argument before pointing out its inaccuracies, inconsistencies, or fallacies, all the while making fun of him like a jerk. But I've never read The War on Christmas. And you know what? I'm never going to read The War on Christmas. Because, really, you already know what it says and I already know what it says, and what it says is stupid. So let's not bother and just move on.
What is particularly interesting and too often ignored in this moronic debate is that, if ever there was a “War on Christmas,” it was fought for ardently by the celebrated “forefathers” of the American nation itself, the Puritans, who prevented any private or public celebration of Christmas in New England well into the eighteenth-century. In short, the Puritans hated Christmas—hated, hated, hated it. For them, it was a Catholic celebration without Scriptural or historical merit (they believed Jesus to be an autumn birth) that had obviously co-opted a Roman pagan holiday. Cotton Mather derisively referred to it as a “wanton Bacchanalian feast” and Puritan authorities happily punished anyone found to be celebrating Christmas for “disturbing the peace.” Indeed, Governor William Bradford issued his first such punishment in 1620—just weeks after the first Thanksgiving.
What is particularly interesting and too often ignored in this moronic debate is that, if ever there was a “War on Christmas,” it was fought for ardently by the celebrated “forefathers” of the American nation itself, the Puritans, who prevented any private or public celebration of Christmas in New England well into the eighteenth-century. In short, the Puritans hated Christmas—hated, hated, hated it. For them, it was a Catholic celebration without Scriptural or historical merit (they believed Jesus to be an autumn birth) that had obviously co-opted a Roman pagan holiday. Cotton Mather derisively referred to it as a “wanton Bacchanalian feast” and Puritan authorities happily punished anyone found to be celebrating Christmas for “disturbing the peace.” Indeed, Governor William Bradford issued his first such punishment in 1620—just weeks after the first Thanksgiving.
 |
| Screw thy pagan holiday. |
(Bill O'Reilly wants to remind you that these secular-progressive Puritans are trying to deny the religious legacy of this country).Other colonies were not as authoritarian as the Puritans, of course, and various other more liberal denominations held some sort of Christmas celebration in southern and mid-Atlantic colonies. But these were neither obligatory nor necessarily festive affairs. Thomas Jefferson rarely, if ever, even referenced Christmas while George Washington often spent the holiday shooting animals and/or locking his servants into oppressive indentures. And because Christmas celebrations were so strongly associated with the English and Germans, by the time of the American Revolution, the entire practice fell out of favor in the United States. Well into the 1800s, then, many Protestants rarely even took notice of Christmas.
In reality, our sentimentalized “Christmas” is less a traditionally sacred Christian holiday than it is an invention of nineteenth-century authors like Charles Dickens or Washington Irving who managed to blend disparate elements of German (the tree), Dutch (the cookie), British (the card), and American (predictably, the fat guy in a stupid outfit) culture together to create the illusion of a coherent “tradition.” This particular narrative of Christmas would become popularized particularly in the second-half of the century because it fit so neatly into dominant cultural trends of the Victorian era: a newfound recognition and celebration of the notion of “childhood” and an increasing emphasis on mass consumption. The merging of these two ideals could be no better embodied than in the figure of Santa Claus:
 |
| Santa was apparently more of a creepy opium-freak when Thomas Nast created him. |
As Protestants began increasingly to observe and celebrate the new holiday, some ministers began to actively promote gift-giving on Christmas (instead of the more traditional New Year's Day) in order to make the religious holiday more esteemed than its secular counterpart. But other religious leaders have continued, even into the present, to express ambivalence, if not outright hostility, toward a holiday that would be far more accurately described by Daniel Boorstin as "the national festival of consumption" than an actual religious observance. And, by and large, that is really what Christmas is: it is a seemingly unending period between Thanksgiving and New Year's in which Americans are turned into raving lunatics, foaming at the mouth while frantically seeking out cheap consumer goods in ostentatious worship of capitalism and Bing Crosby music:
We can mock these people all we want and, to an extent, rightly so. But it may be worth reflecting on our own complicity in perpetuating an atmosphere in which this behavior makes any sort of sense. Christmas, as it is generally practiced in postwar America, works to solidify our increasingly pathological obsession with filling some hollow void with "stuff." Regardless of the financial burden that may ensue, the measure of a parent becomes their ability to procure some stupid new fad in order to fulfill a desire that was largely imposed upon their children through effective advertising. And the myth of Santa helps neatly obfuscate the production of the goods we buy: have you ever stopped to think that “Santa's elves” are often actually just children working in slave labor conditions out of our sight?
 |
| Merry Christmas. |
Debbie Downer, maybe, but it might be something worth actually stopping to think about before we supposedly celebrate "Christian charity."
But let’s return momentarily to the “War on Christmas” for a moment. The phrase “Happy Holidays” is, most likely, just as old as the greeting “Merry Christmas,” and was certainly in widespread use by the 1950s—long before the age of multiculturalism, tolerance, and “political correctness.” Even still, as American society has diversified over the past sixty years, it has become increasingly difficult and problematic to assume a Christian audience. And other December celebrations (Hannukah and Kwanzaa) have gained increased recognition as holidays no more constructed, and no less American, than Christmas.
In short, “Happy Holidays” became both a phrase of inclusion and a method of marketing to a wider audience. It is most certainly not the denial of a “sacred” Christian holiday nor of some uniform American religious tradition. After all, the “War on Christmas” is much more of a longstanding American tradition than Christmas itself. If you want to say "Merry Christmas," go for it, but the persistent attempts to make it compulsory (or to criticize those who prefer something else) are not only ahistorical, they are part of a larger agenda to recreate an imagined version of an homogeneous “Christian America” that never really existed in the first place.
In this vein, Christopher Hitchens has famously, and I think convincingly, argued that Christmas turns the country into a quasi-totalitarian state:
"As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda is inescapable. You go to a train station or an airport, and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor's office or a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard. So, unless you are fortunate, are the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer. It becomes more than usually odious to switch on the radio and the television, because certain officially determined "themes" have been programmed into the system. Most objectionable of all, the fanatics force your children to observe the Dear Leader's birthday, and so (this being the especial hallmark of the totalitarian state) you cannot bar your own private door to the hectoring, incessant noise, but must have it literally brought home to you by your offspring."
I don’t want entirely to be a Grinch here (only mostly). Christmas can also be a good time of family, of celebration, of charity, and so on. But what does it say about modern society that we need to set out a particular time of the year (besieged with compulsory conspicuous consumption) in order to do all those things?
Linus can go to hell--Charlie Brown got it right, man:
Posts
