The Spirit of Not Giving So Much

In a little more than a week, we’ll be celebrating my son’s 3rd Christmas. He’s written a letter (sent via Canada Post) to Santa, asking for a truck and a signal for his railway tracks. He’s still at that young age where any gift is impressive and he’s happy enough with his toys. It’s relatively easy for Santa to answer his requests.

But for an economy that’s supposedly so sluggish, has anyone tried to get to Fairview on a Saturday lately? Either everyone got a holiday bonus but me or Mark Carney is correct about household debt levels. Although I do find it terribly amusing when the federal government says our debt is too high.

It’s this point before Christmas when I begin to feel that grip of anxiety: Is there enough food in the house? Did I give enough to charity? Is our tree too dry (just checked this morning. It’s seriously dry all of a sudden)? Should I have visited my family in New Brunswick instead of staying in Montreal? Is there enough booze in the house? The short answer to the last one is no. We have Sheridans which never gets drunk and Ouzo which also never gets drunk.

And I also worry that we haven’t bought enough stuff for each other. Not for James, mind you. Santa’s giving him a Leapster. He’s doing just fine. We did decide earlier this year that we’re just going to get some furniture from Ikea that we need instead going lavish with the gifts. When I return to work and hear my colleagues tell of the extravagant gifts they got for their loved ones, I always feel a little inadequate. I also felt that way when I mentioned our Ikea plans to someone at work. "Oh yeah," she said. "We ran out of money when we bought our house so we did the second floor entirely in Ikea."

Damn it, I like Ikea. And if I want to fulfill my dream of pretending I live in Stockholm then that’s my business.

If only the SAQ sold akvavit…

The Twelve (or Fewer) Days of Christmas Specials. Day 3: WTF Edition

The thing I like about digging through old Christmas specials on YouTube is seeing how they’re really like miniature time capsules. While guys like Tony Bennett have been famous for decades, most famous people tend to get famous for a short while but it never lasts. It’s the fleeting nature of fame, of course. So, as often as not, Christmas specials, in the tradition of all variety shows, are a reflection of the time in which they were produced.

I put this video, again, from a Dean Martin special, on my Facebook page a while back just to show how quickly things can date. A friend didn’t know who any of them were.

For those born after 1980, they were, from the left, Andy Gibb of the Bee Gees, once a massively popular pop group, Erik Estrada, who played a motorcycle cop best known for his tight fitting uniform and his dazzling white teeth (in those days a novelty), and Mel Tillis, a Country and Western singer known for his humourous songs and a stutter, which he played for laughs. For about 15 minutes in 1980, all of these men were superstars.

Then there was the appearance of Andy Kaufman at the Johnny Cash Christmas special, a comedian whose humour could best be described as “conceptual.”

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find the other clip from that broadcast in which Andy proposes marriage to Anne Murray.

And I’m just going to leave this one here:

Grace Jones, on the Pee Wee Herman Christmas special, wearing a molded plastic breast plate and singing “Little Drummer Boy”. The oddest thing? The joke in the show that she was supposed to delivered to the White House where, presumably, she would do this song for then President Ronald Reagan.

On the 1980′s and The Merciful Lack of Social Media

This morning on Google+ (where I spend most of my online time these days), a friend whom I haven’t seen in person since 1989 linked to a photo on her Flickr page of the day she met her current husband. Beyond congratulations for having a relationship last that long, this got sidetracked into a discussion of how people in the ancient times got together before the internet existed. You had photos of your younger self wearing period clothing but as one person said, "Polaroids don’t go viral" and I added "They also don’t come with a comments section."

I really don’t know how teenagers today manage with everything they do online, particularly with the potential for public shaming. Combining the adolescent lack of judgement with that kind of instant sharing and the cloak of anonymity can make even the most mature, well adjusted teen’s life a total misery.

At age 40, I have a pretty good idea of how I come across and what’s appropriate to share on Facebook. At 14, I had no such self-awareness. But for today’s teens, this isn’t anything new. Facebook was always there for them so the coping strategies will evolve accordingly. My advice to teens: Your grandparents see everything you do. Your privacy filters don’t work on them. Not true, perhaps but it’s a decent rule of thumb.

Bullying isn’t anything new, of course and high school is always a struggle for young people at the best of times. We didn’t have Facebook but we had rumours, which traveled faster than broadband and they had their own destructive power.

And, as I never kept a diary, perhaps it would be beneficial to have a digital archive of some parts of your life available to you. I’ve often met up with people from my high school who recall events involving me that I can’t bring to mind no matter how vivid their own recollection might be. But memory is a weird, deceptive thing with odd, random triggers. The song, "That’s All" by Genesis recently triggered a strong memory of me at age 11, sitting in the back of my friend’s station wagon as we drove down Rothesay Avenue in Saint John as that song played on the radio. It was late but I can’t for the life of me remember where we were coming from or what time of year it was. I think it was summer. Maybe.

So who knows what Facebook does to your memories.

The Twelve (or Fewer) Days of Christmas, Part Two: A Very Special Christmas Special Message

It’s a well-worn trope of current show’s annual Christmas episode to feature a central character learning about the True Spirit of Christmas. What happens is a character is behaving uncharacteristically greedy and self-centered and is then put through an hommage to It’s a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Carol. The 1980′s series Moonlighting did this for the former and WKRP in Cincinatti did it for the latter when Mr. Carlson opted to use the station’s profits to buy a new sound board instead of bonuses for the staff. Remember Dr. Johnny Fever as the Ghost of Christmas Future showing the all-automated WKRP of tomorrow in which Herb is the only employee?

Christmas episodes walk a weird line in that while they can discuss “the spirit” of the holiday, they rarely explicitly mention the holiday’s religious origin. Not because Hollywood is run by godless gay atheists (although it is true) but because the overall tone of the show would feel off if, say, on an earlier episode of Two and a Half Men, Charlie Sheen, while repeatedly touching his nose, started talking about what the birth of Jesus meant to him.

Note- I have never watched an episode of Two and a Half Men so I’ve actually no idea if Charlie Sheen ever gave a speech about Baby Jesus. I’m just assuming.

This vague confusion about the holidays was sent up rather well in the Trailer Park Boys Christmas episode, Dear Santa, Go Fuck Yourself:

And, of course, Ricky gives a speech at the end of the episode in which he discovers the true meaning of Christmas.

I think no matter what our beliefs are, we can all agree that at least once a year, you need to have a brain-learning thing pop in your head that wasn’t there a second ago.

The Twelve (or Fewer) Days of Christmas Specials. Part 1: Dean!

I’m going to confess something here: I like Christmas specials. It hasn’t always been so. When I was young, cynical, and desperate to be thought of as someone who had good taste, I steered clear of the things, decrying them as a bit of candy-coated kétaine.

As I got older, however, I began to like the things. I’m not sure if the two are correlated but it may have happened when I discovered that I also like to have a little rye and ginger around the holidays.

When you get down to it, Christmas specials are weird things. Television networks devote an incredible amount of time to them in a way that they don’t for other holidays. Sure, you’ll get The Ten Commandments on ABC at Passover or maybe even Mohammed, Messenger of God at Ramadan. There are practical considerations for this, surely. Most people are off-work and it doesn’t pay to put up new episodes of your top rated shows during a time when few people would watch them. So specials are taped in advance and re-run until the end of time. In the same way a blogger wants to come up with a quick and easy means of producing content without having to think too much, a network will fill its schedule with cheaply produced variety specials, concerts, sporting events, or seasonally themed episodes of current hit programming.

With that stated, I’d like to make my series posts about the Christmas specials I thought were fun, or odd, or entirely inappropriate. The main criteria for inclusion in this list will be a combination of general datedness, tackiness, and if I can find a decent quality clip of it on YouTube.

One thing to note: I will not be including this year’s Russell Peters Christmas Special because he sucks and I fucking hate his fucking smirking fucking face.

Let’s start with Dean Martin, shall we?  Between 1965 and 1985, Dean Martin recorded approximately 17,284 Christmas specials with an additional 83,382 hours of unreleased specials just sitting in a vault somewhere. Why NBC is just sitting on this goldmine is a mystery or perhaps they really do feel that nobody actually wants to see Dean Martin’s Christmas in Chichen Itza.

From one such special, we have Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, who was already years into his talking-through-songs phase, doing Dean’s signature holiday song, “Marshmallow World”. This was a few years before Dean’s tan elevated itself into a George Hamiltonesque deep bronze but even then, he knew that the secret of bringing that rich mahogany tone to your face was not through spray tans or a tanning booth. No, it was downing a bottle of Canadian Club, slathering yourself in a thick skin of Crisco, and just lolling about in the nude for a few hours in the searing Palm Springs heat.

And if you’re watching at home kids, yes, it was totally cool to smoke back then. Think Bublé will smoke during his Christmas special? No. Because he’s just not that cool. I mean, look at those two up there. The special has just started and they’re already half in the bag.

Perhaps the Christmas specials of today could use more open smoking and drinking. Hmmm… The Mickey Roarke Christmas Special. Hollywood: Make it happen.