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Reindeer Games

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Christmas Display at the Grier-Musser Museum

Just what are the reindeer games that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was prevented from participating in? I strongly suspect that it involved buying into the whole michegaas connected with the holiday. Sometimes it seems to me, too, like a weird cult similar to the celebration of potlatch by the Indians of the Northwestern U.S.

Now that I’ve utterly confused you by introducing two unfamiliar terms in the opening paragraph of this post, I will admit to being of two minds about the season. On one hand, it is totally stress-inducing, with endless traditions and practices to make one feel guilty through their non-observance. On the other, it has the potential of bringing happiness to children and even to adults who don’t expect too much out of life.

If you take a close look at Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, you can see it espouses some truly admirable virtues. And, really, it was this novelette by Charles Dickens that was responsible for much of what Christmas has become.

If you expect too much of Christmas, it will disappoint. But if you go for “Christmas Lite,” picking and choosing carefully how deep you step into the morass, you can actually have a pretty good time.

Martine and I are celebrating the holiday simply. Last Saturday, we saw Laurel and Hardy in March of the Wooden Soldiers at the Old Town Music Hall in El Segundo. I ordered a box of Royal Riviera Pears for her from Harry & David. Next Tuesday, I’ll cook up a big pot of beef stew from the New York Times recipe and serve it with Martine’s favorite Hungarian wine: Bull’s Blood of Eger (Egri Bikavér).

Then, of course we’ll look for some of our favorite Christmas films on TV, such as A Christmas Story, the Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Bishop’s Wife, and Miracle on 34th Street.

We don’t have a Christmas tree (no room for one), but we did send out a handful of greeting cards to our closest friends.

Samhainophilia

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The Winner: Most Popular and Guilt-Free Holiday

There is a such a word as samhainophobia, which means hatred of Halloween. By applying the principal of parallelism, there must be such a word as samhainophilia, meaning love of Halloween. According to Wikipedia:

Samhain is a Gaelic festival on 1 November marking the end of the harvest season and beginning of winter or the “darker half” of the year. It is also the Irish and Scottish Gaelic name for November. Celebrations begin on the evening of 31 October, since the Celtic day began and ended at sunset. This is about halfway between the autumnal equinox and winter solstice. It is one of the four Gaelic seasonal festivals along with Imbolc, Bealtaine, and Lughnasa.

We don’t celebrate Imbolc, Bealtaine, or Lughnasa very much any more; but Samhain, or Halloween, is continue to grow more and more popular. Think about it: There isn’t any guilt associated with buying a few bucks worth of candy and giving it to kids. On the other hand, you have to cook up a huge complicated feast for Thanksgiving and pretend to be nice to all your most objectionable relatives.

And don’t even get me started about Christrmas! You have to kill a tree, decorate it with expensive ornaments, buy expensive gifts for everybody, and do all the same stuff required for Thanksgiving, except maybe you don’t have to serve turkey at your holiday feast.

Then there are all those other holidays: You have to set off an explosive on Independence Day, blowing off a finger or limb. You have to get drunk and endanger your marriage at a New Years office party. And so on and so on.

Heck, I’ll take the candy any day.

The above photo was taken at Los Angeles’s Grier Musser Museum of Victoriana. Martine and I spent a pleasant afternoon visiting the museum owners, Susan and Rey Tejada, who live on the premises. They have an impressive collection of holiday-related books, animated displays, and figurines. I spent over an hour looking at 3-D First World War images on a stereopticon. They also have a great collection of pop-up books of every description.

Devoirs

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Yay! I Survived Turkey Day!

Of course, it was nowhere near so bad as I imagined it would be. I tend to get a bit crotchety about holidays. They tend so often to make for bad feelings because there are all those things one has to do to make for the perfect holiday. If it turns out to be less than perfect, one is floored by feelings of inadequacy.

The French have a word for it: devoirs. Check out the Alpine French School website for a discussion of the different meanings of the term, particularly the second meaning. The devoirs for Thanksgiving include:

  • A turkey dinner with mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, etc etc etc
  • Getting together with as many of your family that you can sit around your dining room table
  • Discussions about politics with that uncle with whom you do not wish to converse

If you think that’s a lot, let’s take a look at thge many devoirs pertaining to Christmas:

  • Expensive and thoughtful gifts for everyone
  • A tree in the living room with ornaments, tinsel, and lights
  • Multi-colored lights festooning the front of your house
  • Maintaining harmful myths about Santa and elves to your underage children
  • Sending Christmas cards to family, friends, acquaintances, and just about everyone else

Just remember one thing: You don’t have to buy into all the “oughts” connected with the holidays. Your more conventional friends will probably think you a bit of a Grinch. Note, however, that it is better to be thought a Grinch than to be depressed and broke.

I took Martine out to Cafe 50s so she could have her Thanksgiving turkey, while I, of course, ordered something other than bird. She also had her favorite Hawaiian Tropic milk shake, so she is quite pleased with our quasi-celebration of the holiday.

The Man Who Killed Thanksgiving

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The Famous 1975 Cartoon by Ron Cobb About Thanksgiving

Even back in 1975 when I saw the famous R. Cobb cartoon depicting a family saying grace over a Thanksgiving turkey while the ground beneath them is littered with the bones of massacred Indians. Of course, even back then I didn’t like Thanksgiving. I had too many memories of dry bird carcasses drenched in fat to make them palatable.

Curiously, we never had Thanksgiving turkey at home. Turkey just wasn’t a Hungarian meat; and my father, like me, didn’t want my Mom to ever cook any. So we always went out for Thanksgiving.

The whole nonsense about the Pilgrims making nice with the Indians before wiping them out in King Philip’s War and other conflicts. The holiday is based on a myth designed to make us feel good about violently supplanting the indigenous peoples of the New World. If you want to get a more balanced picture of what happened, I suggest you read Eduardo Galeano’s trilogy entitled Memory of Fire. I read all three volumes in the 1980s, which served only to solidify my dislike of the holiday.

On this and many other issues, I find myself in the minority. So enjoy your dry bird. And think of all the football games you can watch this weekend!

By the way, Martine loves turkey; so I’ll be taking her out for a turkey dinner tomorrow. Needless to say, I will order something else.

Dog Halloween

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Fireworks Galore, But Does Anyone Care What They’re Celebrating?

As I write this blog, I hear the spluttering of fireworks near and far. What I do not hear is the barking of dogs. No doubt they are cowering under beds and couches while their super-sensitive ears are assailed by the endless sound of explosions.

I used to attend fireworks shows, until I used to dislike parking miles away and joining a large crowd of people for a show that lasted all of fifteen or twenty minutes. Hell, I even set off some illegally purchased firecrackers myself—and I still have all ten fingers and toes! Eventually, I just decided that here was another holiday which didn’t really mean much to anybody.

Which holidays have any meaning any more?

  • Halloween, because it’s still fun and everyone likes candy
  • Thanksgiving, so you discover who in your family is demented enough to vote for Trump
  • Christmas, so you can spend $$$ on what you don’t need and your friends and relatives don’t want

Independence Day has become a kind of Dog Halloween. It results in scaring your dogs and cats half to death. At least, Roxie, the little lapdog downstairs, hasn’t barked once today. It would be too much to hope that her silence will continue, as she still, after more than a year, regards me as little more than a bindlestiff.

Glorious Fourth

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As I write these words, the air is thick with explosions as juvenile delinquents of all ages set off fireworks, terrorizing their pets and injuring themselves in an orgy of carelessness. This is what the anniversary of our independence has come to mean: explosions and barbecues.

Forgive me i I choose not to join in the festivities. At one time, I did; but the combination of too much charred meat and too many overcrowded fireworks displays has, in time, soured me.

Instead I took a walk to the Colorado Center’s park, at a central point called The Landing, where there is shade, a roof, and metal seating. On weekends and holidays, I am more likely to see janitors and security guards going from building to building than locals. There was a bench with two girls, a couple of serious kickboxers practicing, and two or three people walking their dogs.

I had planned to begin reading Georges Simenon’s The Shadow Puppet, an early (1932) Inspector Maigret novel; but I found had already finished the book same under another title, namely Maigret Mystified. No matter, I merely reveled in the peace and quiet with relatively few fireworks explosions in the background.

Then I walked the mile and a half back to my apartment and continued my reading of an interesting history of Spain by John A. Crow entitled Spain: The Root and the Flower.

A Grier-Musser Valentine

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Valentine’s Day Memorabilia at the Grier-Musser Museum

On Sunday, Martine and I stopped in at the Grier-Musser Museum in the shadow of Downtown L.A. to see their Valentine’s Day memorabilia. Of late, Susan and Rey Tejada have been concentrating on paper in the form of old-fashioned images on postcards, greeting cards, and books—especially with pop-up illustrations.

There’s something about seeing this type of material in the Victorian mansion on Bonnie Brae Street that sends you back in time. Afterwards, we sat down with Rey and Susan over cookies and punch and talked for a couple of hours.

Although I got Martine a card for Valentine’s Day, we both decided to go out for lunch on the day after, when we were less likely to run into crowds. So tomorrow we will have a nice English lunch at Ye Olde King’s Head in Santa Monica. It is a great place to have fish and chips or bangers and mash or Cornish pasties. Fortunately, one is not likely to encounter such downmarket English cuisine items as spaghetti sandwiches or baked beans on toast.

Martine and I hope you enjoyed this little gem of a holiday. Why do I call it that? I would rather honor the love I feel than some bogus political or historical event, such as Columbus “discovering” America. After all, wasn’t he met at the beach by the local residents?

Family Life in America

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What’s wrong with this picture? Well, first of all, it’s a big family dinner with all the trimmings in which all the participants are openly delighted with one another. And they’re actually listening to one another. Where’s the strange uncle wearing the red MAGA hat? Where are the scowling teenagers? On the plus side, there isn’t any food on the plates yet, though there’s a big turkey at the far end of the table waiting to be carved. So perhaps there’s still time for the expression of discontent.

Martine and I both agreed that we liked Halloween better than Thanksgiving or Christmas. There was no need for any pretense of a closely-knit family. One just pretends to be someone else and pigs out on candy. Americans don’t do family well. We talk about it a lot, but most families at best have the appearance of an armed truce.

Read J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy or Tara Westover’s Educated to get an accurate picture of family life in America. Oh, I’m not saying that the disaffection is universal, just that it’s dismayingly prevalent.

It wasn’t that way for my own family: but, being Hungarians, we did not care that much for American holiday traditions. Except my brother and I really got into the Halloween sugar rush. We never had turkey for dinner in Cleveland, as both my father and I did not like it very much, and I still don’t. We usually had Christmas dinner with my aunt and uncle in Novelty, Ohio, but it was usually as much Hungarian as it was American. Come to think of it, back then we enjoyed the holidays without feeling in any way obliged to grin and bear it.

We now usually go out for Thanksgiving with friends. But over the last several years, Martine and I celebrate Christmas with home-cooked beef stew served with a Hungarian red wine, preferably Egri Bikavér (Bull’s Blood of Eger).

The Glorious Fourth

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As I sit at the computer writing this blog, I am hearing a series of small explosions as firebugs everywhere are setting off illegal fireworks. Did all this happen because of our national anthem with its “rocket’s red glare,” or is it just some universal male incendiaries’ attempt to see how much of a bang they could get out of life without losing their fingers and toes?

I tend to ignore most holidays. The closest I came to celebrating the Glorious Fourth was to serve corn on the cob for dinner. No barbecue. No firecrackers. No patriotic movies or songs. No flags. No red, white, and blue.

[BANG! A particularly loud explosion just went off nearby.]

It is ironical that the people who most clothe themselves in the American flag are people who want to destroy what our country stands for. On January 26, 2021, the insurrection in Washington looked from a distance like a patriotic gathering. It was only when you zoomed in closer that you found just how appalling it all was. I’ll bet the attendees at that particular hullabaloo are second to no one in setting off fireworks and waving the flag—that is, those who are not serving time in prison.

So here I am, a guy who loves his country but doesn’t feel he has to prove it to anybody.

How (Not) to Celebrate New Years

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A traditional way of celebrating New Years Eve in France is by setting cars alight. According to the BBC, as of some 12 hours ago, a total of 874 cars have been set on fire. I’m sure that’s kind of like a firecracker, but multiplied out, that’s got to be about 10 million dollars in damages.

Far better is a series of two cartoons from Brooke McEldowney in his “9 Chickweed Lane” series. The first cartoon ran on December 31 and was a bit confusing:

It all came clear with today’s cartoon:

I loved this set of images. We make a jump from one reality to another. Actually, it’s the same reality: Just a different template overlaying it. BTW, the look on the little girl’s face is priceless.

So let’s take that leap without incinerating any automobiles, if you please.