There are so many Christmas / holiday movies. The tropes of the holiday make it far too easy to whip up a boilerplate story and put it on the screen. Even the most plebeian of plots will find an audience. Not all can be classics; but with luck you’ll at least avoid making a stinker.
With the vast and growing holiday filmography, it shouldn’t be difficult to find some that are overrated and others that are underrated….
I’m going to be honest; I wasn’t planning a holiday post for this year. After ten years – a darned long and fine run, if you ask me – I’d run out of new-ish things to say. The old stuff (which is still valid, as far as I’m concerned) is all there if you check out the “Christmas” tag in the ‘cloud’ over on the right.
But finding myself in a holiday mood this week, I went looking for “Best Christmas Commercials”. Yes, I’ve done them before, but I came across this one from the UK, and I decided I couldn’t not share it:
“Mog the Cat” is the creation of Judith Kerr (2023-2019), and is the star of over two dozen children’s books. From what I gather, Mog has a tendency to get into or cause situations like the one in the advert, but everything always manages to turn out alright in the end.
Here’s hoping you can have an enjoyable holiday with your friends, family, and neighbors – without having to go through a catastrophe first.
Because I’m too lazy this year to do anything significant.
Look, you can always click on “Christmas” in the tag cloud over to the right – the stuff there is still good. Not much more I can say after ten years of this anyway.
Mr. Weebl is at it again with another Advent Colander Calendar Camembert:
This is my Christmas Tree:
I’ve had this thing for I don’t know how many years. I keep it in the closet with a bag over it for protection. Sometimes I tinker with the ornaments, which are mostly little charms and tokens I’ve collected over the years.
And why is it so hard to find boxes (or at least multi-packs) of humorous Christmas cards?
That is all. Go deck the halls or something.
I don’t know about you, but I quickly get tired of holiday TV ads telling people to buy their products or else Christmas will be a disaster. Or that the holiday season is not complete unless you give someone one of their products.
I wondered if this blatant hucksterism happened in other countries.
One of the first things I noticed was that holiday ads from Europe and Canada were more like short films, running for a few minutes instead of the 30 or 60 seconds that they do here in the US. Perhaps their TV scheduling rules are different. Or maybe it was just the ones I found when I went looking for “Best Christmas Commercials”.
I also noticed that they weren’t so much for products as they were for stores. Less “Buy this thing” and more “Shop here; we’ve got all you need for a great Christmas”.
Anyway, roll the clips!
Rather than upload a collection of music files, I decided to be a little lazy and just slap together a YouTube playlist. I’ll bet you’re wondering why I don’t just create a Spotify playlist. Aside from not wanting to join Spotify (or any other similar service) when I’ll use it only once a year, a good number of these pieces are probably NOT going to be found there.
Sometimes you WANT the video, so you can actually see the artists performing the songs.
Again, I wish I could do something about volume levels and extraneous material in the videos. Such is life.
Here’s the playlist:
“A Christmas Carol in Prose” by Charles Dickens has got to be one of the most popular short novels of all time. It’s been adapted hundreds of times; the story is a simple one of personal growth and redemption – and there’s extremely little religion in it.
It also helps that it’s old enough to be in the public domain, so anyone can do whatever they want with it.
Most adaptations neglect to expand on one part of the story. True, it’s not really that important, but let’s take a look at it anyway.
What sort of business is Ebenezer Scrooge in, and can we discover anything new about the character by examining that aspect?
Continue reading
It’s that time of year again.
This year, I thought I’d do something different – and make a playlist of songs about people who aren’t that keen on the holiday, for whatever reason. Or songs to that effect.
There’s nothing gross. Aside from being overplayed, “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” is pretty sick, when you get right down to it. Nothing depressing here, either. They may be great songs, but Stan Rogers’ “First Christmas” and Tom Waits’ “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” are rather bleak….
I also note that animated TV shows have been doing some fun things in this vein; I’ve included three songs from that medium.
Oh, and to heck with Festivus, and Krampus is already tired. If you want to do something different for the holiday season, there are plenty of other non-standard Christmas traditions out there – like Wassail – that are available for you to try.
If you’re like me (and I know I am), you get tired of the same old holiday songs being played on the radio by the second week of December – if not sooner. Fortunately, there is a radio station that doesn’t play by the rules. WFMU (91.1 FM) broadcasts from northern New Jersey, and is what is known as a “freeform” station. The DJs play whatever they want, subject only to FCC regulations. All but the tiniest fraction of their income is from listener donations, so they are beholden to no one. Think of it as a college radio station – but without the basketball games.
Around ten years ago, they started archiving their shows on their website – so you can listen in regardless of the constraints of time or space.
Most of their DJs have holiday specials of some sort – tune in over the next week to hear what they’ve come up with. Here are last year’s (mostly) holiday shows from my favorite programs for your “streaming” pleasure. You are definitely going to hear things you’ve never heard before. The descriptions are the DJ’s own….
Enjoy! And don’t say you weren’t warned…..
Let me be honest. I’m getting tired of digging through and dredging up all the Christmas music out there. I’ve already shared the holiday tunes I thought were worthwhile, and had to dig around near the bottom of the proverbial barrel to fill up the last holiday mix (or two).
So the heck with it. This year, I’m just going to go through my collection, and without curating or even ordering the choices, just toss out every single version of “Jingle Bells” I have.
Take it or leave it. Continue reading
Made for the Christmas 1968 episode of the ‘children’s’ show Do Not Adjust Your Set.
Gilliam had moved to London in 1967, and was working as art director for London Life when his friend John Cleese (whom he had worked with in the US) introduced him to Humphrey Barclay, who was producing Do Not Adjust Your Set, which was written by and starred Michael Palin, Terry Jones, and Eric Idle. Barclay happened to be an amateur cartoonist, and loved what Gilliam was doing with his cut-out stop-motion animations. He pretty much forced the trio to include Gilliam’s works.
For the Christmas special, Do Not Adjust Your Stocking, Gilliam went to London’s Tate Gallery, and poked through their huge collection of Victorian era Christmas cards. He made copies, and just started playing around with them. “So the style just developed out of that rather than any planning being involved,” he would write in the Python’s ‘autobiography’. “I never analysed the stuff, I just did it the quickest, easiest way. And I could use images I really loved.”
Pure Blather 