Cuts down on a lot of deliveries.

Things changed a lot on Christmas Eve after Santa came under the purview of OSHA.

 

Salute to the post office.

I'd just like to take a moment today to salute the United States Postal Service. 

You think I'm joking, but nay nay! 

We have two post offices pretty close to each other in neighboring villages. The large one, which has earned my ire in the past, is farther from me that the small one. Both are often understaffed. Part of this is institutional, in that the post office, in the manner of the great American car companies and mid-size to large American cities, spent the last seventy years turning into retirement and health benefit dispensaries that happen to have sidelines (delivering mail, making cars, leaning on shovels...). I must say thought that the people at my small post office work hard. 

I think they are more understaffed than usual due to labor shortages and the Chinese Death Virus that's still sweeping the world. (And yet, we are no better swept.)

So I had three boxes to put into the mailstrom (ha!) for delivery before Christmas, and with one thing or another that had little to do with me, I could not get to the post office until yesterday. There were two guys ahead of me and one clerk. 

The guy who was already at the counter was apparently mailing uranium to Iran, because the paperwork involved with his transaction was enormous and time-consuming. As I waited, the line behind me grew. The second mail clerk had to get the mail in from the outside box, which was jammed, and he was run run running like Rudolph. Honest, I think he was breaking a sweat. Not sure what happened when he went back inside, but I don't think he was on lunch break. 

I didn't mind waiting so much. My boxes were lightweight, and it gave me some time to reflect on this and that. The worst part was when the Christmas music playing went from the Eurythmics' "Winter Wonderland" to McCartney's (ARGH!) "Wonderful Christmastime." I'd rather listen to "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" five times in a row so it gets jammed in my head like a sesame seed in a cavity than listen to "Wonderful Christmastime" once. We've put up with that song for forty years now; how much longer, O Lord?

At last I reached the counter, and José, the clerk, was as cordial as could be. He looked tired, but he didn't act that way. When I fumbled the "liquid, perishable, fragile, fabulous, or explosive" question and hit "Yes" on the keypad, he cheerfully started over. The shipping on the packages wasn't cheap--over $40 for the three--but they are all expected to make it to their destinations before Christmas, even the one going to California. 

So cheers to the post office for keeping their chin up and taking their Christmastime responsibilities seriously. At least José. If the packages fail to arrive as stated--and at this hour the tracking information still is not posted online--then cheers at least to José, who is getting things done.

People in song.

Below is a list of persons mentioned in 20 different well-known Christmas songs. Can you name what songs they're mentioned in without hittin' the search engine? Get your pencil and papers and let's get singing!

🎄🎅🤶⛄

1. Tiny Tots with Their Eyes All A-Glow
   
   
2. Parson Brown
   
   
3. Faithful Friends Who Are Dear to Us
   
   
4. Father [pacing the floor]
   
   
5. Your Favorite Girl
   
   
6. Miss Fanny Bright
   
   
7. The Traffic Cop
   
   
8. Kids Jingle-Belling
   
   
9. That Guy I've Been Chasing All Year
   
   
10. The Choir of Children
    
    
11. A Real Famous Cat All Dressed Up in Red
    
    
12. Sister Susie [or Thithter Thuthie]
    
    
13. Vixen and Blitzen [in that order]
    
    
14. Jack Frost Chillin'
    
    
15. Yellow and Red Ones
    
    
16. Little Nell
    
    
17. A Man Who Lives in Tennessee
    
    
18. Barney and Ben
    
    
19. Children Laughing, People Passing
    
    
20. The Mighty King

"Behold, Martians! The Answers!"

1. "The Christmas Song" (Tiny tots, with their eyes all aglow Will find it hard to sleep tonight)
   
   
2. "Winter Wonderland" (And pretend that he is Parson Brown)
   
   
3. "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (Faithful friends who are dear to us Gather near to us)
   
   
4. "Baby It's Cold Outside" (My father will be pacing the floor)
   
   
5. "A Marshmallow World" (Take a walk with your favorite girl)
   
   
6. "Jingle Bells" (And soon Miss Fanny Bright was seated by my side)
   
   
7. "Frosty the Snowman" (He led them down the streets of town, right to the traffic cop)
   
   
8. "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" (With the kids jingle belling And everyone telling you Be of good cheer)
   
   
9. "Christmas Wrapping" (When what to my wondering eyes should appear In the line is that guy I've been chasing all year)
   
   
10. "Wonderful Christmastime" (The choir of children sing their song)
    
    
11. "Little Saint Nick" (And a real famous cat all dressed up in red And he spends the whole year workin' out on his sled)
    
    
12. "All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth" (Sister Susie sittin' on a thistle)
    
    
13. "Here Comes Santa Claus" (Vixen and Blitzen and all his reindeer pullin' on the reins)
    
    
14. "Christmas in Hollis" (Jack Frost chillin', the hawk is out, And that's what Christmas is all about)
     
15. "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" (For yellow and red ones Let's stop all the fight)
    
    
16. "Up on the Rooftop" (First comes the stocking of little Nell)
    
    
17. "(There's No Place Like) Home for the Holidays" (I met a man who lives in Tennessee He was headin' for Pennsylvania, and some home made pumpkin pie)
    
    
18. "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" (A pair of hopalong boots and a pistol that shoots Is the wish of Barney and Ben)
    
    
19. "Silver Bells" (Children laughing, people passing Meeting smile after smile)
    
    
20. "Do You Hear What I Hear?" (said the shepherd boy to the mighty king)

Score 

1-5: You need to brush up on your Christmas, or your pop culture, or your supermarket music.

6-10: You may not celebrate Christmas, but it's rubbing off on you.

11-15: Not bad, not bad, but you're no holiday culture vulture.

16-19: Good score! You've been listening to the Walmart PA system.

20: Well done! You're the top of the Holiday Heap, baby!

A tight squeeze.

Seriously, how on earth are they going to buy anything here?

I showed my wife that picture and she said, "One bag of potato chip from BJ's and the car will tip over like Fred Flintstone's with the rack of ribs." 

Santa came early!

My new phone arrived to replace the one that baby dog Izzy broke. I'm considering it kind of a Christmas present that came early, since that helps me absolve myself from letting the little knucklehead get hold of my old phone. Yay! A present! I must have been a good boy this year!

But that was not the only present that arrived early! 

My wife didn't make any bones about it--she said, "You have to get this early so you can make your cookies." And that's today's task.

I usually don't use a mixer for baking, partly because I haven't had one in years. My mom gave us one when we got married, but it suffered a terrible, unfixable breakage that cannot be blamed on either me or the dogs or anyone else. I don't want to say who broke it, except it was my wife. So this is kind of a guilt present, I guess. 

I'm only doing two cookie recipes this year, so I don't exactly need an assembly-line production, but I do know that a mixer makes creaming butter and sugar a much easier task, so there's that. I look forward to putting this little Cuisinart beauty through its paces. 

I'll be making chocolate chip cookies and pfeffeneuse. Chocolate chip cookies may not seem very Christmassy, but they're my wife's favorite, so it's the least I can do. As for the pfeffeneuse, it's an old family recipe. Well, maybe it's someone's old family recipe. I got it out of a long-out-of-print book in the library of a publisher I worked for many moons ago. It's the only pfeffeneuse I ever tasted that could stand up to those of the great Bay Ridge Scandihoovian bakers--soft, spicy, iced, perfect. If anyone's interested, I'll post the recipe on this site.

One last note on the topic: As you enter the kitchen, tying on the ol' apron, remember the words of advice from that great lawman, Sheriff Mark Kaminski, as seen in the seminal film Raw Deal:  

Put a nickel in the drum, shame another racist bum.

You may have heard the news that the Salvation Army, heretofore a rock-ribbed Better Business Bureau Accredited Christian-based unit determined to save the bodies and souls of as many people as it could, had fallen prey to regrettable political correctness in its training. Specifically, according to Breitbart:

The Salvation Army has followed the lead of other woke organizations in entering the establishment media-manufactured race war and is asking donors to offer a “sincere apology” for White supremacy and White-dominated culture, as detailed in a resource guide “developed to guide The Salvation Army family in gracious discussions about overcoming the damage racism has inflicted upon our world.”...

The resource guide itself contains “five sessions” to “help delve into the topic of racism and the Church.” Those include entire sections titled “Self-Care for People of Color,” “What is Whiteness?,” “Lamenting and Repenting — a Conversation Guide,” among others. 

Well, how about that. O'Sullivan's First Law says that any organization or enterprise that is not expressly right wing will become left wing over time, and it certainly looks like the Army was falling into that trap, going from an ecumenical arm of good works to naming and shaming white people for all the racism in the world.

Okay.

I have donated to the Army many times, through the kettles, but also through mail donations, and I've known at least one guy who was saved from dying on the street as a bum by the organization. So this seemed bothersome. I sent them a note to say how disappointed I was that they had caved to critical race theory, essentially a firehose of misinformation designed to encourage us not to love but to hate one another. I explained that I would be taking my charitable donations elsewhere. They did reply as such:

Some individuals and groups have recently attempted to mislabel our organization to serve their own agenda(s). They have made claims that we believe our donors should apologize for their skin color, that The Salvation Army believes America is an inherently racist society, and that our organization has abandoned its beliefs for one ideology or another. These are absolutely untrue and they distort the very goal of our work. We encourage you to learn more about our beliefs, and to read our full response to these claims.

But I had read that reply already, and as I responded, it's not a discussion about race when one people are singled out as racist as a postulate, with no recourse but "lamenting and repenting." I told them they had lost their way. I will take my racist money elsewhere. 

Place Honky Money Here

Well, I can't say I get results, but two things happened after that: the Salvation Army withdrew the "Let's Talk About Racism" guide, a.k.a. "Let's Make Toxic Allegations Against White People," and it was later reported that volunteers and contributions have fallen through the floor. Good. If it doesn't hurt, they won't learn. 

CRT and similar programs have no intention of helping us love one another; they are intended to ruin and tribalize our nation. The Army had better get away from its blinkered ideas about "social justice" (the most backward term in the world, as it is neither social nor just) and get its focus back on its mission. They may not recover from this, at least not for a long time, and it would be a true pity if it fell apart this way.

My main concern is that no matter how much the organization suffers for this, it will never learn. It will call the racist training program a tempest in a red kettle, and point to the real reason for the lack of donations and volunteers--the Omicron Variant, the economy, the lack of people Christmas shopping in person, whatever. Or they'll just shrug and say Welp, it's because they're all racist, and we were right, and go down with the ship. C'est la guerre, eh, Army? 

Newstalgia.

The 1954 film White Christmas isn't going to be running on a full-day marathon this year on AMC, but it's definitely on the schedule. I've wondered how this VistaVision classic had become so popular with viewers nowadays, when it had barely been seen on TV for decades. It's not a bad movie and it has some great songs, but why now?

The more I think of it, the less I think it has to do with the film's virtues, and more to do with the reasons for the current adulation of PBS painter Bob Ross (died 26 years ago) and PBS child friend Mr. Rogers (died 18 years ago). And that is: Because our culture today sucks eggs. 

It's no surprise that people my age and older find that the culture sucks. Ever since all the arts got targeted at people under thirty, everyone over thirty is obliged to find that these kids today blah blah blah. But I think that the kids themselves feel that they have terrible culture, and prefer to seek out things from a better one. Things like kindness without irony. Romance without the expectation of instant gratification--or the beartrap of sexist accusation. Calm without a horrific storm. Entertainment, in other words, without a sucker punch.

I've heard people my age say the reason kids are so unhappy is because their music sucks. Well, a lot of the music from my generation sucked too, but most of the singers weren't swearing like Bowery bums or threatening everybody or, worst of all, using AutoTune.

Why do we have such a horrible culture? A few reasons. One is the long-held belief dating at least to Freud that the more awful something is, the more true it must be, since everything we do is meant to conceal the awful truth. Or something like that. Also, there are rewards for shocking the jaded, but that ratchet effect has been going on for a long time. There's not much room left on the jack. And finally, we live with a culture that has the idea that everything--that's the total in totalitarianism--has to support THE MISSION. So every book, movie, TV show, etc. has to have some propaganda in it. At the very least, even for people who are 100% behind THE MISSION, that means all entertainment is injected with a dose of homework. Who wants that after an exhausting day? 

My feeling is that this stuff is going to continue until some bright publisher or producer realizes that there's a strong market for new stuff that satisfies the way these cultural items of the past do. I think the infamous Hallmark movies are doing that now, which is why the fans of those aren't all the people that the intelligentsia expect--trailer-park yahooettes. It's much more widespread than that. 

We need some kind of culture that is fit for common consumption, that is not soaked in propaganda. The products of our current culture are in effect designed to put decent people at one another's throats all the time. How long are we going to support garbage like that?