It’s been a rough year, and I’m not in the mood to celebrate much of anything. No getting together with family, so no special effort required for a Xmas feast, no lefse (I’m not setting foot in the local store to buy any), and winter just arrived tardily yesterday, so who cares? I’m planning to squat at home, maybe get out in the morning to deliver a Xmas feast to the spiders, have a zoom call with the kids and grandkids, and zoom has lost a lot of its novelty in the past year.
So here’s some seasonal entertainment, at least. This one is familiar ground: HBomberGuy deconstructs the absurd notion of a War on Christmas. The whole idea is stupid, fittingly spawned from the warped mind of that horrible Culture Warrior and serial harasser, Bill O’Reilly, and many atheists have covered the silliness in detail over the years, making this a kind of comfort food for everyone.
Then there’s this one. Cody is struggling to restrain his rage at American politics, both Republican and Democratic. I’d say this would be an excellent warm-up to stoke the fires of fury before you go to Xmas dinner with your racist MAGA uncle, but you’re not doing that this year, right? You’re going to miss the opportunity to vent at your horrible relatives, so instead let Cody be your proxy as he fights his inner demons.
If you have kids at home, be sure to replace their excitement and anticipation of Xmas morning with existential dread instead. Tell them about the vastness of the universe and the inconsequential, insignificant nature of their lives, and how you shouldn’t fret about Cthulhu Claus coming down your chimney because Cthulhu Claus cares nothing for you.
Have a squamous Xmas Eve, everyone!
I’ll be at work on Friday, just another day at school. I don’t get paid double time as when I worked my way through college as a security guard, but I make three times per hour teaching, so who cares?
Living here, I haven’t heard a single “xmas song” all month. Sheer bliss.
I’ll stick with the Xmas classics…
https://youtu.be/8OHYGVuJnrY
John McClain marathon all set and ready to go. This war on Christmas must stop. You can’t even say ” Yippie Ki Yay Motherfucker ” anymore without people being offended.
I thought existential dread was the reason for the season. My bad!
Are we having a War on Christmas this year? It sort of seems that with an actual virus out there that actual has cancelled Christmas as we know it, it seems silly to compare it to supposed anti-christian feelings the secular left (led by the elitist liberal Starbucks) are accused of.
I never got the whole existential dread thing. I’d rather be insignificant in a vast universe than have one that’s spying on me all the time. And the universe doesn’t demand that I come up with OKRs every quarter.
Hey PZ.
The Seattle Times had an article on making your own lefse this week.
https://www.seattletimes.com/life/food-drink/gather-your-household-for-an-age-old-norwegian-tradition-this-holiday-season-making-lefse/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=article_inset_1.1
Our local grocer, who is very safety conscious has it in the freezer case, so I won’t be making it myself. Julekake yes, lefse no.
Cody’s video is especially important because it is the same messaging that progressives were saying during the primaries, when all the centrists and moderates were saying the only thing that mattered was defeating Trump. And, just like the centrists and moderates who fought harder to shut progressives up during the primaries, those same Democrats are still fighting harder against progressives than against the fascist conspiracy theorist conservatives. But now it’ll be okay because it’s their team in charge!
If we don’t bully and harass the Democratic party to start acting even a little left-of-center instead of like 90s-style conservatives (who were still pretty radically right-wing, all things considered!), the Republicans will win again 2024 with someone even worse than current-Trump is now.
kome@8
I’m unconvinced. Maybe fascism has reached its high water mark for now and “90s-style conservatives” are coming back into vogue.
I doubt the latter is true (fingers crossed on the former), but let’s assume mainstream Democrats are banking on it. It’s not a totally crazy aspiration for those who were doing very well during the Clinton years. I am in theory progressive, but the truth is that the first dot-com boom was pretty good to me. I get why people like this vision. It’s a question of self-interest.
What strikes me is the way leftists paint establishment Democrats as “phony progressives”. Maybe mainstream Democrats are just very sincere proponents of status quo or regression to some previous time when they benefited.
If you are miserable, just remember soon we hit Case Nightmare Green and the Old Ones will return and eat our minds.
.
A song that has rushed up the charts in Britain this Christmas is “Boris is a C%nt!” by Kunt* and the Gang .
(*it is not an expletive if it is a name. In Turkey, there is a film company named “Kunt Film”!)
If you need a better cristmas song I recommend “Ode to 2020″/”Ode to COVID19” from Jeff Dunham show.
Achmed:
“Up on the housetop is where I’ll be
Up where no one can cough on me
Can’t go to restaurants or even bars
I miss the days when we only had SARS
Ha ha ha! Covid blows!
Ha ha ha! Swab up my nose!
Sitting on the housetop tick tick tick Avoiding all the folks who are sick sick sick (there are many more verses)
-An older classic of Jeff Dunham’s ventriquilist doll Achmed the Dead Terrorist:
“Dashing though the sand
With a bomb strapped to my back
I have a nasty plan
För Christmas in Iraq!
I got through checkpoint A
But not through checkpoint B
That’s when I got shot in the ass by the US militar-y.”
Djingle bombs, djingle bombs
Mine blew up you see
Where are all the virgins
That bin Laden promised me?
Djingle bombs djingle bombs
Your soldiers shot me dead
The only thing that I have left
is the turban on my head”
We’re just finishing up Christmas Eve with a nice Scotch, while Rüdügür, the Roomba * us doing the clean up.
10 years ago we were still trying to make everybody happy on Christmas Eve, going from one set of grandparents to the other.
In the end the first set complained that we didn’t love them, because we were leaving early, the other set complained that we didn’t love them because we arrived so late and at some point the kids were crying.
So we politely told them to go fuck themselves and decided that on Christmas Eve we wouldn’t visit anybody and nobody was allowed here.
This means that there were zero changes this year due to Covid and we had a very nice and relaxed time.
*I’m the best of wives, getting my husband something to make cleaning easier **
** We aren’t so much making big presents than decide what to do with the Christmas gratification.
@PZ, did you ever share your lefse recipe or is it a family secret?
I have a 6 pack of ale, and a bottle of rye, and no one to share it with. I should be merry at some point, for a while. New Years is a better holiday, also hopeful, less baggage.
As folks have been fond of pointing out in the past, there actually once was a War on Christmas: the Puritans were the ones waging it, doing tings like penalizing businesses that closed on Christmas. Easter was the only true Christian holy day, as far as they were concerned, and Christmas was a pagan infusion into the calendar. So they cracked down on anybody celebrating Christmas. This in part led to the foundation of Rhode Island as one of the first states to be explicitly free of any state religion, as Baptists fleeing the Puritans didn’t want that to happen again.
Just like their modern ideological descendants, Puritan ideas of ‘religious freedom’ meant ‘we’re free to make the rules ourselves, free from anybody else’s interference, and everybody else has to live with them’.
So I was watching that new Wonder Woman movie.
Somewhere early on, the bad guy tells his son, “some day this will all make sense”.
Maybe, but not in this movie.
PS
I loved the movie.