A Cost Less Christmas

In that tiny apartment that first Christmas on my own, I painted those tiny snowmen, dressed up in hats and scarves. I collected all those empty cigarette packs from my friends and wrapped them like little presents. I scoured Cost Less for cheap ornaments, little Santa Claus figures and fragile little glass balls.

A tabletop Christmas tree was never good enough for my holiday. Even in that shoebox of a space, I crammed seven feet of fake evergreen in any corner it would fit. I crammed dozens of people around it to drink and laugh and eat my bacon wraps. You could barely walk for all the wrapping paper strewn all over the floor.

Now the Christmas tree has plenty of room to breathe under high ceilings in view of a pool in a room so bonus we do not even have a name for it. But those wrapped cigarette boxes and Cost Less ornaments still hang. Because I cannot forget how it used to be.

Best Pandemic TV

There was nothing else to do for most of 2020 so here’s a countdown of the best TV I saw while dozing off on our sectional.

 

16. Fargo. No. The first and second seasons of Fargo were amazing but the third and fourth seasons were disappointing. The idea was interesting: When can immigrants call themselves Americans (or something), but the problem was that so many characters had monologues that the writers wanted to serve as thesis statements for the season. There was one whole episode that consisted of one monologue after another. Some of the characters also annoyed me. Zelmare and Swanee (Marginalized 1 and Marginalized 2) were annoying assholes who lost sympathy when they shot up a train station and killed a bunch of people. The actor who played Gaetano should be embarrassed. Oraetta Mayflower was less a character than a collection of tics and a living symbol (she was the only white non-immigrant in the cast and her name was Mayflower and she murdered her patients she was supposed to care for—get the Symbolism?). Steve summed it up the week after the show ended when we were deciding what to watch and he realized, “We don’t have to watch Fargo anymore.”

 

15. The Outsider. Mare Winningham.

 

14. The Mandalorian. I’m not as into the Star Wars lore as everyone else is but I’m enjoying this exploration of their vast galaxy. Ming-Na Wen is the Queen of Disney.

 

13. The New Pope. What the hell did I watch? A young, miracle-performing pope played by Jude Law awakens from his coma to advise a new pope played by John Malkovich, an aristocratic heroin addict and former punk rocker. It’s a sometimes-hallucinatory rumination on faith, power and duty. It also had Jude Law emerging from the ocean in a white Speedo like Venus on the half-shell, if you’re into that. 

 

12. The Boys. The show’s exploration of the Seven as neo-Nazis was heavy handed (complete with a literal Nazi) but it was necessary and fit with the style of the show to reinforce the idea that the line between superheroes and fascists can be thin. The one downside was that I had no interest in the titular boys. I didn’t care at all about Butcher, Frenchie and the other guy.

 

11. Little Fires Everywhere. No, it wasn’t as good as the book (the idea that “they all did it” was just stupid). The story about adoption wasn’t as nuanced. But the miniseries was amusing. Kerry Washington’s performance was appealingly standoffish, as one can definitely see why she doesn’t trust people. Reese Witherspoon was good as the wealthy woman who condescends to Black and poor people. It was worth it for the scene where Kerry Washington screams “Get in the car!” to her daughter while she dalliances with Trip.

 

10. Upload. Imagine that after you die, you can go not to Heaven but have your consciousness uploaded into a kind of paradise where you can “live” forever. The catch is that your living family has to pay, so if your living fiancée is on the outs with you, you are under her thumb and may end up in the equivalent of steerage. This was fun in both idea and execution.

 

9. The Haunting of Bly Manor. It wasn’t as scary as the Haunting of Hill House series but it was very poignant. I was especially taken by the sad story of Hannah Grose, who flashes back and forth through time, not realizing she’s a ghost.

 

8. Dead to Me. This was a riot and I was howling at the twists and turns like when they crashed their car into the dead guy’s brother (it was funnier than it sounds here). It was a comedy but Christina Applegate gave a great performance that walked a fine line between comedy and tragedy as a grieving widow/murderer: at times her eyes were staring a thousand miles away, like she was deep in shock.

 

7. Agents of SHIELD. We lost track of this show two seasons ago and recently binged the series with our son in time for the finale. The final season was a zany ride, a time travel adventure that was a great excuse for the cast to have fun and dress in period costumes (the bulk of it took place in the early ‘80s, so I was thrilled). A standout was the episode when they were trapped in a time loop and had to keep reliving the same situation over and over again until they found a way out, which managed to be poignant and as comic-booky as possible.

 

6. The Crown. There’s a debate about how accurate season 4 was in depicting Princess Diana’s clashing with the royal family and how responsible Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles were. I take it all with a grain of salt. I can appreciate the show taking poetic license with all this drama—and besides, if you want to know the real story of Charles and Diana’s marriage, it’s not as if there’s a shortage of resources. I liked the delving into the Queen’s lack of self-awareness of her non-maternal instincts. Emma Corrin was fiery and magnetic as Diana and Gillian Anderson was scary as Margaret Thatcher, all helmet hair and contempt for the poor.  

 

5. The Plot Against America. I was fascinated by Philip Roth’s book about an alternate future where Charles Lindbergh wins the presidency on an isolationist platform and foments anti-Semitic violence, and the miniseries was a thoughtful adaptation. It’s an always-relevant cautionary tale about hate, how it may look attractive and acceptable, and how it seduces people. Zoe Kazan nailed the scene at the heart of the book when Bess Levin, already under extreme stress, talks her son’s friend Seldon through his mother’s death at the hands of an anti-Semitic mob. It was an act of incredible kindness that really moved me in the book and the movie.

 

4. Mrs. America. This was a complex, compelling retelling of the complexities of feminism and the battle to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. You can understand why Phyllis Schlafly (an uncanny Cate Blanchett with incredibly subtle micro-facial expressions) opposed the ERA, even if you don’t agree with her, and you can also understand who she appealed to and how she defeated the constitutional amendment. Her story is piled with irony: She advocated for traditional womanhood but left most housework and child-rearing to assistants. She was a smart woman who would have done well in foreign policy but figured advocating against the ERA would give her a seat at the table—instead she ends up shut out of the Reagan administration and ends the series peeling potatoes at her kitchen table. Each episode goes in depth about a different woman as they battle for the ERA: Shirley Chisholm, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug. I learned a lot about them and women I didn’t know about, like Jill Ruckelshaus and Brenda Feigen. It was a great look at the compromises each side had to make for and against the ERA and how it helped get us Reaganism. Also, what the hell, America—we couldn’t get it together to pass something as obviously needed as the ERA?

 

3. Schitt’s Creek. I’m so glad we binged this show and caught up just in time for the final season. It was so refreshing to watch something so funny that was also breezy and light, almost a throwback to the sitcoms that were wrapped up in 30 minutes and reset for the next episode. Except nothing truly reset: the Rose family grew and changed over a few seasons to become better people, yet remaining idiosyncratic until the end. It was also a delight to see an affirming story about a gay character with no angst at all about his being gay. All four main cast members won Emmys (as the show did for Best Comedy) and they deserved it.

 

2. Lovecraft Country. This show was a remarkable exploration of Black pain, Black mythology, Black potential and Black horror as one man searches for his father and learns about his family’s legacy. It mixed the supernatural horrors encountered by a group of smart, adventurous Black people in the Jim Crow ‘50s (those Topsy Twins, with their herky-jerky limbs, were seriously terrifying) with the more down-to-earth horrors such as racist cops and neighbors, and the profound horror of Emmett Till’s murder. Lovecraft Country blends both kinds of horrors—in one episode, in a quest to achieve some empathy, a white sorceress pays some guys to murder her like Till was murdered, resurrecting herself by using her magic. In another episode, the sorceress gives Ruby the ability to wear a white woman’s skin, which Ruby uses to get the job at Marshall Fields that she was denied and torture the boss who harassed her. In another episode, astronomer Hippolyta uses an orrery to transport herself to the past (dancing with Josephine Baker in Paris) and the future to realize her full potential that she never had a chance to fulfill. All that and the cast travels back in time to live through the Tulsa Black Wall Street Massacre. Every episode gave us a lot to unpack. 

 

1. Better Call Saul. The latest season continued Jimmy McGill’s evolution into Saul Goodman and his descent into an alliance with the drug cartel. Jimmy ends up getting shot at in the desert with Mike and clashes with the wily and enormously charismatic Lalo Salamanca. Better Call Saul is Jimmy’s story but we already know what happens to him by the time of Breaking Bad. We don’t know what happens to his new wife Kim and that’s what gives the show an extra thrill. Rhea Seehorn continues to give the best performance on TV as Kim Wexler and it’s a crime against art that she’s never been nominated for an Emmy. In season 5, she faces down Lalo fearlessly and saves Jimmy’s life. She deals with the tension between her pro bono work, which satisfies her, and her corporate lawyering, which chips at her soul, by quitting her corporate job. But by the end of the season, we realize Jimmy is not the only person who has been morally deteriorating. Kim has turning toward the dark side herself. When she proposes a plan to screw over Jimmy’s former boss that even Jimmy blanches at, he tells her that she wouldn’t seriously pursue the plan. “Wouldn’t I?” she says, like slap in the face. I don’t want this Breaking Bad prequel to end and I don’t want anything bad happening to Kim Wexler.  

Are you panicking yet?!

Today we’re seeing the first snowfall in almost two years. It’s hard to think back that far into the recesses of time to remember how we used to get into the correct state of panic to be able to handle the weather. Are you buying too much of the right foods? Is your level of melodrama meeting the moment? Ideally, you should have started panicking days ago when Action News first ominously started talking about forecast models, but there’s still time to panic before the first flakes fall. Join me for a refresher course on how to panic.

 

Food shopping. If you’re rusty on what foods to buy, don’t worry about vegetables, fruits or meats. It’s eggs, bread and milk. The important thing here is quantity. To get through today’s major blizzard, for a family of four, I’d suggest four dozen eggs, six loaves of bread and three gallons of milk. Don’t worry about expiration dates—you’ll go through it all. With the avalanche of snow we’re expecting today, you might not be able to get out for a few weeks, so stocking up is very wise.

 

Also of importance is your attitude when at the supermarket. Don’t just treat it like a normal shopping day. You need to combine agitation and panic with slowness. For example, if your cart is full of gallon upon gallon of whole milk, scan it very slowly and deliberately. If there’s someone behind you who just needs three things for tonight’s dinner, don’t let him ahead of you—go even slower but maintain that attitude of EMERGENCY.

 

Driving. This doesn’t apply as much to people today, since so many people are working from home, but it’s good to brush up. You should always keep at least a quarter-mile following distance between yourself and the car in front of you; research shows the average skid in the snow and ice is 1,000 feet. In inclement weather, remember that the left lane becomes the slow lane. You should slow down 10 mph per inch of snow. So with today’s storm, if you get 10 inches, you should put your car in reverse at 40 mph on the highway. Look out for SNOW SQUALLS!

 

The guiding principle with driving in the snow is to stay afraid. Remember that time when your car slid and did a 35º years ago? Keep that terror inside you. Do not try to get over it or improve your skills.

 

Level of panic. Are you being melodramatic enough today? At all times, you should be acting like you’re starring in King Lear and the Tony committee is in the audience. So hide under the bed. Look out the window and sigh audibly. Anytime they mention the word “snow” on the weather, moan as if the weight of the world is on your shoulders. The best way to deal with a major natural disaster like this is disproportionately.

 

I hope you’ve enjoyed your refresher course on panic. It’s been awhile since we’ve had to kick into Wagner-opera-act-V-level drama, but you can do it.  

 

 

Keep 'War' in 'War on Christmas'

Enjoy wishing people a “Merry Christmas” this one last year, because with a Demmycrat moving into the White House, we’ll all be legally required next year to wish each other “Happy Holidays” like a bunch of godless commies. If there’s one thing a devout Catholic like Joe Biden cannot tolerate, it’s any mention of Christ or Christmas.

 

After a four-year truce during the Trump Administration, the War on Christmas will be back on in 2021. It sure was nice for the last few years, wasn’t it? After Obama’s series of executive orders that totally banned every aspect of Christmas from 2009–2016, the faithful could emerge from hiding in 2017, blinking in the light of the Star of Bethlehem. The last four years, we’ve brought mangers and reindeer glow molds out of hiding from the attic to display openly on lawns. No more did we fear being dragged into unmarked vans for the thoughtcrime of wishing a coworker, or a customer, or our kids, a “Merry Christmas.”

 

It's been such a relief to have a first lady who gave a fuck about Christmas decorations.

 

Starting next year, if you want to display any type of Christmas decoration in your home, you’re going to have to do it like a speakeasy, where with a push of a button, the walls turn around and the decorations are hidden to reveal state-approved portraits of Karl Marx, each festooned with “Happy Holidays” in a joyless Courier font. Christmas trees, if discovered, will be recycled and turned into Section 8 housing in our pure suburban neighborhoods.

 

How will this be enforced? The Deep State has installed a camera in each home in America (paid for by SorosBucks) and AOC will personally monitor for your compliance. Those who do not comply will be sentenced to hard labor at the Green New Deal Reeducation Camp.

 

No more Christmas music either. Traditional, wholesome songs like “Away in a Manger” and “Deck the Halls” and “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” will be automatically deleted from everyone’s devices. Congressional Democrats are already shredding every extant copy of the sheet music. We’ll only be able to listen to traditional Venezuelan or Chinese proletariat music.

 

Forget about hearing “Merry Christmas” from a cashier ever again. Instead, that Target employee will wish you a monotone “Happy Holidays.” Security cameras will make sure the cashiers do this. If not, they will be dragged from the store and sentenced to the gulag by Democrat judges.

 

Finally, roving bands of Antifa will be patrolling the streets for any signs of living Nativities. Any participants will have their blood harvested for adrenochrome. 

 

This is war. As Fox News has taught us, the best way to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace is by waging war on our enemies—by getting our backs up about broad social trends and keeping them up forever.

 

 

How Dreadfully Common

In high school, the librarian once spoke to our class and gave us some real talk about encyclopedias. We were doing encyclopedias wrong, she said. Our parents were content buying us trash encyclopedias, she sniffed, but anybody who knew anything about reference books knew that the only way to go were with the Gale Encyclopedias.

 

“Gale,” the librarian intoned with the haughtiness and authority of a daguerreotype of Queen Victoria. She seemed to have a special antipathy for the hoi polloi who were content to wallow in the mud with passe reference books like World Book or Encyclopedia Britannica. Only Gale revealed the world’s true face, its breadth and depth of topics. World capitals. Phyla. Nobel Prize winners. Laws of thermodynamics. The whole thing.

 

Oh, how she must have looked down her nose at us high schoolers. I can just hear the librarian in her late-‘80s back office in the library, chain smoking while on the phone with an equally erudite friend: “These kids and their families actually still use World Book,” she chortles. “I mean, can you imagine? ‘Volume 1: A.’ How dreadfully common.”

 

You know, they say the Velvet Underground’s debut album actually sold very few copies but that everybody who bought a copy started their own band, which confirmed how influential the band was. I wonder how influential this librarian was—how many of us in this small group of high school students had their minds blown by her words about encyclopedias and let that guide us through the next 30 years of assessing the viability of reference materials.

 

 

 

 

 

All I Want for Christmas Is

Christmas is hers. They sold it to America that way. Every shiny bauble, every twinkling light, every melodic warble. All hers.

 

Backstage, she primps in the mirror. She tilts her face until her good side shows. She will not greet the hoi polloi any other way. She cycles through several facial expressions until she reaches the desired one—a smug smirk that’s somehow incredibly sexy. It’s the type of expression that might lead the public to guess what’s in her head, but that would be futile: She is somewhere else, a Potemkin Village of emotion.

 

The caterwauling of an alarm, impressively high-pitched but mechanical, startles her. Is there a fire? No, it’s just the sound of her own voice warming up, she realizes.

 

She steps on stage in a blood red dress sparked with spangly bits, strutting through the fake snow like she’s soaked in her own carnage and surveying a world she decimated. Her acolytes pick her up and move her around the stage. She is above such things as choreography.

 

As she opens her mouth to sing, she ponders the past—the gaming of the charts, the singles sold at deep discounts to get her to the top. All those necessary calculations. Tilting her face at the camera at the only acceptable angle, she smirks and seduces as she sings the greatest hits—a fantasy, a hero, a sweet day. The Christmas trees tremble with the blunt force of her ‘90s prom themes.

 

Then at the climax, she sings the first notes of her big yuletide hit, what the masses came to hear. As she runs up and down the first three octaves, the void yawns wide. It is like outer space—no light, no life. Just the endless emptiness of absolute zero cold.

 

Outside, the moon turns to blood and the sun turns to ashes. And the Queen of Christmas slouches toward Bethlehem.