Tag Archives: christmas

Yuletide, gay and otherwise

life, , , ,

© the late, great Bob Mizer (Click to embiggen)
© the late, great Bob Mizer (Click to embiggen)
I wrote a few blog posts before Thanksgiving about the reasons we were both feeling less than enthusiastic about spending the holiday with my family. As I mentioned in the Friday Links post after, we got through the day without any disasters. It helped an awful lot that one of my nieces is a new mother and her kid is at the toddling around being cute but can’t talk yet stage. She was a great distraction. There was a teensy bit of a close call. One of the relatives that I recently had to block on Facebook because of all the homophobia who wasn’t supposed to be at Mom’s for the holiday, had her plans fall through, and was texting Mom about coming over… but it was literally while we were in the middle of loading our car up to head back to Seattle, so we dodged that one.

We are staying at home for Christmas. Mom has been talking about a facetime call, but that’s a lot less grueling than being in the actual room with folks who cheerfully try to claim that they aren’t homophobic because they love me despite my lifestyle and that I’m clearly going to hell and that allowing us to get married is going to destroy the world.

For many years what we did was alternate which holiday we spent at Mom’s, while staying home for the other. When Mom was still working (she worked in retail for decades), which holiday she didn’t have to work dictated which one we came down for. Now that we no longer have that issue, we’ve tended to stick with Thanksgiving there and Christmas at home. One reason I do that is because, well, there’s a lot less god-talk on Thanksgiving.

Despite the fact that I can still recite from memory the entirety of the second chapter of the Gospel of Luke, and can sing “O, Holy Night” in three languages, and love to sing along to Christmas hymns such as “Angels We Have Heard On High,” I don’t look at Christmas the way my Bible-thumping relatives do. I’m taoist, now, and Christmas is the season of twinkling lights and mistletoe and brightly wrapped presents and eggnog and ginger cookies and times laughing with friends. My husband is pagan, and has an even lower tolerance for the “baby Jesus stuff” than I do. I expend a bit of effort crafting Christmas music playlists that don’t contain any of the religious music to play around him. I still listen to the hymns and such, I just use headphones or listen when he’s not around.

So what is our Queer Christmas like? How does a gay taoist and his pagan bisexual husband celebrate yuletide? We put up a tree every year. We usually have a theme. This year’s is Up In the Air, built around a tin zeppelin toy my hubby got last year. So the tree has all my Star Trek ornaments and all his Star Wars ornaments, and a bunch of or My Little Pony pegasus figures, plus birds and flying reindeer and several Santas, my Marvin the Martin ornaments, lots of moons and stars. One plastic flying Santa sleigh & reindeer was a table decoration that belonged to my great-grandmother. There are also three glass ball ornaments (one pink, one lime green, and one red) with glitter that also belonged to that grandmother. They go onto the tree somewhere every year no matter what the theme is.

I make two wreaths every year. One goes on the inside of the front door, and one on the outside. We have lights that go in the windows. I have too many lights, so I have to decide which ones to put up each year. We also have some lights for the shrubbery outside, and some cheesy decorations that go on the lawn. We sometimes wear Santa hats at social gatherings during the season. We send presents (and some years Christmas cards) to friends and relatives.

We own a lot of Christmas movies and Christmas specials. I watch some of them during the weeks leading up to the holiday. I could do a multi-day marathon of just my adaptations of A Christmas Carol. And I may very well have done exactly that at least once. We frequently watch a bunch together on Christmas Eve.

Every year we host or co-host a holiday get-together with a particular set of friends. The annual party includes the Ghost Story Challenge: I pledge to have an original Christmas Ghost Story to read each year, and challenge other people to bring a story, or sing a song, or otherwise share something with the group. There’s a lot of food, a lot of laughter, and there’s a gift exchange.

On Christmas morning we check our stockings to see what Santa brought. We open presents from family members and each other. We spend the day either watching more Christmas movies, or playing with our new toys, and making dinner. We have this bad habit of making way too much food for just the two of us, but we each have some traditional dishes we like to have, and we also like to experiment with new foods. At least we always have leftovers!

In other words, our celebration of this mid-winter holiday probably sounds an awful lot like everyone else’s. We don’t have drunken orgies. We don’t decorate our Christmas tree with sex toys. We don’t perform weird anti-Christian rituals. We don’t call for the oppression of our more overtly religious relatives or neighbors. We both say “Merry Christmas” at least as often as we say “Happy Holidays!”

We’re not making war on Christmas. We’re not trying to ruin anyone else’s holiday.

So why are anti-gay groups posting pictures of the White House lit up in rainbow lights from a couple of years ago with captions saying, “Trump should project Merry Christmas on the White House! That will show them!”

Show us what? That their ability to make false equivalencies knows no bounds? That they think being asked to treat people who believe differently than them with respect is oppression? We’ve known that for a long, long time.

We’re not the ones disrespecting the message of the Prince of Peace, who told his followers to love their neighbors as themselves, to love their enemies, bless those that curse the, and do good to those that hate them. In that way, our queer Christmas is a lot closer to the message of Christ than anything they’re doing.

Make the Yuletide Gay.
Make the Yuletide Gay.

Everyone’s heard of Rudolph, everyone knows his story…

life, , ,

After mining every other obscure character for a Christmas special, of course Rankin and Bass would try to milk some more by having Frosty and Rudolph team-up in 1979. But who thought “Christmas in July” was a great title?
After mining every other obscure character for a Christmas special, of course Rankin and Bass would try to milk some more by having Frosty and Rudolph team-up in 1979. But who thought “Christmas in July” was a great title?
Several years ago a friend and I got into a conversation about Christmas song characters. Specifically, the many unsuccessful attempts songwriters and singers have made over the years to duplicate the success of the songs “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” and “Frosty the Snowman” (and to a lesser extent “The Little Drummer Boy”). Examples I can think of were “Chrissy the Christmas Mouse,” “Thistlebear the Christmas Bear,” “The Little Blue Bell,” “Percival and Chauncy,” and “Dominik the Donkey.” He had some others on his list that I’d never heard of. I think he went so far as to track down more to put together a mix CD that he handed out to a bunch of us the next Christmas.

We both agreed that Maria and the little bird from “The Gift” (this is the song that ends with the line, “As her offering was lifted to heaven
By the very first nightingale’s song”) or the poor little boy in “The Christmas Shoes” don’t fall into this category. I even argued that the Little Drummer Boy shouldn’t be included. Frosty and Rudolph are anthropomophized—non-human characters given human-like traits, or at least a human-like story line. Whereas the bird in “The Gift” never does anything that a real bird wouldn’t do.

And characters that were originally created in other media who happen to have subsequently been given a song when someone decided to try to make a television special or direct-to-video show about the character shouldn’t count, either. So as wonderful as The Grinch is (and how could he not be, having been created by Dr. Seuss?), he shouldn’t be offered as an example of a Rudolph competitor. And while Jack Frost appears in a couple of songs, (“Jack Frost nipping at your nose,” and “Little Jack Frost Get Lost”) he first was mentioned in poems back in the late 1700s, and often as simply an allusion to the cold rather than a full-blown personification.

Once you listen these other songs, it’s not much of a surprise why they’ve never caught on. For instance, “Chrissy the Christmas Mouse” has no story. I mean, “Frosty the Snowman” doesn’t have much of a plot, but compared to Chrissy, it’s practically Crime and Punishment! Chrissy is a mouse, who lives in Santa’s house, and she wants to go with Santa on Christmas Eve. So Santa asks Mrs. Claus if Chrissy has done her chores, and Mrs. Clause says “yes,” and Chrissy goes.

“The Little Blue Bell” has a plot, sort of. There’s this little blue bell in a church steeple, right? Except the little blue bell can’t ring. No matter what, it’s silent. How can it be a bell if it can’t ring? And why is it still up in the steeple if it is broken? So the song tells us over the course of three verses, that the blue bell is sad up in that steeple every Christmas Eve because it can’t ring. If I were a bell that couldn’t ring, it would seem to be that it would bother me more than just one night a year, right? Anyway, in the final verse, an angel appears and tells the bell it’s there to dry its tears. And then the angel does some angel-y magic, and transforms the bell into pure gold, and now the bell can ring. And the bell is so proud! And that’s the song.

So apparently the reason the bell couldn’t ring was because blue metal is somehow silent? What’s the moral? Suffer long enough but otherwise do nothing and an angel might come and transform you into a different race or whatever (what else is the blue can’t ring, but gold rings beautifully supposed to be a metaphor of?)? It’s just weird.

Not that Rudolph is much better. As I pointed out last week, it can persuasively be argued that Rudolph’s moral is that nonconformity will be punished until it can be exploited. Not exactly uplifting.

Of course, if you think too hard about the story line of just about any song out there it can be pretty crazy making.

So maybe I should stick to characters like Scrooge and leave the songs to songwriters.

Wait, you thought that was subtext?

television, , ,

This Gay Rudolph Shirt can be purchased at PrettyPinkPearl.co.uk.
This Gay Rudolph Shirt can be purchased at PrettyPinkPearl.co.uk.
It seems as if every other year someone somewhere notices that the Rankin-Bass version of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer has some gay themes. The someone then feels the need to write a breathless article about the glittery gay subtext that no one in the world has ever noticed before. This week a bunch of people are linking to an article on Vulture: The Gay Subtext of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I think that Dan Savage said it best on twitter: “More of a gay domtext if you ask me.” Playing off of the kink slang of Dom/sub—in other words, the gay themes seem to be extremely overt, not hidden.

I much prefer some of the earlier pieces written on the topic: 2013’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: A Gay Christmas Allegory, for instance. Or 2012’s Coming Out In Christmastown. Then there’s 2011’s I’ll Never See Rudolph the Same Way Again Less involved is 2005’s Is Hermy Gay? Sixteen serious questions raised by the 1964 holiday classic Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer. In Michael Salvatore’s novel Between Boyfriends there is an entire chapter in which his protagonist talks about recognizing at age 6 the gayness of Hermy and Rudolph (and specifically that he was like them).

I even wrote something about it once. I thought I had published it on my Sans Fig Leaf page, but a search of my old archives proved it was even longer ago than that. It must have been when I blogged on Geocities, which means it was sometime before April, 1998! And it also means I don’t have a copy of it any longer. Which might be a good thing.

Hermy and Rudolph sing about being misfits. Photo from the NBC special, much of which is in the public domain, though the original character of Rudolph from the poem is a trademark of The Rudolph Company L.P., while the song has a separate copyright.
Hermy and Rudolph sing about being misfits. Photo from the NBC special, much of which is in the public domain, though the original character of Rudolph from the poem is a trademark of The Rudolph Company L.P., while the song has a separate copyright.
One of the reasons I don’t think of Hermy and other aspects of the 1964 Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer as subtext is because every time my family watched it during my childhood, Dad would make jokes about the “fag elf.” In addition to the annual repeat of crude comments about Rudolph and Clarice when the narrator refers to Rudolph having grown up, at least one year he wondered aloud about the relationship between the “fag elf” and Yukon Cornelius in rather graphic terms.

I was four years old when the Rankin-Bass special first aired on NBC TV. I don’t have specific memories of that first broadcast, but because a few years later I have very distinct memories of being dismayed that one song and scene which I have very clear memories of weren’t in the show, I know that I had to have watched the original broadcast. In the original broadcast, Santa is never shown going to the Island of Misfit toys to deliver them to children. A scene showing that was added in 1965. They made room for it by replacing Rudolph and Hermy’s “We’re a Couple of Misfits” musical number with a shorter song, “Fame and Fortune” and by removing a scene at the end where Yukon Cornelius discovers a peppermint mine. Over the years other changes were made to the original show, including a re-edited and shortened version of “We’re a Couple of Misfits” being added back in. And other techniques to make room for more commercials resulted in the music that remained sometimes sounding warbling and distorted.

But to get back to the subtext question: I think you would have to be extremely naÏve not to recognize Hermy, at least, as gay. Certainly my dad thought it was obvious!

Years later, someone asked Arthur Rankin, Jr, whether there was a gay message to Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, and he denied it. However, while Rankin and Bass ran the studio and were intimately involved in directing and producing the many shows their company made over the years, the actual scripts were almost always the work of Romeo Muller, a gay Jewish man from the Bronx. Mullee, along with artist Jack Davis, and actors Paul Frees and Paul Kligman are usually credited with the many Jewish allusions and subtexts that are obvious in other Rankin-Bass Christmas specials, such as Santa Claus is Coming to Town (the Burgomeister Meisterburger had toys burnt in a town square in a scene that looks a lot like footage of historical Nazi book burnings, and his guards all wear actual Prussian uniforms, for goodness sake; and don’t tell me that the Winter Wizard isn’t supposed to sound like someone’s Jewish grandfather!) or The Little Drummer Boy. So it doesn’t seem that big of a stretch to imagine that Muller wrote Hermy as gay.

In 1964 and for a few decades before that, movies, television shows, and plays often featured a stock character referred to now as The Sissy. The Sissy was a closeted predecessor of the Sassy Gay Friend. Some people argue that Hermy is just another instance of the Sissy, but there’s one problem with that interpretation. The Sissy was never a hero or the sort of supporting character with his own subplot. He might be a friend and ally of the hero or the heroine (much more often the heroine), but he was merely there to deliver jokes or be the butt of jokes. Meanwhile, I think what made Hermy worthy of commentary by my dad (while he almost never made comments about the archetypical Sissy in other shows) is that Hermy in not comic relief. Hermy has his own subplot. He doesn’t just help Rudolph find acceptance, he realizes his dream. He escapes societal expectations of being a toymaker and becomes a dentist.

You can argue that this is just a parallel to Rudolph’s journey from ostracized freak to valued leader of Santa’s team of flying reindeer, but they wouldn’t have had to give Hermy those Paul Lynde speech patterns, bright pink lips, and that very twink-like swoosh of blond hair (when the only other elves who have hair are definitely women) to do that. Hermy was an obvious, if closeted, queer character. And instead of being the butt of other characters’ jokes, he was the secondary lead. He’s the one who defeats the Abominable Snowman, after all!

I won’t get into all the reasons that the actual villains of this story are Santa, Donner, and Comet. Other people have covered that pretty well. Just as many have argued that the lesson of this special (and the 1949 song, and the 1939 book) is that deviation from the norm will be punished unless it is exploitable. Yeah, there are some problematic aspects to a lot of these old stories.

I still love this version, though, and not the least of the reasons is because the “fag elf” gets a happy ending.

Which Christmas Ghost should I write?

writing, , , , ,

Since 1995 I have written an original Christmas Ghost Story that I then read (or otherwise perform; one required ukulele, there have also been costumes) at the annual Holiday Party “sponsored” by the Tai-Pan Literary and Arts Project. Some years the ghost story is set in the Tai-Pan universe (which makes it fun, since that universe is a hard sci fi universe; I’ve had to be a bit creative about the definition of a ghost), some have been set in universes of my own creating.

I have a rather long document that I keep adding Christmas Ghost Story ideas to, so even though I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years, I’m not out of ideas. That’s actually the problem, I have so many ideas, that trying to get myself to focus on one and finish it is always a little bit of a struggle. Thus the many times I have posted a comment to social media in the wee small hours of the night before the party that I have finally finished this year’s…

Anyway, I’ve kind of narrowed it down to four that are speaking to me this year, and still trying to decide. So, I’m turning to the wilds of the internet and giving you a chance to weigh in. Read the titles and teasers below, and pick the one that you would most like to hear on a spooky winter’s night:

Some notes: in the past some friends have at first declined to vote because they didn’t feel that they were sufficiently familiar with the universe or stories. Please don’t let that stop you. People who are familiar with my work will have a really good guess who at least one of the protagonists above is, but don’t feel you have to be in the slightest familiar with me or my work to cast a vote.

I don’t guarantee that the winner is what I’ll work on. Some years I spend days nearly finishing one story, and then have a blast of inspiration that results in my writing a completely different tale. But I can’t decide, so maybe you can help!

It’s all about the glitches

life,

I think we all could use a hug from Chewie...
I think we all could use a hug from Chewie…
My brand new Macbook Pro arrived two days before the end of NaNoWriMo, and three days before another deadline I was trying to hit, so I set it up as quickly as I could and tried to just muddle through any of the typical glitches you get whenever you migrate all your stuff to a new machine. All of the glitches so far seem to be software related. Many the sorts that wind up being fixed by deleting preference files or other configuration things that were imported from the old machine and rebooting to get the operating system to rebuild them.

I’m not doing a full review, yet, because I haven’t really used it under circumstances where I think everything of that nature has been cleared up since. But, I am very happy with it, so far. I think following my hubby’s advice to buy the most powerful model I can afford now was the right choice.

While I’m feeling pretty good about our plans and prep for Christmas (I have at least one present for every person on my list, though I have a couple of big ones I still need to get). I did not get the Christmas tree set up or any of the lights up last weekend. But I think once I get the two errands out of the house I need to do today done that I’ll be able to jump into that.

I started working on the Christmas card list. I thought my first step was going to be pinging people I don’t think I have a current address for. But no the first (very depressing) step was deleting some addresses because the person has died in the last year. Yes, there were multiples.

Anyway, after I did that I decided to take a look at tumblr to cleanse my brain, and someone had posted that gif of Chewbacca giving Leia a hug, and I realized we all need a good hug.

Red cups, manufactured outrage, and twisted meanings

news, , , ,

Two of several designs of holiday cups at Starbucks this year, and my annual bag of Christmas Blend coffee.
Two of several designs of holiday cups at Starbucks this year, and my annual bag of Christmas Blend coffee. Photo © Gene Breshears (Click to embiggen)
The annual wails of outrage and anger at Starbucks over the “War on Christmas” began a few weeks ago, before a bunch of Trumpkins took it into their heads to punish Starbucks by going to various Starbucks stores, buying fancy coffees, telling the barista their name was Trump, and then get all upset if anything untoward happened. Or something. I really still don’t understand how buying stuff from a company punishes it.

Anyway, I saw some blog posts a couple of weeks ago claiming that this year’s Starbucks holiday cup was, once again, an assault on traditional american values because it didn’t say Christmas on it. The blog posts were in reference to a green cup that Starbucks unveiled a week or so before election day. They called it a Unity cup, and the featured artwork was many different people drawn with one continuous line, to symbolize how everyone is connected, humanity is one big family, et cetera. And the usual War on Christmas nuts started making angry posts about it.

Here, in a picture I swiped for the Starbucks corporate website, are this year's actual holiday cups, which all look very Christmasy to me!
Here, in a picture I swiped for the Starbucks corporate website, are this year’s actual holiday cups, which all look very Christmasy to me!
There are a couple of problems with this outrage. First, the cups weren’t the Starbucks holiday cups: No, Those Green Cups Aren’t The Starbucks Holiday Cup. Second, in what way can any Christian be legitimately offended by a message of community and connectedness of all mankind? Especially at Christmas?

I mean, in Luke 2:14 after the angel tells the shepherds that the savior has been born, a multitude of the heavenly host appears in the sky beside the first angel and sings, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” Right?

Well, that’s one of the problems. The King James Version, which was the English language translation of the Bible preferred by most protestants for a couple hundred years (and was the one I first read cover-to-cover, the one read and quoted from the pulpit at all the churches I attended, and the one from which I memorized the Christmas story as told in Luke chapter 2 and Matthew chapter 1 as a child), states the angels’ song the way I quote it. God’s message is good will toward all mankind in that translation.

But evangelical and fundamentalist Christians have spurned the King James Version and a couple of similar translations, in part because they weren’t homophobic enough. Seriously, in 1946 the Revised Standard Version added the words homosexual or homosexuality to several passages. The fact that it was unclear in the original languages what some of those were passages talking about, and in other cases were references to particular types of prostitution (and a weird legalistic argument some people were apparently making that if they hired a male prostitute pretending to be a woman they weren’t really cheating on their wife) was completely glossed over with these changes. (You can read a lot more about it here: Homophobia and the Politics of Biblical Translation.)

The god of the King James Version was pretty judgmental, but not judgmental and condemning enough, apparently. And the new translations many of the evangelicals and fundamentalists favor render that verse a bit differently: “Glory to God in highest heaven, and peace on earth to those with whom God is pleased.” Clearly implying that God does not offer universal love and forgiveness to everyone.

Make no mistake, the King James Version’s translation has all sorts problems. And the original texts from which the modern Bible is derived have other problematic issues. There are so many passages that praise slavery, for instance. There’s the bit in the old testament where men are instructed, if they suspect their wife might have been unfaithful, to take said wife to the temple for an involuntary abortion. There are also twenty-five separate and unequivocal passages stating that left-handed people are abominations and will not get into heaven. These are just some of the reasons that I no longer consider myself a member of the religion in which I was raised.

But I still keep, rather foolishly, expecting that more people who call themselves Christian will actually conduct themselves according to the actual teachings of the man who said: “I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”

Do good to those that hate you. He didn’t say to make laws that punish those who disagree with you. He didn’t say to deny marriage licenses to those who believe differently than you. He didn’t say deport those who worship differently than you. He didn’t say to build walls to keep out people who look and speak differently than you. He didn’t say to tell all those people you are persecuting that you love them even while you’re doing all these hurtful and hateful things to them.

He said to do good to everyone, including those who hurt you. That’s how you love your neighbor. But it’s apparently a lot easier to change the words of their sacred book than it is to change their own hearts.

A red coffee cup with snowflakes on it, or Christmas ornaments, or snow covered evergreen trees, or a fanciful reindeer do not constitute a “War on Christmas.” It’s manufactured outrage, not an actual war. But people who call themselves Christian and support the persecution and demonization of people based on race, sexual orientation, immigration status, or religion? That is an actual war on the teachings of Christ.

Ho! Ho! Ho!

life, ,

IMG_4252Happy Christmas! Blessed Yul! Happy Hogswatch! Joyous Kwanza! Festive Festivus! Feliz Navidad! God Jul! Mele Kalikimaka me ka Hauʻoli Makahiki Hou! Beannachtaí na Nollag! Buon Natale! Priecīgus Ziemassvētkus un laimīgu Jauno gadu! Felix Dies Nativitatus!

…and bless us, every one!

(And don’t forget to check out Friday Links (Ho! Ho! Ho! edition).)

Not Yet Christmas

life, , , , ,

Alistair Sim meets the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come in the 1951 "Scrooge."
Alistair Sim meets the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come in the 1951 “Scrooge.”
Today is the first day of my husband’s Christmas vacation, while for me it’s the eighth vacation day. As luck would have it, he woke up with a slight fever and other cold symptoms this morning. If it isn’t the same bug I had a couple of weeks ago, then I’ll probably come down with it right about the time I’m suppose to go back to work. Fun, no?

Other than finishing the Christmas Ghost Story (whose title is currently “Whips for the Wicked”) and copy editing, I haven’t gotten any writing done so far this vacation. Some years I manage to get a lot of writing in during my time off for the holiday, but most years are more like this. There are enough things I need to do (finish shopping, mail last minute things, deliver gifts, visit people, clean, cook, change my mind about what we’re cooking a zillion times, watch Christmas movies, sleep in, and spend time just staring at the tree while listening to Christmas music) that very little writing gets done.

That’s okay. One’s mental and creative batteries can get a recharge from at least some of those holiday activities. Being an introvert who does a really good job of faking extroversion, it’s complicated. I get a lot out of spending time with people I love. And I really enjoy those moments when a loved one is overjoyed with a gift you gave them. Heck, I get a charge when I see someone being really excited by a gift someone else gave them. And my time spent with some of my favorite Christmas movies, particularly the ones that make me cry, is good for both my soul and my creative subconscious.

Just this morning I found myself once again explaining to my Aunt Silly, who is probably the biggest extrovert in the family, why I don’t mind having Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with just Michael and I. Yes, I love my friends and family. I enjoyed the time spent with several on Thanksgiving, and everyone who came to the party, and all the visiting I did with family members on Tuesday. And yes, on past Christmases I’ve loved watching my nieces opening presents on Christmas morning with their Grandma. I just don’t need that all the time.

Grandma with myself and my almost-twin cousin.
Grandma with myself and my almost-twin cousin as babies.
And I have to admit, Christmas with the extended family hasn’t been the same since Grandma died. I sometimes miss the big boisterous Christmas Eves when you never knew which shirt-tail relatives would pop in next to say “Merry Christmas” and see everyone. Grandma’s biological children, adopted children, step-children, and honorary children and their kids and grandkids would often make an appearance. Not to mention some of the children and grandchildren of Grandpa’s siblings some of whom still lived nearby. And it really was a wildly extended group.

I remember one day in High School not long after Mom, my sister, and I had moved to southwest Washington (after my parents divorce back in Colorado), a classmate whose name I hadn’t learned, yet, walked up to me and said, “I think we’re cousins.” We weren’t actually related by genetics, it turned out. She was the daughter of the step-son of one of my mom’s adopted father’s sisters. (Say that three times fast!) By the usual definitions, we weren’t cousins, but her entire life she had called my grandmother “Aunt Gertie.” And that was to distinguish Grandma from her other Great-aunt Gertrude, because Grandpa George (Mom’s adopted dad) wasn’t just married to a Gertrude, one of his sisters was also named Gertrude. So she had both an Aunt Gertie and and Aunt Gert.

But what made those big get-togethers work was Grandma. She was happy to see whoever showed up, and her laughter and love poured out and infected all the rest of us. So even when the relative was someone that you couldn’t remember precisely how they were related, they loved Grandma and she loved them, and that made everything feel right. Without the glue of Grandma’s love, some of us are just that awkward person who used to spend some holidays together.

Our lives have drifted in different ways. I’m an out queer guy who votes for Democrats and Greens and Socialists, and then complains that my own choices for elected official are too conservative. That makes me the polar opposite of a bunch of my relatives. That’s not the only way I’m an alien to some of them. Even my cousin who’s an engineer and works for Intel has never quite understood what a Technical Writer/Information Architect actually does, for example.

And don’t get me started on the gulfs between me and some folks on Dad’s side of the family!

I’ve digressed a long way from where I meant to go with this post. It’s nearly Christmas, yet not quite. There are lights on the trees and presents beneath it. Stockings are hung. Soon there will be mulled wine steaming in the kitchen. Cookies will be consumed. The NORAD Santa tracker will be consulted a few times. Carols will be sung. If I play my cards right, I might convince my poor, sick, hobbling-on-crutches husband to kiss under a sprig of mistletoe.

A can’t wait to see what Santa brings us!

Christmas Presence

life, , , ,

Edward Woodward as the Ghost of Christmas Present and George C. Scott as Ebenezer Scrooge from the 1984 CBS "A Christmas Carol."
Edward Woodward as the Ghost of Christmas Present and George C. Scott as Ebenezer Scrooge from the 1984 CBS “A Christmas Carol.”
We’re having Christmas at home for just the two of us, this year. And like last year I have the entire week off while my husband has to work for most of the week, so I drove down to Mom’s yesterday to drop off her presents and take her to lunch. I also dropped off presents for one of my sisters, my nieces, my grandniece, an aunt, and a friend that all live in the same town. So there was lots of chatting. It was nice to spend some time with everyone.

There is some new drama going on with some of the family, and I got to tangentially experience a teeny bit of it, but mostly it was just a wonderful day. The drive down was a dream, so it only took about two hours to get there. The drive home was not quite as good. The rain was so bad that for a couple of stretched visibility was severely reduced, and there was a few points that between the wind and the rain it was a bit of a challenge to keep the car in it’s lane. Still, it only took about 3 hours to drive home, so it was still a lot better than a couple of the really awful trips have been.

My aunt didn’t have a tree up. Usually she has a big tree with all blue ornaments, but she decided last year that it was silly to decorate just for herself, so she gave away the artificial tree, all of her lights, and all of her ornaments. And she says she’s been regretting it all month. So her current plan is to buy a new, much smaller artificial tree and some lights and ornaments (particularly if she can find them in after Christmas sales) for next year.

Mom did something similar a couple years ago, although her story was a bit different. My Great-grandma had a small artificial tree which she bought in 1957 or so, and she set it up and decorated it every year until she died in 1975. Then her tree went into storage at Grandma’s for several years. Until some point in the 80s, when my mom was preparing for her first Christmas after getting divorced from my step-dad, and she happened to mention to Grandma that she wasn’t certain she had to time, energy, or money to set up a tree that year. So Grandma showed up at Mom’s house with Great-grandma’s tree. Mom used that tree every year until it literally fell apart while Mom was taking it down four years ago.

Mom was in the process of getting rid of a lot of things and preparing to move to the small town where my sister and several other relatives live at the time. The first place she moved to there was much, much smaller than her previous place, and she decided she didn’t have room for a tree. Then she moved to her current place which is a bit bigger, but she told me that fall, when we were discussing holiday plans, that she hadn’t liked any of the artificial trees she’d found in stores because all the ones in the size she wanted had built-in lights, and that was a no-starter. So I could her to talk about what she wanted, and as she described it, I searched on-line until I found a tree that met all of her specifications. It wasn’t until after I had ordered it that I told her what I had done, and that her tree would arrive later that week.

She had ornaments. She has some that belonged to Great-grandma, and a few that belonged to Grandma, but also a bunch that were made by her own grandkids (my nieces). She says she’s very happy with it. When we were there on Thanksgiving, she had us help her set it up and decorate it. One of her favorite decorations, a blue glittery garland with white snowflakes (which I think had been Grandma’s), was falling apart badly and she was pretty sad about it.

So while I and the youngest niece were hanging ornaments and Michael was sitting with his broken leg propped up, he secretly searched online until he found an identical garland and ordered it for Mom. It showed up a few days later and she sent me excited texts with multiple pictures of it.

Great-aunt Noriko's Santa pin.
Great-aunt Noriko’s Santa pin. (Click to embiggen)
If you haven’t figured out by now what a soppy sentimental person I am, you haven’t been paying attention. For example, back in the early 90s, a co-worker came to me one December with an unusual gift. The co-worker’s name was Noreen, and she had been born and raised in Hawaii. She had been named after her Great-aunt Noriko. And Great-aunt Noriko had owned this very silly plastic Santa brooch or pin. Great-aunt Noriko, she told me, had worn it every Sunday in Advent leading up to Christmas, and would wear it to any holiday parties or get-togethers. Noreen had inherited the pin along with other things when her Great-aunt died, but unlike her aunt, Noreen was Buddhist and didn’t observe Christmas. She said she always felt guilty for not wearing the pin at Christmas time; whereas, I wear jingle bell earrings, Santa hats, and other silly Christmas things during December all the time. So it had occurred to her that I might be willing to wear Great-aunt Noriko’s pin.

I told her I would be honored to, and I meant it. I said as soon as I’d seen the pin, I had been flabbergasted because it was identical to one my one Great-grandmother (the same one whose tree my Mom wound up using for many years) had owned, but I never knew what had happened to it. So I said that of course I would wear Great-aunt Noriko’s pin at Christmas time, and tell people about Great-aunt Noriko who loved Christmas and Santa and so on.

Which is when Noreen told me of the Hawaiian tradition of referring to everyone who is approximately your own age as cousin, and any one who is older as either auntie or uncle as a sign of respect, but also a sign of the Hawaiian belief that all people are one big family. Which of course, we are. So she gave me the pin and told me that I should consider myself Great-aunt Noriko’s honorary nephew. So, for over thirty years I have, every Christmas season, worn Great-aunt Noriko’s pin, in honor of her, and my Great-grandma, and my former co-worker.

Merry Christmas, cousin!

Past Christmas or Christmas Past?

life, , , , , , , ,

Joel Grey as the Ghost of Christmas Past and Patrick Stewart as Ebenezer Scrooge from the 1999 TNT adaptation of "A Christmas Carol."
Joel Grey as the Ghost of Christmas Past and Patrick Stewart as Ebenezer Scrooge from the 1999 TNT adaptation of “A Christmas Carol.”
Once again we hosted a Holiday Party on the third Saturday in December. And for the third year Michael and I reserved a suite at a hotel about four miles from our place for the purpose. We had a smaller crowd than last year, but it was still a lot of fun.

This year’s party was a milestone in a couple of ways. For me, it’s now been 30 years celebrating Christmas in Seattle with a group of friends that includes Keith and Mark. It has also been 20 years since the first time that I wrote an original Christmas Ghost Story to read at the party. Since the first one was written and read 20 years ago, that means this year’s story was the 21st such tale. I’ve mentioned before (Conjuring the proper ghosts) about the the variations I’ve explored under the notion of a Christmas Ghost story. Several of the tales have been set in a hard science fiction universe and tended to use more metaphorical ghosts, for instance. I’ve written comedic ghosts, dramatic ghosts, grim ghosts, and hopeful ghosts.

This year’s story had a fairy tale approach. It was the fifth or sixth Christmas Ghost Story that I’ve written set in the same universe as my fantasy novels. I’ve described this particular universe as a light fantasy world using anthropomorphic tropes with an epic fantasy wrapper. So the novels have sorcerers and dragons and knights and epic battles. The Ghost Stories have tended to be a lot more intimate. The most recent one before this year’s was a comedic murder mystery in which one of the constables in the City Watch is confronted by a headless ghost on Solstice Eve to kick of the action. This year’s was a more serious tale, and I think for the first time since I started doing this, directly related to one of the others. It’s actually a prequel to a funny Christmas Ghost Story which, it happens, was mostly written originally long-hand while I was staffing a table in the Dealer’s Den of Midwest Furfest.

Me trying the costume before the Halloween Party. For Christmas I had a black belt and wore my round gold-rimmed glasses.
Me trying the costume before the Halloween Party. For Christmas I had a black belt and wore my round gold-rimmed glasses.
I had a costume this year. Michael talked me into getting a Father Christmas costume for our friends’ Halloween party (to go along with a devil costume he got to do a silly pun). He’s been talking about getting me some sort of Santa suit or similar to wear to the Christmas party for a few years. This was wasn’t bad. It needs some more work, if I’m going to use it again.

Anyway, one of the Ghost Story ideas that’s been sitting in my queue for a while involved my fantasy world’s version of Santa, who is “one of the oldest of the dark fae” and goes by the name Grandfather Frost. If you know your cross-cultural history, Grandfather Frost is the usual English translation of the Russian character Ded Moroz, which means literally Old Man Frost. In the original Slavic myths he was a snow demon or a winter wizard—generally a creature to be feared. As the Orthodox Church took hold in those regions, some aspects of Saint Nicholas were grafted onto the character he became more like our Santa.

So, since I had the costume, and since some other aspects of the fantasy novel I’m working on were related to Grandfather Frost, I wound up in late October starting a Ghost Story about the character. I had a good start before NaNoWriMo, so I figured this year the story would be done early for a change. No such luck. I had been hung up at about 1200 words for a few weeks into December before I finally figured out where I was going wrong and got the tale straightened out.

People seemed to enjoy the story. Yay! I need to get a couple of short story collections together and either self-publish them or something.

This week I’m in that weird headspace I often find myself in after the party. Spending time with this group of friends, exchanging gifts, and continuing the Ghost Story Challenge tradition (this year Mark and Edd each had a story ready to read to answer the challenge) feels like my “real” Christmas. So I end up feeling a little weird during the days between the party and actual Christmas day. I keep having to stop myself from asking people how their Christmas went, past tense. Or from wishing strangers a Happy New Year.

Today I need to finish packing up the car to head down to Mom’s where I’m going to deliver presents. If all goes well, I’ll be stopping off at Mom’s, one of my sisters’, my older niece, my aunt, and a friend I haven’t seen in person in many years. It’ll be a bit of a whirl, but should be fun. And I hope I wind up saying “Merry Christmas” enough that I remember that Christmas isn’t quite here, yet.

Happy Solstice! Merry Christmas! And have a great day!