Christmas Again 2022

It’s Christmas

Hi everyone. 

I’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating. This is my favourite time of the year. I enjoy the music, the lights, and the decorations, I even like the sappy sentimentalism. 

I’m not immune to the stress that goes with it, just so you don’t think my development stopped at age eleven. I figure it’s the price of the ticket. We pay to play. 

It’s one of those unwritten laws. But there are loopholes. I found one. 

“It is better to give than receive” is an old saw with some truth I suppose. But it implies warm fulfillment for the giver. 

Bullocks! 

Gift hunting is 90 percent of the stress of Christmas. Shopping at the mall or the box stores is the modern equivalent of trying to gather nuts and berries and repeatedly being chased by an elephant. 

I’m Not Scrooge 

I love Christmas. Let’s just leave the gift thing for the kids. The whole “Santa…..he knows if you’ve been bad or good” thing is great for tricking kids into shutting up. It only works for a few minutes, but when I hear little Julie or Johnny at the grocery store screaming, “I want Tater Tots” I would pay to have the Christmas scared right the hell out of them if only for some brief respite. 

Why use up stress tolerance on gifts? If you’re male and have anything to do with cooking the Christmas dinner you’ll need every iota of metabolic defence to avoid a heart attack or a stroke. 

My mother was an excellent cook and actually took pleasure in preparing Christmas dinner in all its detail. We were still a young family when she passed away. For a few years, Dad cooked the turkey. 

Most of you, I’m sure, have seen the movie where some dogs steal the turkey and the family ends up at a Chinese restaurant with the staff gathering at their table and singing “Deck the harrs with boughs of Horry, Fa ra ra ra ra, ra ra ra ra”

Our Christmas dinners were never that close to disaster but one year the bird slipped as Dad took it out of the oven and it went sliding across the dirty kitchen floor. 

Stoves and ovens tend to be the last appliances you’d expect to malfunction. I’ve only experienced it once and it just had to be the eve of the first Christmas that I was to cook the bird. That was 1990 and I still have the job thanks, I think, to some ingenuity that my brother Pat and I got credit for. A Polish lady lived directly behind us. She was old-school European and had two kitchens. Why, I don’t know. Only five people lived in the house. The Italians, if they have the space, do the same thing. 

The kitchen that wasn’t used much was on the ground floor with a door about fifty yards from our house with no fence in the way. I sent Pat over to ask her if we could use her kitchen knowing she’d be reluctant to have us tracking snow and mud in. She volunteered to cook the turkey herself. 

It worked! The only casualty was my expensive brand-new winter coat. It got turkey juice sloshed all over it on the return trip. The stains never came out. I could have made gravy out of it for three years. 

One year we defrosted a frozen turkey, as instructed, in the fridge for five days. We didn’t know that our old Norge was seriously colder in the back than the front. Consequently, half of it was still frozen when we put it in the oven. Four hours later……Yum! Turkey Sushi.

Police State

I love Christmas. I really do. 

A lot people drive after drinking alcohol. The holiday season is used to bring attention to a problem that is year-round. The people at MADD get madder than wet hens because they don’t think enough is being done. This is an issue for sure.

Another issue that has come up in recent years is the rights of the motorist. For five or six weeks each year the police here in Ontario operate a program called RIDE. Reduce Impaired Driving Everywhere. Other provinces and states have similar programs. 

It’s a good cause so for six weeks a year we allow roadblocks where the police can question you. 

But Lord Love A Duck, I had to blow into a breathalyzer twice last week and it would have been three if I hadn’t complained! Zero each time by the way. 

“Was there a sale on breathalyzers?” 

“Just doing our job sir”

Soothing

I love Christmas. The music is great. I learned a lot about chord progressions just by noodling carols on the piano starting about age 11. Most Christmas tunes are fairly diatonic, meaning they don’t stray far from the key they’re written in. So with a little practice, I was able to hear the chord changes without being at the piano.

My favourite for three years in a row is Driving Home For Christmas by Chris Rea. After I posted this last year, people told me I was an idiot. 

“The message is insipid,” people said.

Here’s the message, you be the judge:

A guy is driving home a few days before Christmas. There’s some traffic. A guy in the other lane is doing the same thing. 

That’s it. 

 MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYBODY