CSotD: Holiday Anecdotes and Antidotes
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Christmas greetings from First Dog, who gets special placement today because he likes mince pies and fruitcake. I’ve made something of a tradition here of mocking cartoons that mock fruitcake, because it’s a grownup treat and so takes a lot of unwarranted abuse.
But here’s a strip from 2002 that explains what has happened to coffee, which is also a grownup treat and which, like fruitcake, has been moderated and modulated and sweetened and transformed into something popular but completely other.
The difference being that you can still get a cup of joe, but you really have to do some detective work to find dense, damp, dark fruitcake these days. It’s not impossible, but it’s a whole lot easier to find a cup of black coffee.
As First Dog notes, mince pies and fruitcake are adjacent and he’s right about marshmallows, too. I think Disney got hold of Christmas at some point, but there are still those of us with a more Fezziwig vision of the holiday.
Frazz always seems to take a long view of things, and here he traces the way Christmas has changed over the past century or two. As if often the case with Frazz, he left us something to Google, and James Lord Pierpont is the composer of Jingle Bells, which is not a Christmas carol and neither is Frosty the Snowman or Winter Wonderland.
And don’t make me bring out the Big Guns but not all songs about snow are about Christmas, which is a good thing for First Dog, since Christmas down his way is a summer holiday.
I’m not a grinch, but I got a chuckle out of this Daddy’s Home because I really can’t relate to the Christmas specials everyone gets so sentimental about.
It’s mostly an age thing: I was 14 when the first Peanuts special came on the air and I already had completely different voices locked in. I liked the Chuck Jones Grinch because it was true to the book, but most of the Claymation specials came after I was in high school and wasn’t in the right demographic anymore.
I mentioned Amahl and the Night Visitors to someone the other day and they had no idea what I was talking about, though it’s currently playing at the Lincoln Center. But that was appointment TV when I was a kid, back before taping and streaming, when you had to be in front of the set for Amahl, or Alastair Sim’s Christmas Carol or It’s a Wonderful Life.
That’s not just a Christmas thing, either: There’s something lost when you can watch Wizard of Oz anytime you want to, rather than having it be a special event.
(A Brief Discursion into Media)
Guy Body pre-emptively mourns the potential for Netflix to kill off the movie theatres, assuming it gets its grip on Warner Brothers, but notes that going to the movies hasn’t been an event in a long time, since people behave as if they were at home and were raised in a barn.
Deflocked then reminds us that watching at home isn’t the same, either, and seems unlikely to remain the same. Several of the streaming services have now begun tossing in ads and charging you extra to avoid them, which seems like a bait-and-switch scam, given that a lot of us stopped watching movies on broadcast TV because of the interruptions.
I pay for a video package but not for a bunch of add-on streamers, so aside from Turner Classics, I’m at the mercy of whoever thinks I’m not paying enough. So I’m on the “lots of monkeys” plan.
Which brings us to this
Juxtaposition of the Day
There used to be long arguments about which college football team was Number One. It had a lot to do with who had beaten whom and who had beaten them and so forth, such that when the announcer at a game would let us know Miami had beaten Southern Cal, we’d start chanting “We’re Number One!” because we’d beaten Michigan which had beaten Miami which had just beaten Southern Cal.
Now people chant “We’re Number One” even if, by logic, they’re number 147, and the arguments are no longer about football games but about rankings and playoffs. It’s gone from a lively argument among sports fans to a bunch of squabbling among accountants.
Football is not longer the point. The point is to create a new tournament that can’t resolve the arguments but provides streamers with another chance to charge us extra for the no-monkeys level of service.
Like a lot of games, football was more fun before the grown-ups stepped in and organized it.
Baby Blues surprised me this morning because I’ve seen a bunch of cartoons complaining about the needles dropping off Christmas trees, which is what you get if you buy a tree that was cut last month at the other end of the continent.
The solution is to buy local, whether that means cutting your own or buying from the scout troop. If you don’t know the source, at least run a thumb and finger down a branch to see if the needles fall off.
“Sappy” is a good thing. It means you can leave it up until Valentine’s Day.
This is not far off the mark. I get a couple of cards each year, including some from cartoonists, which not only have a personal touch to begin with but remind me of my father, who drew a card each year.
But the days when you could string the cards across your mantle seem largely over, and while Earl seems a bit grim in pointing it out, yes, a lot of that generation is gone. But not quite forgotten.
PSA: Blue Is Not A Permanent Color
The winter solstice is the darkest day of the year, but that means there will now be more light each day. Each year on this date, I repost a piece I wrote for people who may be feeling bluesy about now.
If you don’t need it, perhaps you’ll want to pass it on to someone who does.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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