CSotD: Shifting Perspectives
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If I were still editing a kid-written weekly feature, we’d have already had our annual Nutcracker-or-Christmas-Carol discussion. I miss the kids, but I don’t miss trying to cover this pair of mandatory holiday extravaganzas.
The Nutcracker was easier, because, while it barely changes each year, we had enough kids who actually knew something about ballet that we could assign different aspects. One year, for instance, we had a young dancer interview the prima ballerina, and another year, a kid with some mechanical interests looked into the stagecraft.
Got to admit, I never thought to assign someone to cover it from the point of view of mice envious of the Mouse King, but if I hadn’t retired when I did, I’m sure we’d have gotten there eventually. But a tip of the hat to Jimmy Craig for freshening a holiday standard.
Meanwhile, it’s enough to send me out for a plate of Chinese and a movie, and I’m not even Jewish.
Come to think of it, I don’t think there are any actual nuts involved in the Nutcracker, but Dave Blazek envisions a time when there won’t be any actual nuts anymore anyway.
I turned in my spare change the other day, reminded that pennies will disappear and I haven’t carried cash in a couple of years anyway. We don’t have a lot of parking meters hereabouts and the laundromat has card readers, so my need for coins is pretty limited. I dumped what I had into the change machine at the grocery store and it came to $8.70. The machine asked if I wanted a credit slip or to convert it into crypto.
Well, there’s crypto egg sausage and crypto, that’s not got much crypto in it.
I suppose if you offered me $870,000 in crypto, I’d probably take it, but I’d rather have cash and I sure can’t envision any use for $8.70 worth of the non-stuff.
Maybe I could use it to buy plastic facial features for snowmen. I remember radio ads for Blue Coal when I was tiny, but by the time I was out building snowmen, most people had converted to fuel oil. You could, however, still scrounge bits of coal around the edges of what had been their coal chutes.
I think it’s all gone now and they sell plastic snowman kits with eyes and noses. If you can make off with your dad’s $40 briar, go for it, but keep your hands off his glass pipe. Or better yet stay inside and make an AI snowman on your phone without having to get cold and run around the yard.
There was a box in our basement that reportedly held a collapsible top hat, which you could wear to the opera but then fold down and hold in your lap. I never even saw it out of the box, much less on my father’s head, and it never occurred to us to snag it for a snowman, though I’ll bet Dad wouldn’t have cared.
He might have even joined us.
I’m just old-fashioned, I guess. I can figure out apps and stuff, but what I can’t figure out is why I’d bother. Like Betty, if I get a coffeemaker, I just want it to make coffee. I don’t expect it to change my life and I’d just as soon it didn’t.
I had a Mr. Coffee for years. You put coffee and water in it, and then you turned it on in the morning and it made coffee. And when it finally broke down, I bought a new one and they’d improved it, so now I drink tea. You heat the water and put a teabag — a “sachet” — in the water. It doesn’t do anything else.
I’m disappointed that Betty’s new machine uses pods. Not only are they un-eco, but they make crap coffee. Pod coffee for pod people, I guess.
And when I buy a cuppa, I buy red eye, which is worth the five bucks as long as the person behind the counter knows the difference between a red eye and an Americano.
I was in Montreal with an American ex-pat from Japan who ordered a coffee, had cream and no sugar, and paid with a “merci,” tout en francais. As we walked away I asked him how many languages he spoke, and he said he didn’t speak French but he knew what she was asking him.
Everything should be that simple, but certainly ordering a cup of coffee.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Can’t blame this one on changing times. Jean Shepherd’s nostalgic look back to 1940 in A Christmas Story confirms that we were just as vulnerable to commercial predators then as kids are today, and, no, I don’t know how you can be nostalgic for a time a full generation before you were born.
But I do know that little boys were jonesing for BB guns back in 1913, before Jean Shepherd was a gleam in anybody’s eye, and I remember wanting Zorro gear because Davy Crockett stuff was over. And then a slot car track. In the words of Influencer Roseanne Roseannadanna, it was always something.
I also remember that none of that was what you were going to get from your grandparents anyway. What I really don’t remember is parental frenzies over things like Cabbage Patch Dolls and Tickle Me Elmos, at which point I think we can stop fretting over the kids and maybe take a look at their parents. Perhaps with a dart gun handy.
Parents were sane in my day, and particularly at our house. Mom had been so wounded by discovering that her parents had fooled her about Santa that she refused to lead us on. Any questions we asked about him were answered with “What do you think?” and any inquiries about presents got a “We’ll see.”
Don’t get me wrong: We scored well. But it was always a surprise, as it ought to be.
I think that kind of parenting encourages this kind of creative imagination, which should be the goal of even having kids.
Meanwhile, we’ve gotta send Santa Claus back to the rescue mission …
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