Wassail, wassail all over the town

With the rush of Christmas now over and the rush of New Year's just beinging I thought I'd take a few minutes to give a quick update to whoever still reads this blog.

Christmas was quite low key, but also enjoyable, this year. My in-laws came in on the 23rd, but stayed with my brother-in-law and his wife. So, they'd come over here or we'd go over there. There wasn't too much planned, captial-e events. Pretty laidback all in all.

I must admit that I do miss family movies that has been a Christmas tradition until this past year. Whenever we'd go to Saskatoon or they'd stay with us ofr Christmas, we'd rent a pile of classic and not-so-classic films to watch. When people are sleeping at another house and have to drive across town, they aren't as keen on staying up and watching movies. We did go to a movie, but finding something in the theatres that everyone wants to see is hard. In fact, we split into two groups when we went. Rachel and her mom went to Doubt; everyone else went to Quantum of Solace. For some reason it's easier to agree on older movies.

Oliver proved that he can handle company quite well. While there are still bursts of puppy-excitment, he's become a mellow, easy-going dog. Christmas was our testing ground for seeing how he coped with having people over now that he's a little older, and he passed.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Well, it looks like the deep freeze we've been experiencing here in Winnipeg will be with until Christmas. I must admit, the four half-hour-to-hour long walks a day have turned my feet into perpetually frozed blocks of ice. They only begin to thaw before it time to go out in the cold once more.

Instead of posting a brand new Christmas blog that in all likelihood wouldn't be that good, I thought, why not post a retro Christmas blog? Here's one from way back in 2006. It was a simpler time, a time of innocence and magic.

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Hangin' my stockin' I can hear you knockin': Zat you, Santa Claus?

After doing this blog for four years, it's hard to remember what I have and haven't written about. I'm pretty sure that in Christmases past I've listed my favourite Christmas songs; last year, I detailed Christmas in the Netherlands with St. Nicholas and Black Peter...but I don' think I've ever listed some of my favourite holiday movies. So that's what I'm going to do this year. These are, in no particular order films I try to watch every holiday season. Some will be the classics that appear on everyone's list, some will be hidden treasure that you've never heard of before.

1) Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) I love Preston Sturges movies and The Lady Eve might just be the best comedy ever made. Miracle is a great holiday movie because it's so wonderfully, shockingly subversive! It's about a girl, Trudy Kockenlocker (how did that name get by the censors?), who goes to a GI dance with her friend, Norval Jones. Well, Trudy has such a good time that she winds up married and pregnant... but has no idea who the father might be. Norval steps up and tries to do the right thing. It all comes to a head at Christmas ... a fitting time for a young girl who's been unexpectedly knocked up to deliver her "miracle" child.

2) It's a Wonderful Life (1946) This classic film deserves every iota of praise. A truly inspired reinterpretation of Dickens' A Christmas Carol with George Bailey, a good and honest man who has placed the interests of others ahead of himself, believing that his life has been misspent. This film reveals the fragility of life - suggesting that one person could make the difference between a whole community's happiness/success and misery. This is my advisor's favourite movie of all time, and the fact that he lost a job at a prestigious American university because he unrelentingly defended this film when someone's wife dismissed it as sentimental nonsense makes me proud.

3) Scrooge (aka A Christmas Carol) (1951) Many versions of Dickens' ghost story of Yuletide redemption have been made over the years, but this is the definitive. Anyone who tells you otherwise is an absolute moron. I feel as deeply and passionately about this film as any other. I usually watch it three or four times a year and can recite most of the dialogue from memory. One of the great joys and proudest moments of my dissertation has been working this film into a highly praised chapter on Dickens adaptations.

4 & 5) About a Boy (2002) and Love Actually (2003) I can't imagine there are many other people with two Hugh Grant films on their must-see holiday lists, but both of these films are great Christmas movies. In About a Boy Grant's character is haunted by his father's very popular, but ultimately innocuous Christmas song, "Santa's Super Sleigh". All but rejecting the holiday, he holes himself up in his apartment watching Frankenstein until he learns that family can be about a community you choose. In Love Actually Grant is one of a dozen or so actors whose intertwined stories portray the highs and lows of the holiday season.

6) Santa Claus (1954) I'm pretty sure I could only ever sit through the "Mystery Science Theatre 3000" version of this piece of Mexican yule-poo (that's for you, Kyler). I recently inflicted this on some friends... and I'm not sure they'll ever forgive me. Basic premise: Santa and his multinational child labourers battle the devil, Pitch, who tries to convince children to steal, vandalize and be naughty. You read that right. Santa fights the devil. I'm sure it's going for "quaint," but it hits "creepy" nearly every single time. Particularly disturbing are the giant toy reindeer that pull Santa's sleigh, Pitch's Busby Berkleyesque dancing, and most of Santa's facial expressions.

When I sang a song about a honky-tonk... it was time to leave

The other morningI realized how much my life has changed: I reached into my jackey pocket for my house keys. I produced the said keys, an unused pooped bag and a handful of loose kibbel. As Dave has commented, I might as well change the focus of this blog to my dog.


On another, non-Oliver, note, I've just finished reading Ron Hansen's fantastic novel Exiles, which tells of English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins's attempt to honour the memories of five German nuns who died when The Deutschland sank off the coast of England in 1875. Hansen weaves the stories of the nuns, who were leaving Germany following the Falk laws and Bismarck's persecution of Catholics, and Hopkins, whose conversion to Catholicism and membership in the Society of Jesus isolated him from his Oxford tutors, his friends and his family and whose poetic experiments (Hopkins is called the most modern Victorian poet and the most Victorian modern poet) isolated him from the literary world.