I’ve been diligently avoiding the unavoidable visual and auditory warnings of the impending Yule since mid-October. But in the second half of December I’m ready to embrace “The Christmas Station” and decorations and such.
However, I always preferred the offbeat things, like Weird Al’s “Christmas at Ground Zero”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsvZHHLQ8-c[/youtube]
and Lehrer’s “Christmas Carol“.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSlpCBek1_M[/youtube]
Try the South Park Hanukkah Song klezmer quintet, or the Santa and Jesus duet from the same episode.
Here are some recent takes:
Christmas in Japan:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmCrIZeob4w[/youtube]
And How the nativity would have gone, had it been in a chatroom.
What are your favorite offbeat holiday expressions?
Dan: Thanks for your mind-scrambling blend of sardonic Christmas videos.
Watching these videos, the thought occurred to me that our patina of civility some somehow holds together well enough, often enough. And Christmas is certainly an extra good time for a bit of detente, if not good cheer.
But, as some of your materials suggest, there is always a scary undercurrent of potential disorder, despite all the smiles and handshakes and presents. Maybe it's even a powderkeg; but it doesn't blow up on an individual basis very often, for reasons I don't understand. Maybe here and there we'll encounter a person shooting or blowing up a home-made bomb, but (thank goodness) it's still an unusual thing–worth reporting when it happens. But the potential lurks: I'm reminded of Spike Lee's movie "Do the Right Thing."
What's sad, though, is that widespread violence and aggression (as opposed to isolated local occurrences) are business as usual. That's what occurred to me watching the Yankovich video. And that violence doesn't only take the form of bombs and guns. It is most often expressed through the spending and withholding of dollars. Witness the needless wars, the people who are starving who need not. The millions of children who are getting crappy education who need not. The families who have easily treatable medical conditions who can't afford it in a land where we can afford handing $700 Billion to bankers without any accountability.
There are aspects of Christmas I enjoy too, but the cynical side of me sees the holiday has far too much an invitation to pat ourselves on the back for being peaceful and good and caring and decent, based on isolated Yuletide acts of kindness, whereas we could lick many of the big problems if we really wanted to.