Christmas

Sunday

Peter Wood

The meaning of trees aflame

One of my favorite trees collapsed the other day. It was a tall balsam fir that stood almost cylindrical on the steep hillside behind my house in Vermont, keeping post beside an old hemlock. The branches of the hemlock turn and twist in the breeze with joyous abandon. The fir tree, however, faced the harshest gale with stoic reserve, barely swaying. But last week it suddenly uprooted itself and fell like a wounded comrade into the embrace of its brother. Arborcide, of course, has been in the news lately. On December 8, a man set fire to and destroyed the fifty-foot artificial tree outside News Corp headquarters in midtown Manhattan. Forty-nine-year old Craig Tamanaha was arrested on the spot and was naturally released without bail shortly afterwards.

tree

Thursday

Michael Warren Davis

Live like it’s Christmas every day

Every December 24 — while dad builds the fire, mom preps the salmon loaf, wifey makes the eggnog, and I “test” the brandy — a wail goes up from the Davis house. It’s Elvis Presley, crying: “O why can’t every day be like Christmas? Why can’t that feeling go on endlessly?” And we answer him, no less soulfully: “For if every day could be just like Christmas, what a wonderful world this would be!” It’s a great song. But, hey, doesn’t the man deserve an answer? Why can’t every day be like Christmas? Granted, we can’t all spend our days opening presents and eating sugar cookies. It might work for Tom Hanks, but some of us have work to do. And yet, whatever the cynics might say, I don’t think Christmas cheer has that much to do with presents.

Wednesday

Teresa Mull

Time for a national snow day

The world in wintertime (at least where it snows) is a different place. Here in rural Pennsylvania, a distinct, sulfuric musk — a most nostalgic and comforting scent — wafts through my little hometown, lending an antiquated charm that reminds us of bygone days when coal was king (and proves it’s still very much in the royal family in these parts). While the natural world dies, hibernates, and goes dormant, our human spirits are rejuvenated. When the temperature drops, there’s a communal mood change, the effects of which tend to be a contagious energy and a marked softening of mankind. People let down their guards, exchanging prank gifts at office Christmas parties while wearing elf ears and silly, ugly sweaters bedecked with jingle bells.

Matt Purple

I’m dreaming of a ‘problematic’ Christmas

A new edict has just been handed down by our woke betters. According to an article at the Huffington Post, it is now forbidden to use the (distinctly holiday) phrase "let's work off ___," as in "let's go to the gym and work off those seventeen snickerdoodles and entire burlap sack of peppermint bark we ate yesterday." Per HuffPo, such fat-shaming, "while surely intended as a lighthearted joke, is seriously problematic, according to experts." It's the "according to experts" that always slays me there. And while I don't want to pit the authorities against each other, the doctors I've talked to have all warned that one consequence of engorging on sweets is that eventually you do turn into a lardass.

Tuesday

Addison Del Mastro

The Christmas carol canon that could have been

Ah, Christmastime, the season for pheasant dinners, fancy ties, the land of Toyland from which you can never return, the time of year when everyone falls in love, when snowmen fly away to Snowland to become Eskimos, and when kids run around crying “dickory dock!” Right? All of these are bits and pieces from old Christmas songs that have mostly been forgotten, whose imagery and language failed to take hold in the general imagination. It’s quite fascinating how such a small number of songs, from a very narrow moment in American life, have contributed so heavily to defining the mood and feel of our secular Christmases.

commander biden dog major cat
Cockburn

Bad boy: Bidens dump dog week before Christmas

They say a dog is for life, not just for Christmas. Clearly that’s another old adage Joe Biden no longer remembers, as this week his White House announced the unsanctimonious jettisoning of Major, the president’s German shepherd, in favor of Commander, a younger, friendlier pup. “Welcome to the White House, Commander,” a tweet from the official POTUS account read. The president’s social media flacks then posted a video of the new First Dog playing with Biden. In the clip, Commander sits in order to earn a treat from the president: clearly an upgrade in the behavioral stakes. https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1473057147017744390 Major, you may recall, was a rescue taken in by the Biden family in November 2018.

Monday

Esther O'Reilly

Seventy-five years of It’s a Wonderful Life

Frank Capra was almost too embarrassed to pitch his greatest film to Jimmy Stewart. At the time, both men were veterans in a post-war slump. Capra was losing his first confidence in a shelved Cary Grant vehicle-that-wasn’t, a script that had been torturously adapted from a short story by a fractious committee of writers. He stumbled through the premise for Stewart, trying to explain that the story starts in Heaven, and it’s about this fellow who thinks he’s a failure in life, so an angel named Clarence has to come down and stop him from jumping off a bridge, except Clarence can’t swim so the fellow has to save him… Here Capra paused, mopping his brow to confess, “This doesn’t tell very well, does it?

wonderful life

Friday

Michael Warren Davis

Why do so many Americans believe in the Devil?

Early in our marriage, my wife vetoed the idea of celebrating Christmas in the Alpine tradition: by having Santa Claus accompanied by Krampus, your friendly neighborhood ice-demon. Of course, Mrs. Davis was amenable to the idea of a horned monster beating our children with birch rods. At least when they’re naughty. Then she realized that, since neither of us are Swiss, it would technically be cultural appropriation. That was the end of that. Speaking of demons, here’s a little Christmas meditation for you: more Americans believe in the Devil than in God. According to a recent survey, 56 percent of us believe that “Satan is not merely a symbol of evil but is a real spiritual being and influences human lives.” That’s compared to 51 percent who believe in an all-powerful Creator.

Thursday

Teresa Mull

Covid is no excuse to dress like a slob

The Covid-19 outbreak has been hard on us all. So please: as we slowly return to our in-person office jobs (assuming we do at all), don’t make it any harder than it already is by dressing like you’re still working from your makeshift at-home “office.” “The coronavirus pandemic has boosted Americans' love of comfort wear, accelerating a trend toward wearing athletic attire — also known as ‘athleisure’ wear — at all hours of the day,” reports CBS News. “Since the beginning of the pandemic, sales of formal attire have slumped as stuck-at-home workers prioritize how they feel over how they look.” The athleisure market — already a $155 billion industry — is expected to skyrocket to $257 billion over the next five years.

athleisure
christmas
Matt Purple

The war on Christmas comes home

America's longest war has just come home. Last week, Fox News’s All-American Christmas Tree, standing merrily outside the channel's headquarters in New York, was set on fire and destroyed. The arsonist was quickly arrested upon which he was subjected to the fearsome rigor of our justice system: released without bail as he cussed out reporters. We should pause here to note just how banal and predictable much of the late-night jesting about the blaze has been. It isn't that the likes of Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert shouldn't joke about the fire — crack all you like, and the Daily Show's "Pine Eleven" was pretty funny.

Sunday

Micah Mattix

Saving Henry James’s Christmas ghost story from the critics

If you have a graduate degree in English, I’ll bet you my neglected copy of Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination, you’ve read Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. It’s long been a favorite of critics because we don’t really know what happens in the end — everyone loves a puzzle — but the postmodern critics love it big time. You can superimpose any half-baked theory with impunity because no one will call you on it. In 1995, Wayne Booth wrote that he found more than 500 books or articles on the novella before he got tired of adding them up. It’s easily double that now. That’s not to say it’s a bad story. Quite the opposite. I think it’s one of James’s best. It is also a good example of how James has been misunderstood.

ghost

Friday

Alexander Larman

The problem with Christmas movies

The first time I saw Love, Actually was upon its release in 2003. I thought it was generally fine, with good and bad bits jostling alongside one another, and scene-stealing performances by Bill Nighy and Emma Thompson going a long way to counteracting the dreadfulness of some of the supporting cast and general Richard Curtis-ness of it all. But what I was unprepared for was that it would go from being a reasonably enjoyable portmanteau rom-com into a film that epitomizes "the contemporary spirit of Christmas," or some such rubbish. Every year, it becomes ever more ubiquitous, whether on streaming platforms, television or even in theater re-releases. And every year, something inside me dies a little harder.

Wednesday

Cockburn

Cockburn cruises the DC Christmas party scene

Cockburn entered the Christmas party fray with two ironclad rules in mind: don’t mix drinks and make sure you eat something. He managed to break both on Tuesday night as he stumbled across the nation’s capital. His first port of call was the Breitbart Christmas drinks at Blackfinn. Guests including various GOP Hill staffers took advantage of a free bar towards the back of the venue and were treated to a brief appearance from petite former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer. The talk of the event was the forthcoming DC newsletter Breitbart are set to launch in the coming weeks.

christmas

Friday

Cockburn

Let Cockburn debase himself at your Christmas party

It is, as Andy Williams memorably put it, the most wonderful time of the year. Christmas party season has hit the Swamp — and naturally Cockburn is in his element. He has dusted off his dowdiest Clark Griswold cardigan and Santa hat. He has stocked up on milk thistle and Brita filters to abate the inevitable daily hangovers. His social calendar is quickly filling up with invites from think tanks, embassies and slightly grubbier magazines than this one — but it could be fuller still. Email your party invitations to cockburn@thespectator.

christmas party

Monday

Cockburn

Lower your expectations for Dr. Jill’s White House Christmas

Christmas may not come from a store, but Cockburn's poor heart still shrunk three sizes after he saw First Lady Jill Biden's attempt at Christmas decorations on Monday. The good doctor unveiled her first annual White House holiday décor with the theme "Gifts from the Heart", an ode to "small acts of kindness" that was rather small-minded indeed. Cockburn's distaste for Dr. Jill's decorations is only partially motivated by the fact that he was not invited to the press preview as in past years; he is sure that after four years of First Lady Melania Trump's ethereal and Vogue-esque displays, independent observers will agree that the new administration didn't live up to the hype.

White House holiday decorations in Washington, DC (Getty Images)

Thursday

Hannah Moore

What’s good from the goose

One of the more curious habits of the British is their tendency to publish opinion polls in national newspapers about their own food habits. Which way round, for example, are you meant to dress your scone? Is it clotted cream first, then jam — or jam first and cream second? Well, the Queen does it jam first, so that must be the way. Or that other national debate, tea and then milk, or the opposite? When I first arrived in the UK thirteen years ago, I was amused to see how worked up the British get about such questions. Try asking them sometime and see what happens. A new poll reveals that 58 percent of the British public admit to preferring roast potatoes over turkey. “How could you?” we’re supposed to gasp. “Everyone knows Christmas dinner is about the turkey!

goose
Calla Jones Corner

I ate Audrey Hepburn’s kidneys

It was late November when Diana called, telling me her butcher would soon kill the “fatted calf.” Sharing a butchered calf once a year with a Swiss friend meant you both had a freezer-full of veal at half price. Being asked to share a calf was also a sign of a deep friendship — akin to using tu instead of vous and locking arms in a toast over shot glasses of white wine. Both could take ten years, which was about as long as I’d known Diana. I had long since gotten over what butchers did. I liked meat — most meat. But I didn’t want to see lots of blood. Growing up, I always asked my father for the outside slice of a roast or his charcoal-grilled steak. Now, I drew the line with rabbit. Rabbit is not normally on an American menu.

kidneys
christmas
Luke Haines

Sounds of Christmas past

Remember when you were so nonchalant about the inevitability of Christmas privilege? Time off work for the holiday season, a few messy coke sessions with colleagues, maybe a boozy catch up with an old friend? Going out and about, buying your bourgeois real (dead) Christmas tree? Remember how you hated all that cornball Christmas muzak piped into the department stores: Slade, Wizard, Macca’s “Wonderful Christmastime,” The Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping,” Nat King Cole’s “Christmas Song”? Then along came Covid and Christmas was gone. You, my friend, were in lockdown. As each post-2020 festive season rolls into town, so will the new variants of Covid. The smart set decrees that it’s best we all hole up for the holidays and hide from disease and death.

fashion
Jessa Crispin

Fashion, fairies and folklore

In blows the dark of winter, bringing with it partially estranged family members, seemingly endless nights and all those television movies about a big boss lady who gets stranded in a small town for the holidays and learns the true meaning of Christmas by falling in love with a lumberjack. It is not a great time of year. But as every sullen teenager knows, headphones are a great way to escape the gathering and retreat inward. There is an abundance of podcasts about how great the holiday season is — how festive, how rich with tradition and meaning. I get through the holidays with day-drinking and bingeing French television shows while shoving cheese into my face, so these don’t really speak to me.

chambertin
Roger Kimball

Silky, sumptuous wines for Christmas dinner

I have had occasion to mention George Saintsbury’s classic, if quirky, Notes on a Wine-Cellar (1920) in this column before. Back then, it was to sample and swish about the mouth Saintsbury’s fondness — which I took to be a broader public fondness — for fortified wines like port, sherry, and Madeira. I suspect that most of my readers, except when listening to Flanders and Swann, rarely give Madeira a second thought. And although afternoons were made for sherry, they were made for other things too. As for vintage port, we are wheeling into the season — Thanksgiving through New Year’s — when it comes into its own and gladdens the hearts of many. I am certainly counting on it to gladden the hearts of the serious thinkers chez Kimball at Thanksgiving and Christmas this year.