Month: December 2024

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Who, Where, But Mostly When?

The joke used to be, of course, that people couldn’t get used to writing the correct year on their checks for weeks (or months!) after New Year. That’s gone the way of all things flesh because, well, who writes checks for anything anymore? (I still have some in my office, of course, in case of emergency or the utter collapse of the internet… but we’d never be so lucky for that latter one to happen any time soon.) The strange thing for me, however, is that somewhere in my brain, it’s been 2025 for weeks before the year has even officially started,

I’d love to blame this on being really, really organized and prepared for the year that’s coming, but it’s more likely an after-effect of having almost entirely lost track of time in the past few months. I know that I’m not the only person who, writing this mid-December, feels as if it’s actually somewhere back in late October or maybe early November at the latest; I’ve spoken to enough people in the last couple of weeks who seem as surprised that it’s actually the holiday season as I am to confirm my company on this particular crazy train. But I’ve also been spending more time than I’d like to admit thinking about what lies ahead in the next 12 months that, on countless work documents in the past week, I’ve described our current time frame as December 2025.

That’s not all; in referring to the past 12 months in emails to people or multiple work scenarios, I’ve talked about it as 2025, and asked people what their favorite things have been in 2025, prompting more than one “I don’t know yet, what are you actually asking?” in response. (If only I knew the answer to that question, friends…) Maybe “2025” just sounds better in my head than “2024.” Perhaps I just wanted to skip out of the year that saw me turn 50 all the sooner, thinking that 51 is somehow preferable for a mysterious, probably non-existent reason. Who can tell why my brain does anything it does, at this point?

This sense of disorientation is something that, I can only hope, will lessen across the next few months with no holidays, conventions, and very little travel planned. As strange as it may seem, the space between January and March is as close to a “quiet period” as I get these days, for all manner of reasons; a time when other people need to settle into their new year and find their feet. Some of us, it turns out, have been living here for awhile already.

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Trying to Touch and Reach You with Heart and Soul

We’re close enough to the end of the year that I might as well finish up the 2024 playlist that I’ve shared once or twice during the year (okay, three times; it’s because I shared them in bunches of 50 songs at a time; there’s a formula!). As the year came to a close, I added less things to the playlist (intended to be new songs to me, or things I was becoming newly obsessed with after not listening to for awhile) because my attention was on things I’d already added, but nonetheless:

The actual playlist is here. If, by some strange circumstance, I add more songs between writing this post and the end of the year, you’ll find them here.

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Step Three, Seasonal Profit

What makes a good Christmas story?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, for obvious reasons — look at the calendar, after all. It’s the most wonderful time of the year, as any number of singers will tell you if you listen to the radio long enough, and that means that I’ve been watching more than my fair share of holiday movies and reading just as many (if not more) holiday comic books. I even made the mistake of watching Red One, the “Chris Evans is a dirtbag and Dwayne Johnson is a giant security elf and I guess they’re a buddy comedy team now?” movie from this year, and…. oh boy.

The problem with Red One is the problem with Spirited, a very similar holiday movie starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds from last year; both are comedies in which a real-world cynic comes to accept the magic of the holidays while paired with a secretly-disillusioned magical being who also comes to believe in the holidays all anew, and everyone lives happily ever after, and both make the mistake of thinking that the way to do this is by replacing magic with a mixture of special effects and “hilarious” real-world elements. Santa’s treated like the President with a special security detail, get it? The North Pole is an efficiently-run bureaucracy, understand? It’s so relatable.

Except, of course, it’s not. It’s restrictive and boring and makes everything feel more generic; there’s, if anything, a purposeful lack of magic, as whimsy and wonder get replaced by cynicism and formula.

My contrast, I’ve been re-reading Will Eisner’s The Christmas Spirit throughout the month, which collects the various holiday-themed installments of his 1940s newspaper strip The Spirit. Every single story in there feels like a model of what works for a good Christmas story, because every single one is based around a very simple idea: at some point, someone will be moved to make a kinder choice than they normally would, and everything changes for the better as a result. It’s a formula that doesn’t require gimmicks, winks at the audience while referencing Santa, magic, or snowmen, or anything other than the belief that the holidays are really about trying to be kind and good… and seeing what happens as a result.

There’s a lesson there for… well, basically everyone who’s thinking that Vin Diesel should play Santa’s half-brother through adoption who has to save the holidays in a big budget streaming special this time next year. But then, seeing what Eisner did and trying to learn from it has never really been a bad idea.

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Christmas is a Time Travel Story

At this time of year, thoughts turn to holiday playlists, and the essential songs that have to make it on to every single one. (I shared mine earlier this week.) I had a thought the other day bemoaning the lack of good new Christmas songs, before I realized two things simultaneously:

  1. I am old, and therefore almost destined to find so much of “new” music to be boring, dull, or just simply not my bag, daddio.
  2. More than arguably any other music genre, the appeal of Christmas music is that it’s nostalgic and pulls you back to simpler, earlier times in your life. So finding “new” Christmas songs that appeal to you as much as songs you grew up with it… difficult, to say the least. (Which is to say, sorry Sabrina Carpenter and your Nonsense Christmas Song.)

That last one is something I should have realized sooner, because it’s a lesson I learned when I was a kid myself. There were many Christmas traditions in my house growing up, which is almost certainly why I’m such a holiday fiend to this day. One of the major ones, though, was that when we did the decorations for the living room and the rest of the house, we would listen to Christmas music, and if at all possible, that would start with the music my mother grew up listening to at that time of year — which is to say, Nat King Cole’s Christmas album.

I say, “if at all possible,” because there was a period where the album was gone for some reason. Maybe it was destroyed, or misplaced? I don’t remember what happened to it, but I do remember that a replacement was eventually purchased after a couple of years, and it was clear the difference it made in her experience just hearing him sing “The Christmas Song” again. It was what completed the whole thing for her; without that song, it wasn’t really Christmas.

I’m the same. Not just with “The Christmas Song” (I learned from the best, and was taught at a young age), but with “Merry Xmas Everybody” and “I Wish It Could be Christmas Everyday” and at least half of the Phil Spector Christmas album. That’s not to say that new songs can’t be added to that must-listen list, because they can — things like Low’s “Just Like Christmas,” The Blind Boys of Alabama’s “Last Month of the Year” and The Executor’s “Christmas is a Joyful Day” have all achieved that goal since I was a kid — but the core songs, those ones that get played the most and induce the strongest festive feelings… all of them come from way back, and remind me of the wonder that you feel most strongly when things were simpler, happier, and I didn’t have to worry about taking time off work in order to celebrate everything appropriately.

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Bright Candle Flame, Etc.

Sure, my thoughts might have turned to the festive musical season a little later than usual this year — or, rather, I was surprised how quickly December arrived, when my brain apparently had a lot more November to deal with — but I rallied and built myself a holiday playlist to play while getting in a holiday mood. Unusually for me, this one is all killer and no filler, with the arguable exception of its opening track (I love it, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if other people disagree); it felt like a year to bring things into sharp focus with the classics, maybe. Anyway, for those who want two hours of holiday music, it’s right here for your Spotify ears. And what’s on it? Why, check out the screenshots below.

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Call Me By Someone Else’s Name

If there’s a literary tradition I am inordinately fond of, it’s the nom de plume. I love the idea of people working under fake names for whatever their reasons, and perhaps even more so, I love the idea that others can then discover the true identities behind the name through a small amount of detective work; the whole thing seems like a strange, sometimes sadly necessary, game that I find myself all too eager to play on any number of occasions.

(I have, to the best of my admittedly poor memory, only employed a fake name in work once — which is not the same as ghostwriting, which is something I’ve done a lot and, as I continue to work as an editor, find myself doing with no small amount of frequency. The fake name I did use was a matter of necessity, as I was under a non-compete contract at the time but also owed another outlet a story. Shhhh. Don’t tell.)

My admittedly ridiculous joy in the practice might stem from growing up reading 2000 AD as a kid, where there were issues where 4/5 of the stories were written by the same writing team, but using different names to disguise the seeming lack of available talent. Names which were familiar to the kid-who-was-me at the time — John Howard, T.B. Grover — were, in fact, not real people at all, a fact that utterly delighted me when I eventually found out, years later. I’d been a fan of no-one, this whole time!

I was thinking about this recently upon discovering that there’s an Elephant 6 band called Major Organ and The Adding Machine that… well, no-one actually seems to know for sure who it is. It feels like the pseudonym taken one stage further, somehow; a group identity that people can (and have!) made guesses about the truth, but which more than 25 years later, no-one really knows for sure. Imagine if the Beatles had released Sgt. Pepper’s… but kept the act up the whole way through…

I have, on more than one occasion, promised myself that I’d start doing a webcomic under a fake name and just put it out there for people to randomly discover. Maybe that’s a project for 2025.

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That Is The Feeling That I Wish For You

For someone who is both such a fan of the holidays in general — embarrassingly so, achingly so; it genuinely is probably my favorite time of the year — and specifically such a fan of the traditional holiday music that generally fills the airwaves at this time, I’m suitably embarrassed to admit that, the first time I heard Christmas songs on the radio this year, it came as a surprise.

In my defense, November was another beast of a month that left me feeling somewhat adrift in time. Even with the anchor of Thanksgiving — one that, for the first time in years, had actual guests, and from out of town at that, making it more of an event! — the entire month seemed to go by so quickly that I wasn’t entirely sure when I was the entire time. (Surely November had only just started, right? Wasn’t Hallowe’en just the week before? When was the election?) I was, bluntly, not prepared to hear the twinkle of the Beach Boys’ singing about Ol’ Saint Nick just yet.

I wonder, in some absent-minded, half-hearted manner, whether there’s something to be said for a pop cultural indoctrination or preparation; traditionally, Thanksgiving around these here parts means watching Miracle on 34th Street and putting my head into that Santa space, but this year that fell by the wayside because of the guests, so maybe I just wan’t properly prepared…

Here’s the thing, though; it wasn’t just that the songs were surprising, it’s that they felt so welcome when I heard them – at once familiar and oddly grounding, as if letting me know that I knew exactly where I was on the calendar and maybe a little bit emotionally, as well. In my defense, it wasn’t actually the Beach Boys that did that trick, but hearing “Linus and Lucy” from the Charlie Brown Christmas Special; hearing that piano hit me so strongly, in a good way, and put me in the mood I should have been in for a few days prior.

Chalk another one up for the magic of music, the holidays, or that very particular combination of the two, I guess. Next year, I’ll try to remember this ahead of time to get me where I’m supposed to be.