Original anecdotes, commentary, rumination, and occasional pontification.
DECEMBER 27, 2024 – This evening I finished watching Darkest Hour, directed by Joe Wright and featuring Gary Oldman in the role of Winston Churchill. Oldman won an Oscar for Best Actor for his extraordinary performance in this historical drama. I’d read quite a lot about Churchill—his harrowing experiences as a soldier and war correspondent …
DECEMBER 26, 2024 – ‘’Tis the season for the Middle East: the star over the manger in Bethlehem, in the case of Christians; the Maccabean Revolt, capture of Jerusalem and cleansing of the Second Temple and the miracle of the oil (think: lights of the menorah), in the case of Judaism. Unfortunately, every season “’tis …
DECEMBER 25, 2024 – Before the end of Christmas and the beginning of Hanukkah, we packed the car, mostly with food, and headed up to the Red Cabin for a few days in the north woods. It was my first trip up here since the last of the autumn foliage had fallen. Now the land …
DECEMBER 24, 2024 – This morning my wife announced that she’d found tucked away in the very back of her underwear drawer[1], a neat stash of letters that our two sons had written to Santa Claus back in ancient times. Of course I wanted to see it—the stash of letters, I mean. They reflected a …
DECEMBER 23, 2024 – When it comes to official holidays, the thing about Christmas is that it’s not just one day. It’s an entire drawn-out season, and close on its heels is New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. Retailers bulk up their shelves and increase their hiring weeks in advance. We the people lay …
DECEMBER 22, 2024 – I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with the sights, odors and cacophony of the marketplace. On the one hand, I’ve been drawn to the bazaar of commerce; to the grand combination of consumption, industry and trade and all the ancillary activities, from finance to economics to management to legal issues to …
DECEMBER 21, 2024 – With the Christmas song, Do You Hear What I Hear? (and its first verse line, “Do you see what I see?”) ringing inside my head, I’m compelled to ask, Who in this country does not hear and see what’s happened to our precious democracy? Who does not hear, who does not …
DECEMBER 20, 2024 – Yet again, my fingers—if not my brain—wanted to turn out a screed excoriating President Musk for having displaced the autocrat-elect as leader of United Plutocrats of America. But this still being the cheerful season of the year, I shifted gears to write something . . . well, cheerful. That was until …
DECEMBER 19, 2024 – If you hadn’t noticed, since December 4 my posts have embraced a Christmas theme in keeping with this festive season of the year which has evolved from its pagan roots to its Christian foundation to its steroidal commercial secularism and generic expression, “Happy Holiday!” With still six whole days remaining before …
DECEMBER 18, 2024 – My wife could easily find employment at Santa’s North Pole outpost. Within hours she’d likely be promoted to a supervisory role, and by the end of her first day on the job, she’d ascend to an executive vice president level. She has natural executive skills and exhibits good tastes and sensibilities …
DECEMBER 17, 2024 – Back in the day, the exchange of Christmas cards was one of my favorite aspects of the season. Even as a self-absorbed kid for whom Christmas presents were the biggest deal of all, I loved to be the one who got to check the mailbox and find it stuffed with newly …
DECEMBER 16, 2024 – If you read last Saturday’s post, you know the TV situation in our house during my “growing up years.” Omitted was mention of notable exceptions: the quadrennial presidential nominating conventions, the Olympics and the first manned moon-landing. For these events, Dad rented a TV—from Joe’s Western Auto hardware store in downtown …
DECEMBER 15, 2024 – Yesterday evening we (my wife and I and our nine-year-old granddaughter) attended my showman brother-in-law’s Christmas show in front of a sell-out crowd at the Fitzgerald Theater in downtown St. Paul. The full-on three-hour production of A Prairie Home Companion Christmas, with indefatigable veterans, sound effects man extraordinaire Fred Newman; Tim …
DECEMBER 14, 2024 – For most of my growing-up years, our family lived without a television. I’m not sure if this was a conscious decision on the part of my parents or simply a “result by default” after the television that we did own had gone on the fritz. The default scenario alone is unlikely. …
DECEMBER 13, 2024 – Throughout her life, my oldest sister has been the consummate over-achiever. One manifestation of this attribute—and closely associated with Christmas—is that from the late 1970s to circa 2020, she performed in close to two thousand performances of The Nutcracker Ballet produced by the Boston Ballet Company. My second oldest sister, took …
DECEMBER 12, 2024 – Ever since Prometheus gave fire to humankind, our ancestors have sat around the campfire telling stories. It stands to reason: human speech preceded human writing—and presumably cave paintings—by a good number of millennia, and there’s no more powerful agent than a crackling fire in the pit and glowing embers off to …
DECEMBER 11, 2024 – Anyone who belongs to a mainstream church or even one of the confounding number of offstream churches is familiar with the “pageantry” of the annual Christmas pageant. Back in my churchy days, I thought of these de rigueur features of Sunday school as three-set Venn diagrams. One circle, of course, represented …
DECEMBER 10, 2024 – The power of rationalization is often underestimated. Over my lifetime, I’ve observed people undergo the most extraordinary mental gymnastics to justify taking an easier but inferior path over the more difficult but superior one. Or simply to hide the truth, either from others or, more often, from themselves. Some rationalizations have …
DECEMBER 9, 2024 – When I was a kid, outdoor Christmas lighting was a crude precursor of its infinite modern refinements and variations. The standard issue lighting back in the day consisted of strings of large slightly oblong bulbs (featuring the primary colors plus green) that ran usually along the gutters, occasionally along the gabled …
DECEMBER 8, 2024 – Amidst telling stories mostly about Christmas past, I must take a break to recount a hilarious story about Christmas present. My wife was having a rough go at decorating the house. The first problem arose when our nine-year-old granddaughter decided to opt-out of the “festivities.” This choice was a let-down for …
DECEMBER 7, 2024 – My Nilsson grandparents, who lived within easy walking distance of “Dinkytown” on the edge of the main campus of the University of Minnesota, never showed interest in decorating for Christmas. By the time I was in their lives, anyway, they’d dispensed with the whole business of buying a tree, decorating it with …
DECEMBER 6, 2024 – Every Yuletide (I love the old word), while working at my laptop, I play YouTube recordings of the timeless Christmas classics, Handel’s Messiah and Vivaldi’s Gloria. I alternate between the two, though with lopsided preference for the Venetian. My “go to” rendition of Gloria is a 12-year-old performance by the Armenian …
DECEMBER 5, 2024 – How can it be December 5 already? I remember when December lasted forever. No, a thousand years ago the earth wasn’t rotating any more slowly than it does today, but in my perception of each diurnal turn, our planet was definitely spinning at a more leisurely rate. As a kid I …
DECEMBER 4, 2024 – Last night before bedtime—our granddaughter’s, not mine—I read from Stave I of A Christmas Carol. Few if any works of literature composed in English have enjoyed such broad and lasting popularity as C.D.’s book of the season. Compact—especially for Dickens—and impactful, it’s a tale that I appreciate ever more as I …
DECEMBER 3, 2024 – Judging by the colored blonde hair with dark roots, the long pink sparkly false nails, the oversized ring, the expensive blanket cape, the high black shoes . . . the middle-aged woman across the aisle and one row up on the flight back to Minnesota was definitely not from my zip …