The western world has been determinedly turning out pop-culture Christmas stories for a solid 150 years. There is the classic It’s A Wonderful Life, the overrated Frosty the Snowman, and the classically overrated Gift of the Magi. But the best of them all – possibly even the first of them all – is A Christmas…
Tag: Christmas
Right Around the Corner
The Christmas season is over. If you subscribe strictly to the church calendar, the season might linger on until Saturday. But as a general social rule, the Christmas season is effectively over after New Year’s Day. Now it’s time to get back to life and start the new year (2019: What Could Go Wrong?). So…
Keeping Christmas
Of all the Christmas stories ever told since St. Luke penned the first and true one – of all the books and shows and movies themed to the season, all the Christmas specials – the greatest is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a tour de force for the ages. The story’s greatness is made up…
Movie Review: Small One
You’ve all heard of a boy and his dog. This is the story of a boy and his donkey. It’s an old, mangy donkey, tattered ears and scruffy fur, but in his eyes it’s good enough for a king’s stable. He loves it, you see. But his father tells him they must sell it, because…
Christmas Is Too …
If you listen long enough, you will discover that Christmas is too much of many things. It is too commercial, too materialistic, too Christian, too pagan, too saccharine and nothing but an excuse for shameless capitalistic mongering. These opinions will be with us until the end of Christmas, and I have no ambitions of dislodging…
From the Office of Cooking Experiments (Christmas Edition)
Today, in timely festivity, the Office of Cooking Experiments presents its very first Christmas edition. Christmas is, of course, a beautiful, spiritual season that is easily ruined by stress, and it is our hope to reduce the stress that you, the amateur holiday cook, so naturally feel. At Christmas, you are expected to cook for…
Tannenbaum
Tannenbaum The lights are laced through the branches of the Christmas tree – the same lights that have adorned our tree for twenty Christmases past. The bulbs are old, thick; they do not sparkle so much as glow deep colors over the evergreen needles. A plastic crown tilts on the reaching topmost branch, a token…
(Christmas) Movie Review: Rise of the Guardians
Jack Frost was nimble, Jack Frost was quick; Jack Frost froze the world with his stick. Yes, I know: It’s a mixing of disparate bits of culture and childhood lore, kind of catchy and not quite right. And in that, it’s like Rise of the Guardians. Rise of the Guardians was released into theaters around…
Movie Review: Arthur Christmas
Arthur’s heart was in the right place; it was his feet that usually weren’t. He wasn’t quite harmless – certainly not to the elves he routinely tripped over, whose home he once accidentally melted. But he meant well. Arthur Christmas is a story of Santa, his wife, his father, and his two sons. If you…
Review: Arthur Christmas
Arthur’s heart was in the right place; it was his feet that usually weren’t. He wasn’t quite harmless – certainly not to the elves he routinely tripped over, whose home he once accidentally melted. But he meant well. Arthur Christmas is a story of Santa, his wife, his father, and his two sons. If you…