Keeping It Real

Hello World, Happy happy, joy joy, as they say in the cartoons. There's so much to be happy about, a person wouldn't hardly know where to start. Thursday was Boxing Day in much of the world, and there's also Kwanzaa, and the bright shiny new year is right around the corner in the middle of the week - so for anyone who didn't care for the way things were going in 2013, you won't have long to wait until the whole darned thing gets kicked to the curb once and for all. Last Tuesday, we had our candlelight Christmas Eve service at church and right on time, with some wonderful special music from our soloists, and our plucky choir-ette pitched in gamely with an anthem of their own, which was well received by the indulgent congregation. If all that wasn't already enough to celebrate, it's still a buying bonanza out there for those individuals who got in the habit of shopping back in November, and just can't seem to stop. A normal person might think that 2 months would be plenty of time for stores to move just about all of the merchandise that they could possibly want to sell at one time, but apparently not, because desperate retailers were already advertising their after-Christmas sales earlier in the week when it was still before Christmas. Admittedly, some of these ads were for cars, which only qualify as Christmas gifts in the loosest possible interpretation of the term, but many of them were for the hottest toys and gadgets that people were paying top dollar for, scant weeks previously. It would be a year-end good deed for all of us to get out there and snap up some bargains in the whole ho-ho-hullabaloo aftermath, and the President's economic advisers would thank you, I'm sure. Of course, Christmas was on Wednesday, and it must be true, because NORAD was tracking Santa's movements all night Tuesday, and we can be sure that it would not have been all over the Internet if it wasn't real. Speaking of other-worldly reality, I recently heard a commentator explain that almost 20% of Americans don't believe that the Apollo space missions actually landed astronauts on the moon, but that hundreds of millions of citizens were duped by a wide-ranging conspiracy, using a variety of complicated special effects to make the impossible seem plausible to a gullible nation yearning for a return to its glory days. He went on to explain that for a mission of that complexity (or even a fake one) it would have taken many tens of thousands of individuals working on every single aspect from the tiniest transistors to the most mammoth rocket engines, all the while willingly participating in a gigantic ruse and keeping mum about it for no apparent advantage. He said it probably would have been easier to actually land on the moon, than to get all of those untold thousands of people to keep a secret of that magnitude, and frankly, I can't help but agree with him there. After all, in the immortal words of Benjamin Franklin, "Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead." In other updates from the North Pole, NORAD wasn't the only one paying attention to Santa during the week, as anyone with a television set can readily attest. The holiday movies and specials came thick and fast, at all days and times, and on every channel from one end of the spectrum to the other. We caught up with one of the newer selections on Netflix, where it came as a complete surprise to us, and out of the proverbial blue, like a snowball in July. It was an animated flick called "Saving Santa," featuring the voice talents of Martin Freeman, Tim Conway, Joan Collins and Tim Curry, among others, and just what the doctor ordered for some holiday cheer when we needed it the most. It struck me that it's been a busy time for Martin Freeman, not only making two Hobbitt movies in a row (the newest one is in theaters now) but also the recent "The World's End," a good-natured romp about a band of English revelers on a pub crawl, as well as the upcoming season of the BBC mini-series "Sherlock" supposedly returning in January with the equally over-worked Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role. Anyway, this story seems simplistic on the face of it, with a few unmemorable songs tossed in for good measure, which is about par for the course of formulaic holiday movies since just about forever. But unlike many lesser examples of this ilk, it soon turns into a rollicking, time-traveling, intricately inter-twined free-for-all, that skitters along rambunctiously from one unlikely escapade to the next, dragging you along in breathless wonder right behind it. One of our continuing disappointments in Netflix as a whole is that they don't offer any 3-D entertainment for our viewing pleasure, but we chose to experiment with this showing in the fake 3-D mode that Sony provides on our big screen TV, and we considered it a spectacular success, making the entire experience all that much more exhilarating than it would have been otherwise, in the same old dull and flat version. If this is what they're calling "enhanced reality" nowadays, or some other euphemism for basically making stuff up out of whole cloth, personally I have to say that I'm all for it. Also from the "fact or faked" casebook, we have the curious Christmas caper whodunit, where alert shoppers in the stores on the 26th would have found precious little evidence of the yuletide spirit, in the merest hours past, still on the shelves, or even in the discount bins, to reveal that the holiday had ever taken place to begin with. All was summarily swept away or sent packing, until scarcely a snowflake, jingle bell or candy cane remained to tell the tale. Of course, this is what comes of people rushing out to buy their so-called Christmas trees in the first place when it's still before Thanksgiving, so that by the day after Christmas, those self-same trees are already out in the street, and all the lavish decorations from the previous month are nothing but a fleeting memory. The commercialization of the season has actually served to turn Advent into Christmas, and the 25th - rather than ushering in the Christmas season that continues through to Epiphany in January - is now nothing more than a jumping-off point to the football playoffs and Valentine's Day. Alas poor Christmas, which has somehow managed to become eclipsed by its own unbridled popularity, while inexplicably, being a victim of its own runaway success. And speaking of inexplicable, I was at work when I happened to overhear two Jewish doctors discussing the age-old miracle in Bethlehem, and since one of them was apparently married out of the faith to a Christian woman, felt qualified to pontificate on the festival's rituals, traditions and religious practices, at least as far as he understood them. I will say that he probably did a better job explaining Christmas to a Jewish person than I would have done, say, trying to describe Yom Kippur to another Christian, but there was still a lot that seemed to get lost in translation, like seeing a familiar movie in a foreign language with sub-titles that you already know are wrong. I almost spoke up when he got to the part where The Wise Men show up in a sleigh with reindeer, but hey - I've always felt that reality is over-rated anyway, and I just love a happy ending, don't you? Elle