CSotD: Nitpickers and other unpopular types

As we pull within two weeks of Christmas, Ben (MWAM) threatens his wife, and us, with a series of excruciating puns to fill the days, and I hope he follows through. The funny pages are so flooded with bad takeoffs on Christmas carols each year that it’s a relief when one of them confesses to such horror up front.

The Twelve Days of Christmas brings up a number of questions as well, beginning with the fundamental one of whether the singer is enumerating each day’s gifts or recapitulating the total from the two weeks. That is, does the lover end up with 12 partridges in pear trees, or is the initial partridge simply catalogued again each day?

The larger matter is that the 12 days begin not now but upon Christmas and extend through the Epiphany when the Magi visited and gave gifts.

In some countries, all gifts come with the Kings on January 6, which makes sense, and it’s quite a festival in Spain, for instance.

Though analyzing the timing leads only to confusion: Jesus had his bris in Jerusalem on January 1, before the Three Kings visited, and so all those nativity sets with the Magi huddled around the manger seem unlikely, since we can assume that the Holy Family was back in Nazareth after the Circumcision.

Or en route to Egypt. There is no certain thread to the whole thing, since Matthew and Luke’s nativity stories are not only folkloric but come from two different cultures. Matthew’s version is Israel-based Jewish folklore and Luke was a Hellenized Jew and so his is more Greek.

Doesn’t matter. I don’t think you have to believe that Noah had kangaroos and penguins on the ark either.

I particularly don’t think it makes anyone clever to poke holes in Biblical folklore, but that’s a losing battle because the Internet is flooded with folks who clearly believe otherwise.

 

This Cornered (AMS) conflates the term “grace” in the hymn with “grace,” the prayer of pre-meal thanksgiving when they’re not so far apart in the first place. At Camp Lord O’ The Flies, we used to sing “Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow” before Sunday dinner, and I’m sure we weren’t the only place where hymns fulfill the task.

The joke here being that someone playing “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes would ruin everyone’s appetites, and that’s true whether they are Sassenachs who hate the instrument or Gaels who hate the song.

“Amazing Grace” is to the bagpipes as “Heart and Soul” is to the piano: A perfectly good song, but a necessary choice of those for whom it is the only song they can play.

Like Nativity folktales, however, it tends to come up in contexts where criticizing it would be churlish.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Joel Pett)

(Clay Jones)

Speaking of poking holes in things for no particular reason, Clay Jones admits in his blog that he only trashed the late Mike Nesmith for something to do on a Sunday, and I suspect he was anticipating — and planning to enjoy — the objections that erupted on social media.

Many of those outraged people said they’d grown up with the Beatles and/or the Monkees, which sent me scrambling to the Internets to find out how old Joel Pett is, and it turns out he’s three years younger than I am, which is a little too young to have truly grown up with the Beatles, though he could claim to have grown up with the Monkees, which he does not.

And he’s quite correct that, while the times were hardly utopian, they had not yet become apocalyptic.

A strange sort of progress indeed.

Clay Jones was born the year the Monkees were formed, and the year the Beatles released “Revolver,” but he admits to having no particular affinity for either.

 

I, however, had the great good luck to have grown up with the Beatles, a claim I base on the rule laid out by Tom The Dancing Bug in 2007: I was 12 years old when they charted their first hit and I was 19 when they broke up and you can’t cut it any finer than that.

I’m of an age to know that the Monkees were not a musical knock-off of the Beatles. They were a sitcom imitation of Richard Lester’s Beatles movies, with their songs simply a marketing arm of the effort.

My little sisters adored them, but they also liked Bobby Sherman. As it happened, the Monkees produced better pop music than Bobby Sherman, often rising to the level of Paul Revere and the Raiders though not quite the Turtles.

Indeed, you had to have been there.

Anyway, Nesmith was a good musician who went on to do some remarkable things. Remembering him just for that TV show is like remembering Tom Hanks only for “Bosom Buddies,” which also aired for a mere two seasons.

Dagnabbit.

 

Returning to the impending holiday, Wallace the Brave (AMS) seems to be sparking a story arc worth following and I suspect Spud might have done well to not suggest anything, but it’s too late now.

I also suspect that the desk on stage implies a production of “A Christmas Carol,” because it’s not the right set for “The Nutcracker” and why else would Wallace’s parents have brought the kids out to a show?

One of the benefits of retirement is that I no longer have to assign kids to attend and critique holiday productions of “A Christmas Carol” and “The Nutcracker.” It was an impossible task to instruct them to bring anything new to either, mostly because the production companies didn’t bring anything new to either, which is called “tradition.”

I did, one year, manage to arrange for a young reporter who had done a fair amount of ballet herself to attend a rehearsal of the Nutcracker and then interview the prima donna, which I guess is opera but you know who I mean. Not only was it a good story, but getting her there before opening night solved our annual deadline issues.

Besides, nobody wants an actual critical review of either production, any more than they want some wiseass to poke holes in the Nativity story.

Such things don’t have to be factual to be true.