Macy’s elves

“We were given a demonstration of various positions in action, acted out by returning elves, who were so onstage and goofy that it made me a little sick to my stomach. I don’t know that I could look anyone in the eye and exclaim: Oh, my goodness, I think I see Santa. Or: can you close your eyes and make a very special Christmas wish?”
David Sedaris – Santaland Diaries

I spent forty minutes today in Macy’s lining up, along with hundreds of other parents, for the privilege of handing over my precious newborn to a garishly dressed stranger for a quick photo-op.

I assume my daughter enjoyed it. She appeared to be captivated by the lights and animatronics and generally spaced out as if on her own little baby LSD trip.

More prosaically, I spent the time thinking about those poor souls who found themselves working as elves and how true their experiences have been to David Sedaris’s in Santaland Diaries. They all seemed overwhelmingly young, a handful of them somewhat magnificently still maintaining a sense of Brooklyn hipness despite the costumes. Indeed, they should be thankful that they live in the age of the hipster; elf-appropriate breeches and stockings wouldn’t look entirely out of place in a Williamsburg bar on a Friday night.

Cognitive Dissonance: All for onesies, onesies for all

My grip on British pop-culture is loosening. I did, however, notice that one of this year’s most commented TV shows on social media was 15-stone Babies, a documentary by Channel 4 that looked into the world of adults who retreat to, or fetishize, life as an infant; they sleep in mansize cribs, they dress in diapers, they have someone change their diaper, etc. On twitter and Facebook, people seemed enthralled and repulsed by the documentary. “What a load of freaks,” was a common refrain among people I follow on Facebook. Fast-forward two months and a quick look at Facebook reveals a surprising number of the same people posting pictures of themselves in the onesies they received for Christmas.

Boxing Day

Boxing Day acts as the downer, the Christmas Xanax, for the previous day’s festive high. A post-bacchanalian slumber of leftover turkey, bad TV, and hours spent down at the pub – all of it easing us back into the mundane.

Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes —
Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week —
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted — quite unsuccessfully —
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry
And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.

From W. H. Auden’s “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio”

Carol of the Birds – Gillian Clarke

From the bedroom window I saw a cardinal in a bush; momentarily it fashioned a Christmas card image. Here the cardinal challenges the robin as the iconic Christmas bird. I hurried to try and take a shot of the bird as its presence seemed appropriately festive.

Winter sun is cold and low,
mew the kite and crake the crow,
bird of flame, bird of shadow,
ballad of blood on snow.

Owls are calling llw, llw, llw,

Kyrie, hullabaloo.

Small birds come without a sound,
starving to the feeding ground,
till the robin with his wound
carols the ice-bound land.

Noctua, hibou, gwdihw,

Owl’s lullaby – who? who? who?

The story tells of pain and blood,
the troubles of a restless world,
a star that lights the snowy fields,
towards a newborn child.

Owls are calling llw, llw, llw,

Kyrie, hullabaloo,
noctua, hibou, gwdihw,

lullaby – who? who? who?

Gillian Clarke’s Carol of the Birds

Carols from King’s

Watching an old broadcast of Carols from King’s on YouTube and trying to maintain one of my Christmas Eve rituals.

Shame BBC America feels the need to show ten hours (not exaggerating for comic effect) of James May’s Toy Stories rather than fitting this into the schedule.