December 2005

Earl and I have needed a little kick in the holiday spirit this evening. With trying to keep up with the rat race, we’ve found little time to just sit down, relax and enjoy a little Christmas joy for ourselves. So tonight we decided to snuggle up to the holiday classic, “White Christmas”.

All proper showings of classic movies deserve a little short to set the mood, so we first watched “A Vision of Sugar Plums”, the Christmas episode from the very first season of Bewitched.

In “Visions…”, Billy Mumy plays Michael, a bully of a boy that lives at the local orphanage that has come home with Darrin and Samantha for Christmas. He doesn’t have a very warm, fuzzy feeling for the holidays, believing its all a bunch of bunk. Samantha decides to convince him otherwise, and whisks him off to the North Pole, along with Darrin riding shotgun on her broom, so he can meet Santa Claus. After meeting Santa Claus, Michael starts feeling the holiday spirit, calms down a little bit and seems to move on to a well-adjusted life with the parents that want to adopt him (the father being Bill Daily, Major Healey from “I Dream of Jeannie”).

After Bewitched it was on to the main feature, “White Christmas”.

This movie is one of our all-time favorites. The cinematography is breathtaking (in Vistavision!). The musical numbers are most enjoyable and words cannot describe the amount of talent found in this movie. Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, Vera-Ellen are all incredible performers. They certainly don’t make movies like “White Christmas” anymore and Hollywood doesn’t seem to have the talent found back in the day. Watching “White Christmas” has inspired me to watch more classic movies this winter and I’m looking forward to snuggling up on cold winter nights to catch on some old chestnuts.

Tonight was just what we needed to fully get into the holiday spirit. Now I’m looking forward to catching “Bell, Book and Candle” sometime next week, another classic (and an inspiration for Bewitched) that takes place at Christmas.

Tomorrow we are off to Pennsylvania to kick off the annual Christmas tour. It’s going to be a grand weekend.

I was looking at old files on our webserver here at jpnearl.com and came across this little blog entry type thingee I wrote back in December 2001. For some bizarre reason, I was writing blog entries outside of my blog. I don’t recall why I was doing that, but nevertheless, if you’d like to take a look, here it is.

12/23/2001. The Chimes.

There are times, usually when the house is clean, that I just like to sit back and feel the ‘vibe’ of our home. (When the house is cluttered, the only vibe I get is the sound of coughing. “Dust me already!”) Being less than 10 years old, our walls don’t contain a lot of stories yet but I like to think there’s an amicable feeling in our home when someone walks in for the first time.

Last night was Earl’s company Christmas party. Like last year, we hosted the festivities again this year and everyone apparently had a delightful time. There was no punching or arguing, just delicious food, good drinks and friendly chit-chat. As my friend Shirley says, “it was dandy.” I got to play the “boss’s spouse” role which is always fun. “You only have to live with him eight hours a day, remember, I get the other 16, plus weekends.” I sometimes wonder if my sense of humor is a little whacked out for social gatherings, but I kept all my clothes on and I didn’t dance on the dining room table so I suppose I’ll be invited back next year.

It’s little gatherings like last night that make me appreciate our home all the more. Earl and I keep to ourselves quite a bit, but it’s nice to welcome others into our home from time to time.

It’s a nice opportunity to give the walls something more to talk about.

A Clean Christmas.

Originally uploaded by macwarriorny.

I thought the holidays were suppose to be a joyous occasion. Whether you’re celebrating the Solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza or just the commercial glee of it all, there is suppose to be a merriment that warms your heart and tickles your soul.

My heart is full of dust and my lungs are full of bleach fumes.

Tomorrow night is Earl’s company Christmas party. And it’s here. In our house. I guess I’ll have to finally pick up the wine glasses scattered about from last year’s Christmas party. Maybe I’ll go crazy and scrape up the petrified chip (complete with dip) that someone tried to hide under the sofa*.

Actually, I’m looking forward to the occasion. It’s not often that we entertain in the house and it gave us an excuse to chase the dust bunnies back under the furniture. It’s just so much work to get ready for the party. The floors need to be polished, the towels need to be fluffed, the toilets need to be scrubbed. I guess we’re going to have to aim better when we pee in the dark from now on.

All this work is because we’ve got everything backwards. We have a lawn service to mow our grass through the summer, but we plow or snowblow the driveway ourselves. When we lived in the small house, we had a cleaning lady that came twice a month to scrub the place from top to bottom. We moved into a house twice the size and we now we hose everything down ourselves and call it “good enough”.

At least our hearts are full of merriment this season. And our merriment is squeaky clean.

* I really had the urge to type ‘davenport’ instead of ‘sofa’ up in that paragraph. I have no idea why, I haven’t heard someone refer to a couch as a davenport since 1993 or so and that was when my grandmother was heading in to senility.

I don’t know about the rest of the American public, but I’m really, really, really tired of product placements in television shows and life in general. I think what finally made me snap was the “Memoirs of a Geisha” movie mentions/product placement peppered through a recent episode of “Medium”.

“Hey do you want to see Memoirs of a Geisha”, he asked as he held up a full-page ad in the newspaper, “You really enjoyed the book, I heard the movie is just as good.”

Then later…

“What are you guys here to see?” “Memoirs of a Geisha”. “Oh we just saw it, and it was a very good movie, you’ll really enjoy it.”

Since the lead character is a psychic, she already knows if she’ll enjoy the movie or not, why waste time talking about it? Oh, because at the commercial break there was an ad for, wait for it, “Memoirs of a Geisha”.

I started getting ticked off at the product placements during an episode of The West Wing when Donna walked down a hotel hallway carrying a FedEx tube by the end so she wouldn’t block the FedEx logo, then Josh made coffee in the complimentary coffee maker from Holiday Inn, which had a logo larger than the coffee maker itself, then Will went to get an ice cream sandwich type thing which was two seconds away from star billing for the show when they lingered on the “Nestle” logo for an uncomfortably long amount of time.

Why are we allowing these product placements and rampant commercialism to take over the country? First it started with the stadiums. Syracuse had MacArthur Stadium. Folks called it Big Mac. Then they ripped it down and built a new one. “P & C Stadium”. Of course P & C went bankrupt so now it’s “Alliance Bank Stadium”. Oy. Was Mac Arthur a bad boy and had to have his stadium taken away from him? It was built in the same spot, it should still be Mac Arthur Stadium. “Mile High Stadium” in Denver, even though it’s not the original, should still be called “Mile High Stadium”, not “Revolving Name Bank After Latest Merger Stadium”.

DisneyWorld is not better. Planet Earth, brought to you by AT&T. It’s A Small, Small, Small World brought to you by Infiniti.

The New York State Fair? “The Verizon Center of Progress Building.” Like Verizon has ever been in the center of progress.

What’s next, freeway signs? “Next Rest Area brought to you by Ex-Lax.”

At least there’s a rumbling out there of people fighting back. Take a peek at Jerri Manthey’s Survivor Outtakes. It shows how ridiculous this all has really has become.

I sit here writing my blog entry, one hand on my work supplied Dell keyboard in front of my Dell monitor. I’m drinking a Diet Pepsi and I have my hand on my chin. I then notice how smooth my skin is after shaving this morning. I’m so glad I used Barbasol.