Sayeth the Lord: "Because day after day after day, all you do is mutsche me."

If God himself was behind the Denver Bronco's recent run, then He sent Tim Tebow a little message about humility yesterday.

Merry War On Christmas, everyone.

Maybe George Allen should just stay away from cameras

No macaca moments in this one, and there IS something kind of cool about seeing a politician (or a would-be one) show his true colors after he thinks the camera has been turned off. But if this goes viral, George Allen's attempted comeback could find itself in trouble:



Every time I see George Allen, I think of Bob Roberts:

Lest we forget.

There's some rumbling afoot that Joe Scarborough is considering a run for president in 2012.

The mainstream media won't bring this up, but just in case you've forgotten, go read this post from July at Brendan Calling.

Could be nothing, as we found out with the Chandra Levy murder. But that doesn't mean it should be swept under the rug if Joey the Scar decides to be a candidate for the highest office in the land.

And while you're over there, you may never buy another real Christas tree again after reading this.

Note to all parents: Please don't let your kids lose this

Matthew Morison (with Paolo Szot), "You've Got to be Carefully Taught", from South Pacific

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!

It's easy to forget, when you see teabaggers foaming at the mouth on cable news about birth certificates and lazy unemployed people and immigrant drug dealers and treasonous liberals, that even these most vile of people were once children.

Santa Says is a blog by a guy who seems to do seasonal work as a mall Santa, who posts his experiences dealing with children at Christmas time. What may surprise you is that for all that Christmas is the season of unbridled avarice (cf: Jean Shepherd), children really do get what's going on the world around them:

Today a boy gave me a small baggie of coins that were his own funds and when asked he said he wanted me to use them to buy toys for kids that might not get any. In fact I have received such gifts before from children But this year I have gotten 2 to 3 times as many and I believe that even young children can be aware of hard times for others and respond with compassion and touching gestures especially involving other kids.

A 5 year old girl ends her letter to me, “Don’t forget about the poor people. Take one ting you would give to me and give it to a poor child!” Alexander gives me a few buttons and says, “These came off of my Buzz Lightyear. I thought you could use them to make another boy a new Buzz.”

Morgan writes, ” Pleas bring all the sick kids a toy or a book and something to eat.” Breanne, “I now there are lots of kids out there that do not have iney toy’s so if you Do not have unaf of toy’s pleys giv those ones that Do not hav toy’s”

After 9-11 one youngster asked me to “take toys to the children of the terrorists so they won’t hate us so much”.

There's a journey from being children like these to being the kind of willfully ignorant, hate-filled lunatic that just elected what will be perhaps the most loathsome House of Representatives in this nation's history. Your children don't have to take that journey. You can set them on a different path. The raw material is already there.

Just because a song has the word "Christmas" in it doesn't make it a Christmas song

I know that the holiday season is one of sad memories and loss for many people. It seems that a disproportionate number of people lose loved ones during the holidays -- parents, spouses, even children. I think of Elizabeth Edwards' young children, still raw from the loss of their mother, trying to find a way to observe Christmas in some way that doesn't make it worse. I have a friend who lost her husband in the fall and her father last week -- a double 4th quarter whammy. Colored lights and TV commercials showing large, loving families sometimes just serve to rub salt in the wounds.

Still, the fact that between 2 PM yesterday and 10 AM this morning I heard Joni Mitchell's "River" not once but THREE SEPARATE TIMES on the radio makes me wonder. I know we all feel that if we have to hear "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" one more time a well-placed icepick embedded squarely in one's own frontal lobe sounds like an appealing prospect, but I'm not sure that "River" is the answer.

It's one thing to be a brooding, depressive adolescent, writing sad poetry in a blank book while sitting alone at lunchtime at school and coming home to listen to the Blue album and crying. It's quite another for the very same people who perpetrate Burl Ives on us every Christmas to decide that the presence of the word "Christmas" in the first line makes "River" something to which even the loneliest, most depressive adult in the world should be listening on Christmas.

If you've got the blues on Christmas, there are far better choices. Like Sonny Boy Williamson's Christmas Blues:

Or Charley Jordan's Christmas Christmas Blues:

Or Eric Clapton, Crying Christmas Tears:

Or Blind Lemon Jefferson, Christmas Eve Blues

Or if your mood leans more to rage and cynicism than tears and depression, there's Maxine of the Hallmark Cards, Crabby Christmas Blues:

Or Ray Davis, in a solo performance of the Kinks, Father Christmas:

Maybe it's time to stop hating "It's a Wonderful Life" and watch it again

It seems suddenly timely:

And just to seal the deal

Christmas may now proceed:

Because it's not Christmas until and unless Darlene Love sings.

And of course there's always this:

A Very Maron Christmas To You

How to Wrap a Cat For Christmas

via Lynn:

So it's a day late. Who cares, with a voice like that

Those of you who are longtime readers know how we here at B@B loves us some Darlene Love. Christmas may be over, but you can enjoy it all over again listening to The Great Darlene this year in her annual rendition of "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" on Late Night with David Letterman:

Damn. This woman is sixty-eight years old and The Voice is better than ever.

Christmas Video Blogging: Because nothing says "Christmas" like bhangra

Chak de Punjab Bhangra Dancers at a 2008 Christmas concert:

Christmas Video Blogging: A Very Maron Christmas

Christmas. Ur hearin it wrong:

Christmas Video Blogging: And some of these people play a strong role in public life

As Lynn says, "And they say people who believe in astrology are crazy..."

What a bunch of death-centered lunatics these end-timesers are.

And yet, despite the insanity and longing for death that some of Christianity's practitioners exhibit, there's one thing I like about Christmas, especially Christmas Eve. It's when I remember what their religion was at one time supposed to be about. I wrote about it two years ago, and in a tradition that's right up there with the Brilliant Duo's annual Christmas Eve Indian dinner, I'm linking to it again.

Ah, yer all a buncha pagans...

I've long found it fascinating how a celebration of someone born in the warm, dry Middle East became so associated with cold and winter. They didn't have spruce or pine trees in the Holy Land, nor did they have mistletoe. The Three Wise Men weren't an old fat guy with white hair and a beard dressed in a red suit bringing toys to children. And no one brought a turkey so that Mary wouldn't have to try to cook in a place filled with flammable materials. As someone once asked me, "How did Christmas become German?"

It's sort of like trying to determine what the relationship is between the resurrection and fluffy bunnies and eggs. And why "Easter" sounds so much like "estrogen".

The answer, of course, is that just as Oasis ripped off the Beatles, so did the early Christians rip off the pagans. Add to that some good old fashioned commerce, and you have the Christmas celebration that people like Bill O'Reilly regard as being somehow mandated by God himself.

The Independent (UK) has the straight poop on the trappings of Christmas:

Why is Christmas Day on 25 December?

The Bible offers no date for the birth of Jesus, which probably was not in the year 1AD, but a few years earlier, and may or may not have been in December. The celebration of the birth of Christ on 25 December dates back to the fifth century, when Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.

The date was chosen to coincide with the winter solstice and the Roman festivals associated with the shortest day of the year, which falls between 22 December and 25 December. This was seen as the day when the Romans celebrated Dies Natalis Solis Invicti – "the birthday of the unconquered sun". It was also Jupiter's birthday and, further back, the birthday of his Greek equivalent, Zeus. In Eastern Europe, the various Orthodox churches – the Russian, Greek, Armenian, Serbian et al, follow the old Gregorian calendar, and in which Christmas Day is 7 January There is no Santa Claus in the Gospels.

Where did he come from?

Nearly 1,700 years ago there was a bishop of Myra, in Asia Minor, who was imprisoned under the last pagan Roman Emperor, Diocletian, but reinstated under Constantine. A cult grew up around him in Greece and spread outwards, and he became the patron saint of children, among others. An old legend about him is that there was a poor man who could not afford dowries for his three daughters, until bags of gold were tossed through an open window by St Nicholas, landing in the stockings drying in front of the fire. In Holland and Germany, there was a custom that St Nicholas was the secret bringer of presents for children on 6 December, his feast day.

When did he start sliding down chimneys?

After the American revolution, New Yorkers tried to rediscover their Dutch roots, and revived the feast of St Nicholas, and his legend. The writer Washington Irving took the mickey out of this revived cult in a satire published in 1809, called Knickerbocker's History of New York. In it, St Nicholas appears as a fat, jolly figure, dressed in fur, with a clay pipe and beard, who slides down chimneys.

There's more here. Of course if your name is "Bill O'Reilly", you might want to pass it by. After all, why would you read something that deprives you of a weapon?

And for those of you not inclined to snark today, you may want to revisit my post from Christmas Eve last year, when for one brief shining moment, I was able to give my cynicism a rest.

Joyous Yule, everyone.

A scene from my favorite Christmas movie

The Ref

Not me. I finished putting together a Craftsman TV stand

And last night, it wasn't Chinese food, it was Indian food, at Teaneck's famous Taj Palace, where the Lamb Saag was even better than usual, and the place doing a brisk business dishing up curries for Jews, Indians, and other heathen.

I don't have that "Little Match Girl" thing that some Jews have on Christmas. I long ago learned that the way to deal with the notion that everyone has a big Norman Rockwell Christmas except you is to demystify the holiday and turn it into a day off from work and an excuse to make evil things like ham and macaroni and cheese. And finish putting together that damned TV stand so that when the Dish guy comes the week after New Year's, there's something to put the set on.

But for those who still feel left out, here's a little something for you (via Sam Seder)

And this oldie but goodie:

Buck up, folks! In 3-1/2 hours it'll all be over, and you'll be the one at work tomorrow without post-Christmas letdown.

Some thoughts from a nonbeliever on Christmas Eve

I do a lot of what could be called Christian-bashing on this blog. While my own spiritual leanings are a kind of hodgepodge of Buddhism and various forms of paganism, my roots are Jewish and I respond viscerally as a Jew to things like anti-Semitism, klezmer music, and having other religions forced down my throat.

The mainstream Christian denominations around which I grew up seemed to have left the "spreading the word" part of Christianity behind. I knew about the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, of course, but back then they seemed remote and historical; not something that could happen today. When I was a kid, the only proseletyzing and conversion attempts I experienced were from a Catholic friend when I was around eight or nine, who educated me about heaven, hell, purgatory and limbo, and where I was likely to end up if I didn't become a Catholic. This was pretty disturbing stuff for a kid whose parents weren't religious and who seemed to alternate between having a Christmas tree or a menorah, depending on the year.

In recent years, the proseletyzing and conversion part of Christianity has come roaring back, with attempts to put Christian prayer (and yes, the Lord's Prayer that we baby boomers still said in school is a Christian prayer) back into the schools, declare this a Christian nation, and make Jesus the head of state. I don't think someone who is even a mainstream Christian can understand how threatening this is to nonbelievers, especially given Christianity's history of massacres of those who do not believe. Why people who insist that their religion is truth aren't content with their own faith, but need for everyone else to affirm that same faith all the time is a mystery to me. But all too often, Christian faith does seem to be that insecure, and I don't think it's too much of a stretch to believe that in these days of Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly and televangelists that if they could still get away with it, they would.

I've also written that because of my penchant for mocking and questioning the intelligence of those who have blended the religious with the political, I feel obligated to examine the Judeo-Christian tradition every now and then and see if anything's changed; to see if it speaks to me. And it never does. Part of the reason I studied Biblical Hebrew in college (at the Moravian Theological Seminary, no less) was because I wanted to read the Old Testament in its original language so I could read it as originally written, not as a bunch of translators with their own agendas decided it said. That class was where I learned things like how what's in the English OT as "God" starts out as "elohim", which is a plural form and then becomes YHWH; and how the first woman starts out as (transliterating here) "ishah" (woman) and doesn't become "chevah" (Eve) until the second telling of the creation story in Genesis -- an inconsistency that gave rise to the notion of Lilith as Eve's predecessor. A relative gave me an Old Testament with English on one side and Hebrew on the other, but I never got very far with my project, and alas, I've long since forgotten all the Hebrew I knew.

But no matter how many times I revisit this spiritual system, with its punitive, capricious alpha male deity who tests Abraham's faith by telling him to take his beloved son Isaac up to Mount Moriah and sacrifice him -- and at the last minute says "Kidding! Just wanted to see if you'd do it!"; its virgin birth and a man walking among us as the literal son of this anthropormophized deity, who died so that David Vitter could patronize prostitutes and Jim Bakker could have sex with Jessica Hahn and embezzle money from tens of thousands of people and so that Larry Craig could decry homosexuality while cruising in airport bathrooms, the answer always comes back "Naah."

But on Christmas Eve, I understand why people believe. I love Christmas Eve. I love it because it is the quiet after the storm of shopping; after the stores are closed and the horn honking and fighting over parking spaces and the orgy of consuming takes a break before becoming an orgy of acquisition the next morning. Most people are at home, with the lights on both inside and outside their homes. On my street, many people line the sidewalk with luminaria. I can step outside, and if it's a clear night, I can see stars in the sky and hear nary a sound, save the slight white noise from the highway three miles away.

And if I stand very still and listen to the quiet, I can visualize a young couple in a makeshift shelter, surrounded by well wishers from afar, with a newborn whose arrival they don't quite understand but that they know promises great things for mankind. They're a little bit frightened, but also awed at the huge responsibility they face in caring for this tiny child and nurturing him into the man whom some will believe is a god. As this couple looks up at the same sky I do, they also feel insignificant, and inadequate to the task they face -- not much different from what all new parents must feel. Tonight, millions of people think about this tableau that even I can see. And for a brief time, it reminds them of what they've often forgotten during the shopping frenzy of the last four weeks; of what they celebrate tonight and tomorrow.

For those who believe, I wish you all a joyous Christmas filled with love and wonder.

And for the rest of us, well, it's a good day to watch The Lord of the Rings.

In commemoration of the Solstice....

...another snarky Christmas song. Because nothing says Christmas like a Jewish guy doing a darkly comic parody video from 1986 that seems weirdly timely today:

The only Christmas song in the entire world that I can stand

And it's only because Darlene Love's pipes are the best evidence we've ever seen that there may be a God after all:

But seriously....does anyone really LIKE Christmas music? To me, the standard recordings of Christmas songs have the icepick-to-forehead inducing effect of hearing Stairway to Heaven for the 47,826th time.

And then, of course, there's this one, which kind of violates the "It's only OK to knock your OWN team" rule, but ah, the heck with it -- it's DARLENE FUCKIN' LOVE: