Dreaming of a Weird Christmas

 Practically everything this year was different from previous Christmases.

There were no family gatherings, no huge feast, no visits from friends sharing Christmas cheer. 

But weird or not, we still managed to keep Christmas.

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, we set up a Google Meet to open presents with Audrey's sister Betty and the family. It was great seeing their faces and having a visit with them, but the inability to break into smaller groups for a chat or a game of cribbage or whatever made the latter half of the affair feel a bit stilted. I mean, I still wouldn't trade it, but the limitations fo the video chat were pretty apparent.

That evening we had charcuterie for supper and watched a YouTube of the Christmas Eve service from St. Albert United Church. We have gotten used to singing hymns in our basement, but taking communion at home with torn bread and shot glasses of wine felt a bit surreal, as did lighting our own candles instead of "passing the light" as we normally do.

Christmas Day was pretty laid back but spirited after a fashion - from spiked coffee and a breakfast beer in the morning through fortified egg nogs and such throughout the day. As strange as it was to have only the four of us present for opening gifts for the first time in, well. a lot of years, we were grateful that both girls were able to be at home, especially after a busy semester for Fenya and Glory being in Churchill from July to November.

In the afternoon, we got Tara and Jerry in Houston up on the Portal they got us for Christmas and opened gifts with them. It was wonderful to see them and share a laugh, even though Tara was extremely tired - she had contracted COVID through work and couldn't have joined us even if they had a teleporter. Again though, there was cause to be grateful - her symptoms were more cold-like than flu-like and her pulse oximeter reassured us that her lungs were still working efficiently. It was hard to see her so listless on one of her favourite holidays though, especially with both our girls sugared up as much as they were.

After that we got Auntie Vera on the phone in Ontario. She is preparing to move back to Alberta in the New Year, but was currently at an acreage by herself following an extended bout of caregiving for a friend who is dying of cancer. While we wanted the contact and familiarity, it felt more like a need in her case, and I was happy we were able to set up a game of Drawful with her by setting up another video chat and pointing my phone at the television. By following the prompts on her laptop and doodling on her cell phone's screen, she joined us in a hilarious game that felt like she was in the room with us from two time zones away.

After that, our Christmas Dinner arrived - Chinese take out from Happy Palace. We had joked about doing it for years, absolutely no one felt like cooking, and hey, it was a wonderful homage to a classic movie.

We cooked a ham (with a brown sugar, bourbon and black pepper glaze!) the next night, but that Christmas dinner a la Chinoise was one of the best I can recall - even if we did forget the Christmas crackers, something I am realizing only today as I write this blog.

It is important to note that as weird as this Christmas was, it wasn't all bad - no terrifying mid-winter road trips or fretting about visitors delayed by weather, no one getting uptight from cabin fever or overcrowding - but on the whole, I will be more than ready for a less distanced, more sociable Christmas next year.

Reading "Cajun Night Before Christmas"

Years ago, Audrey found a book called Cajun Night Before Christmas at the library's used book sale. We had never heard of it but found the book, written to affect the rural Louisiana dialect, was almost as much fun to read as "Fox in Socks" by Dr. Seuss. Last year the family even got me to read it to Fenya's boyfriend, Bobby, and I don't think our relationship was really at the "read me a story" stage at that point.

I don't have as much cause to read it anymore, and despite having some younger people in our lives again, like our grandson Robin, there probably won't be any opportunity to read it aloud in person this year. Thanks 2020...

But Audrey thought committing a reading to posterity might be a good idea, and Glory was willing to help light and shoot it, so I eventually relented and we recorded it tonight.

(If there is no embedded video above, here is the YouTube link.)

\Cajun Night Before Christmas was originally presented as an ad for a New Orleans car dealership, and won a CLIO award in 1967 to boot. An adaptation of this ad ended up being the first children's book for Pelican Publishing, which has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It was joined eventually by Alaska Night Before Christmas, Texas Night Before Christmas and Artist's Night Before Christmas. 

Maybe someday I will have the opportunity to read you this story in person - my willingness to do so will depend on many variables including time, mood, and the quality and strength of your egg nog. But in the meantime, I hope you enjoy a cheesy reading of a regional interpretation of a yuletide classic.

Merry Christmas, y'all.

Brutal But Sweet - Wayne Season 1 Reviewed

 A couple of years ago I saw a trailer for a show that looked interesting, and which seemed to focus on a teenaged boy beating the hell out of bullies. The show was Wayne and the notion was certainly appealing (comeuppance is my milieu, for certain) but since it was premiering on a service I had no intention of getting (YouTube Premium), it slipped from memory.

It recently showed up on Amazon Prime, a service I don't really need but quite enjoy, and one I have used a fair bit this year to avoid perusing multiple shops in search of harder-to-find items (I still try to shop local for most things, but the Bezos has his teeth sunk in me pretty deep, I'm afraid). Anyhow, we are still trying to get caught up on The Expanse and after finishing The Great (another wonderful but racy show featuring Dakota Fanning as Catherine the Great and Nicholas Hoult as Peter the II or III, depending on what's needed) I stumbled upon Wayne in the "you might like" listings, and Glory and I thought it was worth taking a gamble on.

Ten episodes later, we are hooked and are re-watching it now with Audrey and Fenya (when study breaks permit) and we are desperately longing for a second season. Hence my writing this post in the futile hope that my ten of readers might check it out and hopefully spread the Gospel of Wayne throughout the land, so that the new ownership can greenlight at least one more season.

Be warned - this is not a show for the faint of heart! Two episodes in, you will have witnessed a number of fairly brutal but non-lethal beatings (many of which the titular hero is on the wrong end of), arson, a shotgun blast to the face, a game of stabscotch that goes horribly awry and a chainsaw maiming. Two teenage runaways, Wayne and his would-be girlfriend Del, are at the center of almost all of these misadventures, but this is by no means a love story - it is the tale of two young people with no hope looking to escape two tragic but distinct situations, with no assurances they will find love along the way.

Looking back at the comedies I grew up on, it is astonishing to me how little attention modern television - network, streaming or otherwise - pays to lower-class characters. Shows like All In the Family, Good Times, Sanford & Son and others depicted a greyed-out and occasionally hardscrabble lifestyle that protagonists had to sometimes game around or work a little harder in order to find happiness (and often did!) and which we see very little of nowadays. In fact, with the exception of Roseanne from almost a quarter-century ago, comedies or tv series in general about working-class families have not exactly lit up the scoreboard - unless, of course, they are animated, like The Simpsons, Bob's Burgers, or King of the Hill.

The backgrounds that Wayne and Del come from in Brockton, Mass. are, frankly, ugly and depressing and very real. The cost of arts and crafts supplies can be the trigger for a fierce argument or the opportunity for surprising tenderness. Having a car is a big deal, not just a middle-class incidental. In fact, the premise of the show is Wayne leaving home to find the car of his father that his mother and her boyfriend took off with when he was five. When his bedbound, cancer-ridden father shows him a picture of his beloved auto, Wayne smiles in wonderment and says (in his Bahstan accent), "You had a cah?"

The two protagonists are not driven by cuteness or romance, but desperation, and do not act like miniature adults nor hormone-driven children. At 16 and 15 respectively, Wayne and Del's backgrounds have given them a maturity not seen in the teens of John Hughes' Shermer, Illinois, but they maintain an adolescent focus on short-term solutions that is at once terrifying and occasionally...enviable?

But for all that grimness and brutality, Wayne has a lot of bright moments, even if a lot of the laughs are vengeful and cathartic and often hard-won. Wayne is an individual who simply cannot abide to see people get away with things at the expense of others, which, as you can imagine, makes it easy to gin up moments that are both dramatic and occasionally hilarious. The dialogue is sometimes reminiscent of a Coen brothers movie, with attention paid to regional accents and dialects as the two teens carve their way down the eastern seaboard from Brockton to Florida. There are absurdities galore but the plot is never advanced by stupid people and only requires a minimum of contrivance or coincidence to bring the various characters together.

And such characters! A fatalistic and cynical high-school principal accompanied by Wayne's sophomore huckster confidant, a square police sergeant convinced Wayne may need a second chance and his soup-blogging subordinate, and Del's troubled, bullying father and her two idiot brothers, all need a reason to intersect as Wayne and Del gradually converge on Ocala, Fla., and Wayne's dad's gold 1979 Trans Am, as well as his mom. But what then?

The showrunners also deserve full props for their great musical cues and offbeat selections, including a pitch-perfect if unprecedented usage of Rush's "Working Man."

Wayne is strange and sweet, brutal but compassionate, a bizarre but not surreal blend of Ferris Bueller's Day Off by way of Pulp Fiction. A lot of the laughs are derived from the brutal and direct manner in which Wayne interacts with his challenges, and his struggles to right perceived wrongs he encounters, but practically every character gets an opportunity to showcase their pain and the way they are dealing with it, which was not really something the trailer prepared me for:

Yes, the language can be foul, the violence occasionally shocking and brutal, but Wayne is a rough show with a good heart, very much like its main character. Unlike a lot of similar shows with youthful characters, I have a hard time imagining what the future holds for Wayne and Del, but it is made extraordinarily clear that a happy ending is by no means assured, and perhaps even unlikely. I'm compelled to see how the story unfolds and would very much like to see a second season, so by all means, check out the trailer, watch the show, and please, tell your friends.

Away Goes a Manger

I hold a significant amount of fondness for Audrey's nativity set, which is a bit surprising to me. It's a highly traditional, old-fashioned, Euro-centric depiction of the birth of Christ that doesn't have an ounce of verve to it, and yet, I love to see it come out at Christmas. 

With my Mum passing a year ago this Wednesday, we had pretty limited decorations last December and so the nativity set never made it out. This year, it is within sight of my computer desk, nestled beneath a tree decorated by nothing but stars and angels.

Thinking about it, there are three reasons that this particular set appeals to me so much.

Gratitude - the set itself was a gift from Audrey's parents, but Opa went a step further and built a stable for it out of scrap wood. He even added a light so the interior is more visible. He's busy building another stable for a different set of Fenya's right now as well.

Attitude - my wife and I have a real problem with so many characters from the Bible being depicted as white people in art. In particular, the idea of Jesus, a man native to first-century Palestine, looking like a community college student from Nebraska in 1953 is just galling to us. Audrey's mother was understanding about this, despite coming from a generation where this was obviously no big deal, and was willing to repaint all the skin tones and make them just a bit earthier and more appropriate to the setting.

Fortitude - You wouldn't know it to look at it, but this little nativity set has seen some stuff, man. It was sitting in a box on Audrey's Mum's work desk in the basement in their lovely home on an acreage in High River.

In 2013.

The year of the High River flood, that is.

On June 21, a wet slurry of river mud and water built pressure up against the double doors leading out of the basement until they finally gave way, flooding the basement to the four-foot mark before receding by about a foot and a half. The force of its entry threw a full-size treadmill all the way across the basement and turned it upside down.

Oma assumed the nativity set had been washed away, but when they returned home, it turned out the floodwaters had somehow lifted the cardboard box off the desk, carried it outdoors and set it on the picnic table on the basement patio. The cardboard box was a write-off, but there was not a scratch on the figures inside.

My belief system doesn't contain a God so vain that he couldn't bear to have images of his relatives desecrated by a flood, so I am not going to say this was a miracle or the result of divine interaction or anything like that.

But despite all that, it doesn't seem too out of place to call it miraculous either, and it makes me smile to recall it almost every time I look at the Nativity set.