christmas

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Come midnight tonight, for the second year in a row, I will have made it through the entire holiday season without once hearing Mariah Carey singing “All I Want For Christmas Is You”.

See?  It is possible after all!

It wasn’t easy sometimes.  Like whenever I went inside a grocery store and had to brace myself for hearing that song over the supermarket’s music system.  I made very sure that I ducked in and quickly got my stuff and then ran out

Allow me the opportunity to once again state that Christmas music does not belong anywhere before Thanksgiving.  As always around here, there were radio stations that began playing holiday songs on the morning after Halloween.  That is damn too early!!  Just as Christmas decor doesn’t belong in stores even before Labor Day.  When the radio stations and retailers do things like that, all it does is make the ...

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It was on December 23rd, 1955 – seventy years ago tomorrow – that Metro-Golden-Mayer released Good Will to Men.  This is one of my all-time most favorite Christmas cartoons.  It’s essentially a remake of the considerably darker Peace on Earth from 1939.  Although we may not live under the threat of war as much as those during the era did, the themes of this animated short are perhaps more timely than ever before.

“Love thy neighbor.”

Directed by none other than William Hanna and Joseph Barbera (who went on to create The Flintstones, Scooby-Doo and many other animated favorites), here is Good Will to Men…

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The second season of Fallout premiered a few days ago on Amazon Prime.  I haven’t seen it yet but I’ll probably watch it later this evening.  Have had a few things on my plate lately.  Although at the recommendation of a friend last night I did watch Wake 

Up Dead Man, the latest of Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” series starring Daniel Craig.  I really liked it.
Anyhoo, the new season of Fallout is unfolding this holiday season.  And as part of the festivities Amazon has posted on YouTube a special lil’ treat.  In the tradition of broadcast Yule logs that goes back many decades across the history of television, here is… the Ghoul Log!


Nothing says Christmas cheer quite like ninety minutes of Wayne Newton music and the fattened arm of some poor sap roasting over an open fire.

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I’m reading a number of stories regarding churches turning their nativity scenes into political statements about immigration agents enforcing the laws.  Namely, these churches are replacing Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus with signs saying “ICE was here”.  At least one church went all the way and has ICE agents surrounding the crèche with zip ties and weapons drawn.

Photo credit: Matthew McDonald

I would not want to visit these churches, because they are demonstrating that they have no grasp of scripture at all.

Here’s the truth of the matter: Jesus and his parents were never refugees or immigrants.  Joseph took his wife to Bethlehem because that was their hometown, and they had to take part in a census that had been ordered by Caesar.  They may not have been fully citizens of Rome (few in Roman territory were) but they were certainly 100% legal residents of the empire. ...

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Whoever came up with this ad deserves an award.  This spot is brilliant, tragicomic, heart-tugging, funny, and beautiful.  Publix has a long history of having great commercials and this is one of their best.

Growing up I thought that people whose birthdays fell on Christmas must be so lucky, because it meant that they got more toys.  Watching poor Isabelle suffer from being a Christmas baby makes me greatly regret having that notion.  May all who were born on Christmas have a birthday just as wonderful as this young lady’s 🙂 ...

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Every year at Christmas I used to leave this site for a few days.  Just sort of to take in the holiday and enjoy it with friends and family.  And the last post that I would make was a reprint of column that I wrote for Elon’s student newspaper.  It kind of became a holiday tradition of mine to publish it again, now twent-six years after it first ran.

I’ll be honest.  I’m just not feeling much of the Christmas spirit this year.  There are a lot of reasons for that, which I haven’t talked openly.  Maybe if I share this, it will make me feel better.  Perhaps it might lift up the hearts of other people who deserve to be happy.

Well, here it is.  Merry Christmas.  See y’all soon.


Originally published in The Pendulum, Elon University, 12/03/1998

Celebrating the Christmas season means celebrating the memories

Chris Knight
Columnist...

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“HEY!  UNTO YOU A CHILD IS BORN!!!”

I needed to see this movie right now. 

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is a story near and dear to my heart.  I played the head firefighter in two productions of the stage play for Theatre Guild of Rockingham County.  That was years ago and I still  have very fond memories of  those shows.  So I was curious about how this new adaptation, directed by Dallas Jenkins, would be.

This new film (there was a television movie back in the early Eighties, so this is the second time that The Best Christmas Pageant Ever has been formatted for the screen) pretty much follows the plot of the original novel.  The Herdmans, AKA “The worst kids in the history of the world” are the juvenile blight upon the whole town.  But a series of events leads to them not only coming to church one ...

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To be honest, I don’t know if I should do this.  It seems like it would be more ideal to bring this back during a better Christmas.

But when would that be?  We aren’t guaranteed a tomorrow, much less a holiday that could be years from now.

It’s like this: for a very long time, every year in the days before Christmas, I would post an article that I wrote for my college’s newspaper, in 1998.  A few weeks ago was the twenty-fifth anniversary of it getting published.  When I started this blog some years after college, that essay seemed like a good thing to make a holiday tradition out of.

I just checked and the last time I did that was in 2013.  Ten whole years ago.

In 2013 I was recently back home from spending a week in voluntary commitment to a psychiatric facility, because of depression.  Well, ...

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Work with me here.  This is something that popped into being inside my gray matter a few weeks ago.  Personally, I can’t find any argument about how this is not a viable theory.  Although I confess that I did ummm… “borrow” some things from current pop culture.   But as Santa Claus is a character who has borrowed much else across the centuries I think it’s appropriate.

So here it is: my hypothesis for why there are so many Santa Clauses, how Santa gets ALL that work done in a single night, how Santa knows everything about whether you’ve been bad or good.  And that ultimate question: does Santa Claus exist at all?

All right, here we go…

Santa Claus is a multi-universal entity. That’s why we see so many of them at Christmas time. Most of the Santas you’re seeing are from other universes who are in ours for awhile.
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