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This is the first time that Wendy and I are

celebrating Christmas and Chanukah as a married couple. Since she’s

Jewish and I’ll celebrate any holiday as long as there’s food and

booze, I’ve extended the goodie giveaway started with the Accordion Guy

Advent Calendar to include the eight nights that make up Chanukah.

The “Jewish Christmas” description is a poor description of

Chanukah; whereas Christmas is considered to be one of the major

holidays of the Christian faith, Chanukah is a minor one in Judaism.

Calling Chanukah the Jewish analogue for Christmas is an exercise in

making poor analogies. It would be like calling a Playstation Portable

“the nerd’s prom date” (it’s overhyped, you want it in your pants, in

the end, it’s not as good as you expected it would be).

The traditional Jewish calendar, like the Chinese one, is based on

lunar, rather than solar cycles. This means that like Chinese New year,

the Gregorian Calendar (the calendar we use every day) date of Chanukah

changes every year. This year, for the first time in fifty-ish years,

Chanukah and Christmas fall on the same day.

While

the origins of Christmas are reasonably well known (at least here in

“The West”), many people don’t know what Chanukah is all about. Here’s

a little hint for my fellow Gentiles: most Jewish holidays have a theme

along the lines of “They tried to kill us; they failed; let’s eat!” For

a more specific explanation, I can point you to Judaism 101’s page on

the subject, but I thought it would be more fun to show you Steve

Greenberg’s comic, Is it the Jewish Christmas? [JPG file, 170K]

Have a great one, everybody!

Here’s a quick preview of photos to come: it’s our Christmas tree

during the first round of decorating. Note the dreidel ornaments —

they’re a gift from Eldon Brown. He bought some multicoloured plastic

dreidels, drilled holes in their spindles and attached Christmas

ornament hooks to them. Thanks, Eldon!

Click the comics to see them at full size.

I love Chappelle’s Show and I also love a good conspiracy theory, so I couldn’t help but enjoy reading The Chappelle Theory.

Its anonymous author claims to be a retired PR executive who claims to

have many “contacts closely related to the individuals involved”,

allowing him or her to “to fairly accurately recount the events” in

Chappelle’s strange fall from grace.

This excerpt provides a good introduction to the rest of the site:

Dave was haunted by a secret. One that only he was aware of, and one

he couldn’t share with anyone, lest his comedy empire crumble.

He

knew that at the same time he was signing his record-setting deal,

there was a secret cabal of powerful African-American leaders from the

business, political, and entertainment industries working together to

ensure that the third season of Chappelle’s Show would never happen.

At one time or another, each member of this loosely knit, informal group had played a key role in Chappelle’s rise to stardom.

They

had been instrumental in securing movie and television roles, offering

counsel, and simply aiding Chappelle financially when his stand up work

couldn’t pay the bills during his lean early years.

Over the last

two years, they had watched warily as Chappelle’s Show had become

Comedy Central’s premiere show, eclipsing even South Park and The Daily

Show in terms of buzz.

Whether

you think that the site is merely the raving of a consipracy nut or an

insider blowing the whistle on dark machinations within the

entertainment industry, it’s an interesting read.

Has it already been ten years?!

Ten

years ago, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, two film students from the

University of Colorado, were commissioned to make an animated short

that would be used as a video Christmas card to be sent to various

Hollywood types. Parker and Stone used contruction paper and

stop-motion animation techniques to create the now-legendary The Spirit of Christmas [6.8MB, QuickTime – lots of swearing, and offence-a-licious] featuring the kids who’d eventually get their own show, South Park, Jesus and Santa fighting over Christmas and Brian Boitano, who saves the day.

Perhaps you’ve already heard this little bit of trivia, but in case you haven’t, let me the one to tell you: many people in Japan associate Christmas with things that we’d expect, such as decorations and gifts, but also with things that we wouldn’t expect, such as romantic getaways to love hotels and a Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner.

Joi Ito has written that he knows the origin of the Japanese Christmas/KFC tradition: it’s all due to his friend, Shin Okawara. Shin was responsible for bringing KFC to Japan, and during its introduction, spun what I like to call “the dirty bird” or “greasy buzzard” as the sort of food eaten by rich people in America, in a manner similar to the way those old Grey Poupon ads made it seem like the mustard of the upper classes. He ran an ad campaign that showed wealthy American

families all eating KFC for their yuletide feast. The Japanese, being led to believe that “dirty bird” was an American Christmas tradition, simply adopted it.

Lest you think that I am poking fun at our Japanese friends for adopting a Christmas tradition learned from TV, I will now make a confession — we deVillas have done it as well. In an episode of the late 1970s television series Eight is Enough, the Bradford family had a tradition of drinking orange juice before opening their presents. Dad thought this was a good idea, and borrowed this tradition. Almost thirty years later, it’s still OJ first, then the presents. And it’s all Dick van Patten’s fault.

I’d love to give you a KFC-related downloadable as today’s Advent Calendar goodie, but I don’t have any. However, I’ve got the next best thing: McDonald’s-related downloadable goodies. These are ads from 1962 that feature early appearances of McDonald’s then-new mascot, Ronald McDonald, who was played by Willard Scott, long before he was a fixture on the Today show.

Ronald’s costume was a much rougher version of the Ronald we know today. Note the use of a McDonald’s cup for a nose and tray with burger, fries and shake for a hat. Also notable is the quaint 1960’s “Ronald McDonald” theme music.

Those of you who have a bit of clown phobia may not want to watch these videos — many people I know find the old Ronald much creepier than thew current one.

• McDonald’s Ad #1 [1MB, MPEG video]
• McDonald’s Ad #2 [1MB, MPEG video]

For

a long time, adapting Charles Dickens’ classic tale A Christmas Carol

was a tried-true cliche for television shows. The setup was always the

same: some character who was behaving badly (it wasn’t necessarily

greed) would get visited by three ghosts who would show him the error

of his or her ways. I remember some of the more successful attempts

such as Blackadder’s Christmas Carol and the WKRP in Cincinatti

episode in which Mr. Carlson doesn’t hand out Christmas bonuses, eats

one of Johnny’s brownies and has a dream in which he gets visited by

the ghosts (the Marley in this case being Bob

Marley).

I also remember sillier adaptations, such as the Six Million

Dollar Man episode title A Bionic Christmas Carol, which is

summarized as follows:

Oscar

makes Steve give up his Christmas holiday to investigate a major systems supplier

for the space projects.  Oscar fears that sabotage in the life support systems

may affect a Mars landing.  Horton Budge is a cynical industrialist and is

so tight that his nephew, Bob Crandall, who is employed at Budge’s plant,

isn’t paid enough to support his family.  The sabotage that Oscar fears is

the result of the low morale at the plant caused by Budge’s miserly ways. 

Steve utilizes his bionics to bring some cheer and a change of heart to Budge

and his family

I was nine years old when the episode was aired (December 1976), and for some reason, it’s permanently burned into my memory.

There’ve also been many movie adaptations that have modernized the

tale, from the excellent Scrooged,

starring Bill Murray as a cynical

and selfish TV producer (and Bobcat Goldthwait playing the

Cratchit-like character) to the rather painful Skinflint: A Country

Christmas Carol, which was a made-for-TV musical that I think starred a

lot of the cast from Hee Haw.

I’m not as big a TV watcher as I used to be in my childhood and teen

years, so I don’t know if A Christmas Carol is still inspiring

television show plots. I thought that in the spirit of the cliche, I’d

present the original version in eBook form [412K, PDF] as

today’s Advent Calendar goodie.

Recommended Reading

Here’s a web page that covers a number of television and movie adaptations of A Christmas Carol.