STACY MCCAIN: Have a Holly Jolly (Commie) Christmas.

OPEN THREAD: Merry Christmas to all, even the haters and the losers.

MERRY CHRISTMAS: Bid our sad divisions cease:

BEST CAT WOMAN SINCE EARTHA KITT:  Cat Woman is out there to protect truth.  Purr.

MERRY CHRISTMAS, TO YOU.

MERRY CHRISTMAS: Let your heart be light.

MERRY CHRISTMAS:

THE SAN FRANCISCO STORY BEHIND THE ‘CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS’ ALBUM:

Unique among those Christmas hits are the songs from “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” the 1965 animated Christmas special starring Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” gang. The movie’s soundtrack might be the most recognizable jazz music in history. Piano player Vince Guaraldi’s renditions of classics like “Christmas Time Is Here” have become the definitive versions, and tunes like “Linus and Lucy” — which the gang jams to onstage — have reverberated through pop culture ever since.

Schulz has close ties to the Bay Area. Although born in Minneapolis, he moved to Sebastopol in 1958, then relocated to Santa Rosa in 1969, where he lived until his death in 2000 (a museum and skating rink were built celebrating his work). But the Christmas special’s soundtrack has uniquely San Francisco roots and, if not for a string of coincidences, may have never actually been heard by the public — let alone hit No. 2 on Billboard’s album chart 57 years later. A four-hour “super deluxe” version was released in October featuring material recently discovered in the Fantasy Records vaults.

Guaraldi was born in North Beach in 1928. After a brief stint at San Francisco State and a tour in Korea as an army cook, he hit the SF jazz scene and quickly received a contract from locally based Fantasy Records. While playing live around San Francisco, he picked up nicknames like “The Italian Leprechaun” (he was just over 5 feet tall) and Dr. Funk. He and his trio gained some popularity through covers of Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfa on their 1962 album “Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus,” then had a bona fide hit with the B-side “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.”

It’s hard to believe, but prior to its self-inflicted Weimar-ification*, San Francisco quite a brilliant city.

Related: Charlie Brown’s Inside Job. What gives the 1965 Peanuts special its staying power? “All the suits had said no to the religiouselement in the special, but Schulz insisted. Everyone at the network was prepared for a flop, but Schulz wasn’t thinking of network executives when he made the special. He was thinking about children and about the nature of God. The suits didn’t understand it, but from the first broadcast, the kids who watched it loved it, and made it a huge hit from then on.”

* Instagram v. reality! San Francisco unveils taxpayer-funded open-air Christmas market that’s become dystopian hellhole after being besieged by city’s famed druggies.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

HOLIDAYS IN HELL: So This Is Christmas — and What Have Celebrities Actually Done?

As French authors would later conclude in their magnificent clean-up book on 20th-century communism, The Black Book of Communism, in 1999, nearly 100 million people died worldwide as a result of Marxist atheists.

To be sure, faith is no guarantee of a refuge from the evil that men do. Evil is also committed in the name of faith and by those who think they were/are on a mission from God. The Islamic Republic of Iran has been doing this since 1979, as one modern example.

However, it’s an analytical stretch that requires undue faith in the innate goodness of the religiously naked ape to believe atheism and atheist states will be any different from others who have complete power in a state. It’s an error to think that atheism will somehow thus serve as a peaceful refuge from humanity’s worst impulses. To believe this is to assume that religion — and not concentrated power — is the main problem in human affairs.

See China’s Xi Jinping today as the latest atheist incarnation of John Lennon’s imagined state and its consequences: a man on a mission for himself, who will run roughshod over his own population and others who want nothing to do with his view of how we should live. Xi’s repression is already obvious in China and in Hong Kong, and if he ever gets the chance, in Taiwan.

The same vapidity is evident in “Happy Xmas.” Its most famous line opens the song, and lodges in my cranium without asking permission: “And so this is Christmas/And what have you done?” Those ten words have enough hubris to inflate the Hindenburg. It’s as if ordinary folk somehow should justify themselves to a 1960s–1970s rock star consumed by self and by error, as in his musical worship of anti-religious belief and consequences.

The easy response from normal people to two celebrities who, by 1971, had been writing songs and giving interviews from their bedroom decked out in pajamas can be imagined as follows, perhaps from a single mom: “Oh, I don’t know, John — I’ve been raising three kids, caring for my aged Mom, and working double-shifts at the coffee shop to pay the bills. You?”

Other responses to imagine: From a Second World War veteran: “I fought my way on to Omaha Beach and survived D-Day — and the rest of the war, but many of my friends did not. We beat the Nazis, which is what mattered even more despite the sacrifices.”

Or imagine the response from a steelworker, miner, or farmer: “Endured another grinding day at the foundry/shaft/farm, this to afford the mortgage and Christmas presents.”

As Ian MacDonald wrote in Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties, a trenchant analysis of the Beatles’ changing worldviews and how they fed their lyric writing, focusing on “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” an earlier attempt by Lennon to shift away from writing universal anthems to focusing on his day to day celebrity life:

Behaving as if they had personally invented peace, they jetted round the world in first-class seats selling it at third-rate media-events. This was arrogant as well as silly, and the news media’s derision, of which THE BALLAD OF JOHN AND YOKO self-righteously complains, was not only inevitable but, in the main, justified.

Of all the dangerous ideas Ono unloaded on her spouse around this time, the most damaging was her belief that all art is about the artist and no one else. Serving to confirm Lennon’s self-absorption, this also torpedoed his universalism, and it was as a man struggling to resolve this exacerbation of his lifelong emotional contradictions that he reeled from heroin to Primal Therapy to Maoism and finally to drink during the next three years. Otherwise scathingly honest, he unwittingly put himself into a position in which he was obliged to defend things that, deep down, he cared nothing about. Uncompromising as ever, he threw himself into this trap with total commitment, not only refusing to draw a line between his public and private life but going out of his way to personalise everything that happened in his vicinity, a self-centredness which could hardly avoid occasionally degenerating into paranoia, as THE BALLAD OF JOHN AND YOKO demonstrates. Indeed, so outrageously egocentric is this song that it’s difficult to know whether to deplore its vanity or admire its chutzpah in so candidly promoting Self to artistic central place.

In one of his last interviews, Lennon would finally admit, “I dabbled in politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, more out of guilt than anything. Guilt for being rich and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face to prove I’m one of the people. I was doing it against my instincts.”

His fans, though, cottoned on much more quickly: “The crowd I first saw the original [Let It Be before being Disney-fied by Peter Jackson] with weren’t interested in a happier spin on the Beatles. They were there to render judgment, to be the choric voice of the Beatles’ community declaring their disapproval. In other words, they were there to boo. They were there to boo Yoko Ono. If I remember the film correctly, the opening credits were barely done when we see John Lennon, and there is Yoko, sitting right beside him. ‘Boooo.’ Then, there is Yoko, knitting right beside him. ‘Boooo.’ For the length of the movie, every time Yoko was on camera, the crowd booed, as if to say, ‘Take that, Yoko, for breaking up the Beatles.’”

MERRY CHRISTMAS:

READER FAVORITE: Alpha Grillers Instant Read Meat Thermometer for Grill and Cooking. #CommissionEarned

THEY’RE FREEZING UP IN BUFFALO, STUCK IN THEIR CARS: Buffalo hit by ‘most devastating storm’ in city’s history, governor says.

Hochul sent 50 National Guardsmen yesterday. That number seems . . . insufficient. I hope it’s been expanded.

And, sadly, I’m not down in the Caribbean ‘neath the moon and the stars. But at least I’m not in Buffalo!

Flashback: Snowfalls Are Now Just a Thing of the Past.

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Drinker’s Christmas Crackers — It’s a Wonderful Life (Video).

More here: It’s a Wonderful Life: Holiday Classic Takes On New Meaning As Jimmy Stewart’s Post-War Struggles Bleed Into Film.

And for Mirror Universe version of the same story, It’s a Wonderful Fountainhead, too.

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL:

NO PASARAN: Nazi Caroling: The Extremes Hitler Wanted to Go To in Order to Replace Christianity with the “Religion” of National Socialism).

And if you missed it yesterday: Christmas in Nazi Germany: How Nazis Stole Christmas & Turned Adolf Hitler into Messiah (Video).

Related: Peter Hitchens: The last Noël in the USSR.

MERRY CHRISTMAS: Let nothing you dismay.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Oh No! Zelensky Shoots His Eye Out With The Rocket Launcher He Got For Christmas.

CHRISTMAS TIME IS HERE.

MERRY CHRISTMAS: I hope you muddle through somehow.

FUN GIFT: The Original BenShot Bullet Rocks Glass with Real .308 Bullet. #CommissionEarned

ROGER KIMBALL: Stanford’s Naughty and Nice List.

The scarifying bulletin offers advice on the language that you should—and, more to the point, language that you shouldn’t—use in several different situations. With respect to language that touches on prowess and disability, for example, it suggests that instead of saying “addict” one say “person with a substance use disorder” (not that the person mainlining heroin had any choice in the matter, you see). Instead of saying “basket case,” consider saying “nervous.” Instead of saying “committed suicide,” say “died by suicide”—as if it just happened; no agency or responsibility involved. And on and on through the usual lexicon of supposedly hypersensitive but really obtuse insanity. 

The website proceeds through all the usual politically correct categories, with entries on “ageist” language, 57 varieties of “gender identification” and, of course, endless handwringing entries dealing with race. Don’t say “bury the hatchet,” for heaven’s sake, say “call for peace, call a truce. ” Don’t say “low man on the totem pole,” say “lacking seniority, don’t have the power or prestige.” By the same token (is that permissible?), don’t say “balls to the wall” (I could have told you that), say “accelerate efforts,” don’t say “chairman” or “chairwoman,” say “chairperson, chair.” 

Naturally, you shouldn’t even think about using personal pronouns or the word “man” as a collective noun or as a verb. Don’t say “black hat,” “black mark,” “black sheep,” “blackballed,” “blackbox,” “blacklist.” Don’t even say “brown bag” because—well, you know. Grandfather, father, mother, daughter, son: they’re out, and so are most uses of the word “master”: “master list,” “master a subject,” “master plan.” You can’t say “rule of thumb” because, the document explains, “this phrase is attributed to an old British law that allowed men to beat their wives with sticks no wider than their thumb.” It actually has its source in Muslim practice, but they’re a protected group, so we’re not supposed to mention them. 

Note that the version of this pathetic document I link to exists on a server at the Wall Street Journal. Stanford, facing blowback (that word must certainly offend someone!) hid it from public scrutiny. As the Journal’s column put it, “without a password, you wouldn’t know that ‘stupid’ made the list.”

The Newspeak Dictionary doesn’t shrink itself, you know.

MERRY CHRISTMAS:

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is Christmas really a pagan festival?

The celebration of Christmas is suffused with probable pre-Christian elements, from the Yule Log to the Lord of Misrule (an official appointed to oversee the festivities) but this should hardly surprise us. After all, the priority of early missionaries was to ensure that people came to believe in the Christian God. Customs with no direct bearing on the basics of belief were often left alone; for example, it was several centuries before Anglo-Saxon missionaries to Germany began to interfere in pre-Christian funeral rites or betrothal customs. The medieval church did not, as some think, demand control of every aspect of people’s lives. However, whether surviving pre-Christian customs should be called pagan is debateable, since ‘paganism’ seems to imply something to do with the cult of pagan deities. It is pretty clear that such cults disappeared fairly quickly, within a few decades of the Christianisation of most European nations, even if many other traces of pre-Christian culture remained.

So, is Christmas pagan? In the sense that Christmas is a festival that retains, in most cultures, elements of pre-Christian midwinter festivities, the answer can be yes – provided we’re prepared to use the word ‘pagan’ in quite a loose way.

I blame Saturnalia:

MERRY CHRISTMAS: Let Your Heart Be Light.