Clickable Advent Calendar, 24: A Download From St. Nicholas” and other stocking-stuffers”
A round-up of Christmas-related links and other goodness.
The Clickable Advent Calendar is almost over for 2008, so here are some items I couldn’t get to, in the spirit of “stocking stuffers.”
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention humorist David Sedaris, who made his name with acerbic commentaries on Christmas, particularly The Santaland Diaries (the theatrical version of which currently runs at Horizon Theatre and stars Harold Leaver, whom I interviewed in 2004). This year, for some reason I’m flashing on Sedaris’s “Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol” in which a typically caustic theater critic takes on a school pageant.
Other favorite holiday TV shows include “Justice League’s” Christmas-themed “Comfort and Joy” (which features a great subplot in which the Flash and a bad guy called the Ultra-Humanite team up to give some orphans an impossible-to-find Christmas gift), the “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special” and pretty much any “South Park” Christmas installment. (I found this video of Cartman’s “Swiss Colony Beef Log” via a The Onion A.V. Club.)
Slate has “A slide show of some of America’s weirdest holiday light displays” (I particularly like #2, from Batesville, Miss.)
The blog Musical Fruitcake lives up to its billing as “A collection of the worst Christmas songs ever recorded.” Hear a girl sing “Mom and Dad, Please Don’t Steal for Me This Christmas.” Speaking of Christmas music, Andisheh drew my attention to WFMU’s Beware of the Blog post on MORE Christmas Disco!
Alejandro pointed out the Elf Yourself site, and since I saw it, I know at least one friend who’s elfed-up her family.
For atheists and agonistics alienated at advent, here’s Thomas Bell’s secular variation on “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” “Yes Shirley, There is a wide body of evidence suggesting there may be a higher order to the universe.”
And finally, for your Christmas Eve reading, “A Download from St. Nicholas.”
Photo by Joeff Davis