Christmas Events 2008

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the Loaf

Not a creature was stirring – they'd all been laid off

Well, it almost rhymes. For the handful of you not already been bored to tears with the ongoing saga of CL's turbulent excursion through the wondrous world of bankruptcy, I offer more holiday reading. The Chicago Reader reports that several employees at that paper got...

image-1We took Wayne's mom to Christmas dinner at Chateau de Saigon (4300 Buford Hwy., 404-929-0034) last night. I reviewed the restaurant a few months back and it was positively reviewed by Meridith Ford Goldman of the AJC recently.

The restaurant was doing a brisk business, with a large number of people apparently deciding against turkey in favor of banh trang cuon, the work-intensive...

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Today’s Air Loaf features Max Arbes and CL's Curt Holman chatting about Dad's Garage's Invasion: Christmas Carol. (Through Dec. 23)

Air Loaf is broadcast weekdays on 1690 WMLB-AM at approximately 8:10 a.m., 12:20 p.m. and 6:20 p.m.

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During the Christmases of my childhood, I always enjoyed advent calendars and the daily ritual of opening a little door to reveal a new surprise for each day of December until the 25th. Taking the advent calendar as inspiration, this month I'll offer some tongue-in-cheek holiday blog entries, with the idea that clicking on, say, embedded video or "For the rest of this entry"...

And they even got her to take off her classic "uniform."

Julian Koster isn't a carpenter. But if you invite him to your house, he'll show you how he makes a saw sing.

As one might expect from the man behind the machines that make up the Music Tapes, he believes the tools have minds of their own. Saws aren't made to sing, they're encouraged. Using a child's violin bow, Koster encourages his saws to burst into song by patting them gently.

Koster will...

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In Christmas movies, the spirit of the season inevitably trumps the personal conflicts that bedevil the characters. Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale feels like a yuletide miracle in reverse: Christmas remains in the background, no match for the wrenching problems yet stubborn togetherness of the Vuillard family.

Matriarch Junon (Catherine Deneuve, the de facto first...

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The holidays can be a tough nut to crack. The same traditions that give the season its cozy familiarity — Christmas carols, Rudolph, pine trees — sometimes start to feel a bit, well, stale. If I were a Bravo reality TV judge, I might even call it (gasp!) a "one note."

Lucky for Christmas, the innovative holiday pageant Phos Hilaron has saved it from elimination (so...

It takes courage to put on a show that pays homage to Vincent Guaraldi's much beloved score to "A Charlie Brown Christmas," and do it justice. Since 1965, the San Francisco jazz pianist's accompaniment to Charles Schulz's cartoon special has become a seasonal classic.

The songs are anything but easy to play. But when Jeffrey Bützer explains that he has always wanted to put on a Christmas show,...

Of all the versions of the Scrooge stories on stage this season, Dad's Garage's Invasion: Christmas Carol is the only one where you'll hear words like "bacne" or "turduckephant."

Created by the theater's improv ensemble and directed by Dan Triandiflou, the Christmas Carol satire rejiggers the "invasion" concept the theater used in last year's Invasion: Our Town. Both shows turn a theatrical...