So here's the deal: I'm doing one more wrap-up holiday article after New Year's, but that leaves me an article or two behind my one-per-week goal. This entry, which took easily 3 times as long to write as any other, makes up for it. Because this series is no longer for school credit, I'm free to geek out on this penultimate entry and offer you a ( Read more... )

American masculinity is a rich vein for humorists and serious thinkers alike, certainly too rich to tackle head-on in my little blog. Fortunately, the Christmas season gives me an opportunity to take a glancing shot at the topic via "A Christmas Story," one of the best pop culture depictions of masculinity and its problems.

( Sons of bitches! Bumpuses! )

Macy's! The very word inspires dread in the hearts of timorous Thanksgivers everywhere. For those who crave only turkey on the 4th Tuesday of November, Macy's grueling pageant of the banal is only a gauntlet to run, mixed nuts in hand, before dinner is served. Those of us who admire the communal spirit of Thanksgiving, though, have more ( Read more... )

One side effect of writing this holiday series is that I've been living in an even more impenetrable media bubble than usual. That's one reason why I chose to get out of the house briefly and visit the Henderson Center Open House, a local holiday celebration where shops stay open late, wholesome entertainment takes to the streets, and throngs of ( Read more... )

Halloween may be merely a prelude to the real holiday season, but at least it has its own identity. Thanksgiving, like the Jan to Halloween's Cindy, gets more respect but less attention. Though I've made a good-faith attempt to find Thanksgiving material to cover for these articles, the truth is that the cultural arbiters of media and retail seem ( Read more... )

Permit me to add to the anti-climax of the holidays: After writing about it for a month, I didn't participate in Halloween at all. I considered putting a "WARNING: RAZORS IN CANDY" sign on my door, but as it turned out, no extra dissuasion was needed to keep wary parents out of the dark alley where I live. There was no costume, no candy and no ( Read more... )

Christmas and Thanksgiving are, admittedly, more nostalgic holidays than Halloween. When it comes to nostalgic dissonance, though, Halloween takes the bland little Jack-O-Lantern cupcake -- the real thing is always a huge let-down compared to what we think we remember. The days of unsupervised children roaming the neighborhood dressed as cowboys ( Read more... )

The current episode of the Long-Ass Holiday Review is on hold because I'm waiting to review "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown," which aired only last night. I can use the break. Lately, whenever I have a real journal-worthy thought, I find myself thinking, "Yes, Kris, but how can you tie that into Halloween and provide colorful photos?" It ( Read more... )

I appreciate the essential meaninglessness of Halloween. It appears to be about costumes and candy at first glance, and that turns out to be exactly correct. Even the media -- notorious for injecting politics and bathos into the most unlikely subjects -- can't seem to find anything deeper in this holiday. Halloween coverage is thus little more ( Read more... )

My plan today was to write about Halloween features and ads in media --"It's Starting to Look a Lot Like Halloween," that sort of thing -- but a more natural sign of the season struck first. The first mini-storm of Humboldt's winter-long rainy season hit. As I write, I've lost phone and Internet access. For someone only a few years older than me ( Read more... )