Christmas music, much like the holiday itself, features two very different, and sometimes competing, influences: “Ho Ho Ho” joviality, and the nativity of Christ. It’s sufficed to say that Frosty the Snowman is not topping my list of favs.
I long for the simple Christmases of my past. Christmas was a big deal but it wasn’t about presents. It was about tradition. It was the traditions that we enjoyed every year, things that brought the whole family together. We spent the month before Christmas making cookies and candies. We made sugar cookies, chocolate chip, peanut brittle and old-fashioned fudge with Hershey’s cocoa – all stored in festive tins in anticipation of holiday get-togethers. The windows of our home were simply dressed with fresh pine sprigs and old-fashioned Christmas lights. The movie A Christmas Story wasn’t shown 24 hours a day on cable TV. It was a one-time event and we all sat down together to watch it with a big bowl of popcorn and Coca-Cola.
When I was a kid, my mom put up decorations. We had not one, but about 30 elves on various shelves, stockings, a tree skirt, ornaments and tinsel (my mom will deny ever using it, but she did). She broke out the good china for Christmas dinner and dad had Elvis, Glen Campbell and Bing Crosby on his playlist. The end.
Still, there are many holiday movies out there to enjoy. One might argue that It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t even the best of Jimmy Stewart’s Christmas-set films, if one prefers Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner. One might also argue that It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t even the best Christmas movie of the 1940s – check out Preston Sturges’ little-known Remember the Night, with Barbara Stanwyck as a shoplifter and Fred MacMurray as the assistant D.A. who takes her home with him for the holidays (Turner Classic Movies will show it December 4 at 8pm, by the way).
Souvenirs. Tourists spend oodles of time and money in gift shops, wine shops, pottery studios and local artisan jewelers’ shops to find the right thing to serve as their tangible memory of a place. On our last trip to southern Italy, it wasn’t something that we bought there, but instead something we had delivered to our home that was the greatest reminder of how our trip changed us.
It’s that time again: Thanksgiving is just around the corner with Christmas right on its heels. Like hardworking squirrels storing away nuts for the future, I find handling Christmas expenditures is best if planned for in advance and not looked at as an unexpected expense; after all, it comes every year.
Twenty-five years ago this fall, as a scribe for The Flint Journal, I was immersed in the unlikely rise of Michael Moore’s documentary about Flint, Roger & Me, to national prominence. The film made for great copy, especially as our readers were so polarized over it. (Much of their hatred for Moore seemed to subside once he turned his camera to other subjects and GM’s corporate betrayal of Flint was duplicated, as he had warned, by other perpetrators in other locales.)
If you read my column with any regularity, you know that I love to cook, and November is the month when I get to prepare my most favorite meal: Thanksgiving dinner. Like most folks, I cook a traditional turkey dinner, but what makes it special to me is that each dish I serve is a reminder of Thanksgivings past.
As the destination for many a Ribner family outing, Michigan’s Little Bavaria played a big role in my childhood. My brother and I would become filled with excitement each time the family car turned north onto M-83 on its way to our destination: the Bavarian Inn. In addition to its delicious chicken dinners, our father, the son of Slovak immigrants, loved the old world charm of the restaurant’s Austrian and Alpine rooms. Perhaps this is why I long to live in a fachwerk, a timber-framed, stucco house set inside a deep and enchanting forest…
