Introductory Ramble
I don’t know what it is, but when Christmas enters a film, book, song, it swallows it and makes it belong to it. I love Christmas more than basically anything else. I’ve thought a lot about why and I think it’s because the real, boring exteriors of things are suddenly taken over by extravagant lights and displays in some attempt to transform this world into another one. It’s the only time of year when most people disregard the politics of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste. There is no way of accurately creating a Christmas display in ‘good taste’, it only succeeds in lacking all the extremity of joy which the season calls for. At Christmas, gaudiness, trashiness, and drunkenness are god.
The following is a list of things I love which may not be gaudy or flashy in the slightest, but sever the notion of Christmas from the virgin birth and offer some sort of alternative to holiday entertainment made by those who never heard the jolly word of Saint Nick. Of course, this list is not exhaustive, nor is it indicative of all of my Christmas likes. My favourite Christmas album is Phil Spector’s ‘A Christmas Gift for You…’, but it doesn’t fit here, nor am I suggesting that, say, William Basinski’s ‘Silent Night’ is an alternative to that album. Of course not, and to create some sort of hierarchy of good and bad would be out of keeping with the spirit I described above. And finally (sorry for the ramble), if my descriptions seem superficial it’s because (I am) I’m more specifically writing about the ways these things connect to the holidays, not about the full extent of how they operate as works of art. Thank you. Happy holidays XOXO
Writing, Books, Poems, Stories etc.
Merry Christmas From The World (Magazine)
A Christmas issue of Anne Waldman’s The World has since been archived online and includes wonderful selections from legends of the Saint Marks Church scene including work by Bernadette Mayer, Clark Coolidge, Eileen Myles, and more.
Available to read online here at JSTOR:
https://daily.jstor.org/merry-christmas-from-the-world/
A Christmas Memory – Truman Capote
(My attempt to make the fruitcake in the story, circa Xmas 2023)
I debated whether this was fit for inclusion but I couldn’t bring myself to pass it by. I have a soft spot for particularly the young wunderkind Capote who fancied himself the American Flaubert. He wrote multiple Christmas stories, ‘A Christmas Memory’ being the most famous, although I’ll also give a nod to ‘Jug of Silver’.
Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
In Ellis’ debut, a college student returns home for the holidays and passively looks out at the degradation surrounding him. Hefty torrents of snowfall are swapped for large mounds of cocaine.
Nativity – Jean Frémon, drawings by Louise Bourgeois
Fremon’s story focuses on the first artist who wanted to depict the infant Jesus nude instead of strewn with bundles of cloth. Accompanying the story are Bourgeois’ illustrations which relate to birth and the female form. The first publication of the book was on Christmas day of 2009, coincidentally also Bourgeois’ birthday. It was translated into English in 2020 by Cole Swenson.
The Dead – James Joyce
(Illustration by Robert Berry for the Stoney Road Press edition)
The final story in ‘Dubliners’, widely regarded as one of Joyce’s first major achievements, focuses on a Christmas party and its aftermath. It rings true at any time of year of course, but the unexpected succumbing to what history unexpectedly drags up, be it death or old flames, seems particularly fitting for the holiday season and all of its drunken reminiscing at parties which go wrong.
Christmas Days – Derek McCormack, designed and decorated by Seth
If one thing is certain it’s that Derek McCormack loves Christmas. This book is an advent calendar decorated and illustrated by Seth, with an instalment for all 24 days, each chronicling the history of a beloved Christmas phenomena, often with a Canadian bent. The writing is playfully visceral in describing all manner of decorations, events and costumes, their curious histories, and the people behind them. I’m using it as an advent calendar at the moment and I always feel at least ten times jollier after getting to the end.
Christmas – Vladimir Nabokov
(Young V.N. dressed for the cold)
Written in 1925 in Russian for his collection ‘Details of a Sunset’ and later translated into English by his brother Dmitri, ‘Christmas’ contains all of the artful layering and linguistic trickery which he excelled at, and also notably features butterfly collecting or lepidopterology, a huge obsession in Nabokov’s life. He also wrote at least two other stories centred around Christmas, 1928’s ‘The Christmas Story’, and 1932’s ‘The Reunion’.
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
I re-read this every holiday season and I think it perfectly encapsulates walking around a city alone during that time. Christmas is of course so tied to childhood, which makes the backdrop all the more fitting for a narrator stuck between the uncompromising wonder and curiosity of childhood and the phony mediocrity forced upon you when you become an adult.
The Twelve Terrors of Christmas – John Updike and Edward Gorey
To be transparent, I’m basically ambivalent about Updike, but Gorey is one of the greats for me, and here Updike compliments him to great effect (or vice versa). For more Christmas Gorey I’ll direct you towards ‘The Haunted Tea-cosy’, an inversion of Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’. I suppose this is the closest thing to a Victorian Christmas which I have included.
And finally, a story short (and rare) enough to merit a reproduction here:
Christmastime – Laura Riding
The story that follows, the only one in this book of latertime writing, was written for informal Christmastime presenting to friends. In considering it for inclusion in Progress of Stories I had an uneasy awareness of an attraction that the book can have for contemporary taste as modern fiction of a high degree of stylistic sophistication. Those who have adopted the book as an example in this tradition have, I think likely, read it in obliviousness to a motif pervading the whole; the tragic sense of what all stories can hold is not exiled but kept suspended in discreet reserve from the story-telling mood and scene. This story should help to unsettle the impression that I incline to stay at removes of icy intellectuality from the emotional potential of the stories I tell, by the taut closeness to the close-to-tragic happy ending of its portrayal of how human refusal to despair year on year renames itself hope.
– L.R.
CHRISTMASTIME
(1966)
I imagine the Angel of Immediate Joys and the Angel of Future Joys and the Angel of Past Joys all coming suddenly together at the turn of the year, when the paths of happy memory and happy expectation, and that of present happiness, suddenly meet and merge. An abrupt encounter!-for none of the three Angels had been thinking of the others: they tumble into one another-but save one another from falling, the joys they had been carrying, in great armfuls, spilled upon the crossways, mingledly… What now?
“Glad, glad!” all the people cry out—all cry out except the Angels “Oh, I am glad!” everyone says-except the Angels.
The people tread on the spilled, strewn joys as if on a carpet ol flowers, scarcely putting feet to ground.
The people do not know why they are so glad, whether because of old, remembered joys, or joys hoped-for, or joys of the time-being or the moments that just were. All the joys seem the same: “Is this not as much happiness as may be?” they feel. And, almost immediately, they are at a loss, yet do not know this.
The Angels, too, are at a loss; and they know that they are so. The festive moment of the people obscures the further way, the fourth path, the Unknown. To whom, the fourth path?
They hover at the edges of the celebration, watching how the people go joyfully round and round, and crisscross, and back and forth, tasting the thought of joy with indiscriminate zest-from then to now to later to then to later to now to then, mingling times, mingling joys, in bewildered step. “Ought we not to be doing something to help the people?” the Angels ask of one another by exchange of bewildered looks. What next for the people? (“What next for us?”)
Suddenly, before the faces of the Angels show any fretful appearance, the people weary, are heavy with themselves-comprehending as little why they weary as they comprehended why they celebrated and were so light with themselves. And they depart in the fourth direction, the way of the Unknown!-in straggling numbers, their step still bewildered, but as those going where all must go because there is no other way.
Where to, the Angels? They gather up the spilled joys in their separate kinds with the prompt touch of the knowledge of one’s own-which, flower-like, freshen in their arms and as from a not-mortal fading. Where next?
The crossways had darkened and shrunk with the departure of the people in the direction of the Unknown. There was no past or present or future, only the Unknown, and no light to lead the way but the first imprints of the people’s feet glowing faintly on the new road, the mark of the first slow passion of their advance, misdoubt struggling in them with curiosity, curiosity with misdoubt.
The Angels felt the clutch of fear: the people’s joys! (“They will need their different joys…”) They hurried after, and soon they too were lost from sight in the Unknown. They will find their separate paths again as the people begin again to divide their happiness into its ages. The scene is invisible. But time, the order of knowledge, has been restored. Truth has its clock again.
Film
Fireworks (dir. Kenneth Anger)
AKA maybe the greatest movie ever made. Anger’s first masterpiece includes a lot of Christmas iconography, most notably a flaming Christmas tree, but for further proof of its XMAS credentials just turn to the man himself: “This flick is all I have to say about being 17, The United States Navy, American Christmas and The Fourth of July”.
Tangerine (dir. Sean Baker)
I guess this has become the cool film to claim your favourite Christmas film is, but for good reason of course. Famously shot entirely with three Iphone 5’s, it’s the film that put Sean Baker on the map, and in my opinion, his greatest work. The plot is almost a pastiche of a Christmas film wherein the protagonist embarks on a chaotic journey on Christmas Eve, in this case scorched by L.A. sun and pulsing dubstep, but is heartfelt enough to be destined for its reputation as a modern holiday classic. And it is truly hilarious with incredible one-liners from start to finish.
Fanny and Alexander (dir. Ingmar Bergman)
It’s harder to feel more Christmassy than when I’m watching the Christmas sequence in this film. It’s so pure and beautiful and full of magic that cold evil hearts will melt and bells will ring.
This is my favourite Bergman and is committed to the theme which fascinated him all his life, trying to reconcile artifice and trickery from real magic, and what better a time than Christmas to act as the backdrop for this? I should also say that both the theatrical cut and the tv series version are brilliant, though I definitely prefer the theatrical cut.
Silent Night, Bloody Night (dir. Theodore Gershuny)
A Christmas themed slasher film predating ‘Black Christmas’ starring Mary Woronov in a leading role. In the film’s most effective and strangely beautiful flashback sequence, there are cameos from the likes of other Warhol Superstars, such as (to name a few) Ondine, Tally Brown, and my hero Candy Darling. Artists Susan Rothenberg and George Trakas reportedly also appear, as well as the legendary underground filmmaker Jack Smith, though you’ll have to squint to find him. To my pleasant surprise, the film holds up, particularly the flashback sequence and ending, and it was apparently ahead of the curb in predating the primary characteristics of many later slasher films, but with a genuine crust of exploitation flare.
Dans Paris (dir. Christophe Honoré)
I love this film so much. I have a feeling it was heavily inspired by Salinger’s ‘Franny and Zooey’ (which Garrel is seen reading in the film), and alongside that also channels the spirit of some of the more playful efforts of the early Nouvelle Vague. It focuses on two brothers at christmas time, one is left basically suicidal from a bad breakup and doesn’t want to leave his dad’s house. The other runs around the city all day getting involved in various sexual encounters. The Christmas spirit largely centers around the window displays of Le Bon Marche which Garrel runs out to see, and there is also a putting up the tree sequence.
The Dead (dir. John Huston)
John Huston’s final film, an adaptation of Joyce’s aforementioned story, is an ambitious goodbye in a way which seems rare. For one, the film is under ninety minutes and not a three hour swan song, and the star, Angelica Huston, doesn’t make up much of the runtime. It also mostly consists of strings of dialogue within some confined spaces, and the key into the emotional core of the film only comes right at the end. It’s one of Huston’s greatest achievements, and effectively manages to capture something desolate which the story has.
Christmas Evil (dir. Lewis Jackson)
I’m getting sentimental, and if you don’t go in for that then I’ll direct you here to what John Waters has called his favourite Christmas film. It follows a mentally disturbed man (oddly played by Fiona Apple’s dad) who after becoming obsessed with becoming Santa Claus, goes on a murder spree dressed as him. Out of all Christmas slasher films I’ve seen, I’ll say that this feels the most Christmassy somehow, probably because it takes the intensity of seasonal goodwill to its deranged extreme.
Tokyo Godfathers (dir. Satoshi Kon)
One Christmas Eve, three homeless people find an abandoned baby. One is a middle aged alcoholic, another a teenage runaway, and the other is a trans woman desperate to be a mother. The three of them go on an adventure to return the child to its parents, which is complicated when the past finds a way to catch up with all of them. Every Satoshi Kon film is mesmerising and this is no exception.
Some of my best friends are (dir. Mervyn Nelson)
It’s an interesting relic of its time which coincidentally also features Candy Darling (who steals the show while we’re at it, although Rue McClanahan is also pretty fabulous). Set in a gay bar on Christmas Eve, it follows its clientele who slowly get drunker as the night progresses. It was accused of ripping off ‘The Boys in the Band’, but unlike ‘TBITB’ this film isn’t interested in explaining what being gay is, though it has its cliches for sure. It also isn’t as conservative and revels in its squalor, which coincidentally makes it all the merrier, and very very Christmassy.
8 Women (dir. Francois Ozon)
A stylish murder mystery whodunnit set in a confined space at Christmas. It’s also a musical, so put this on after ‘Meet Me in St. Louis’ is finished as everyone’s wiping their eyes, and you never know, they might cry again, or laugh at least.
Bell, Book, and Candle (dir. Richard Quine)
The same year that ‘Vertigo’ was released, Novak and Stewart starred side by side in ‘Bell, Book and Candle’. Novak portrays perhaps my favourite witch in all of cinema, who for whatever reason casts a love spell on old Jimmy Stewart at Christmas. It’s a delight from start to finish, and there are so many great performances, and it’s also set in Greenwich Village.
My Night With Maud (dir. Eric Rohmer)
One of Rohmer’s ‘Six Moral Tales’ series, his first commercial success brings Pascal and theology into the bedroom. Rohmer has a film for every season, and this is his holiday film, featuring midnight mass, snow, and what most Christmas films feature: love, or in this case, a dissection of it.
Female Trouble (dir. John Waters)
I’m cheating here, but I really want to point attention to what might be the greatest Christmas sequence ever put to celluloid. God knows I need my cha-cha heels this year, don’t we all?
The Apartment (dir. Billy Wilder)
Every holiday romantic comedy stems from this. That’s all that needs to be said.
ALBUMS
A Christmas Record – Various Artists
You can take or leave some of this stuff, but what’s really remarkable are the two songs bookending the album by the one and only Alan Vega of Suicide. ‘Hey Lord’ is almost as frightening a goodbye as Phil Spector’s spoken work outro on ‘A Christmas Gift for You…’.
Silent Night – William Basinski
Ambient genius William Basinski’s hour long meditation could be a mood piece centred on the nativity, or it could serve as a way to clear your head from holiday overstimulation, either way it’s delicate and moving if you chose to really focus on it.
Warm Forever – Candy Claws
In ‘Warm Forever’, glitchy dream pop legends of the music board era, Candy Claws, created a twenty minute miniature holiday album that is both hushed and chaotic, like a mind too wired to sleep but wrapped in the softest blankets imaginable.
The New Possibility – John Fahey
The story goes that John Fahey walked into a record store one day in July and was surprised to see stacks upon stacks of copies of Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ album. The clerk told him that since there was a demand for Christmas music every year, it always sold out, and so Fahey got the idea to try to make an album that would sell out every year. He was right; it’s his highest selling album to date. Even among Fahey fans it is a divisive release, but the intricate quality of his classics are here. All in all it is an erratic and lonely set of renditions of old classics, an album interesting enough to call for countless re-listens so that you can really immerse yourself in it.
Christmas – Low
Low took their quiet, melodic, but stark and contemplative joie de vivre and brought it to Christmas with beautiful results. ‘Just Like Christmas’ is a very strong contender for the greatest Christmas song of all time.
Pop Caroler’s Songbook – PC Music
Hyperpop Xmas. This is a charity album released to bandcamp in 2020 featuring seasonal and wintery songs from artists in the roster of the now semi-defunct PC Music including: Caroline Polachek (with ‘So Cold You’re Hurting My Feelings’!), Hannah Diamond, A.G. Cook, and more.
We Three Kings – The Roches
A vocally manic and quaint folk album that is by turns beautiful and campy. It sounds just familiar enough to be something overheard from the inside of a Church long ago, but strange enough to sound like the work of some outsiders not allowed inside of a church.
Peace – Rotary Connection
My mission is to promote this album. It’s so good. I could gush about it but the most important thing that you should know is that this album answers the question of how Santa gets his sleigh to fly, why, by the recreational smoking of mistletoe of course! and if the good natured hippy stoner humor isn’t a turn off, then boy, do I have the psychedelic soul opus for you!
Songs for Christmas – Sufjan Stevens
Stevens is the patron saint of indie Christmas, so he’s a man after my own heart, and this, in my humble opinion, is the superior of his two Christmas albums (though I love ‘Silver and Gold’ too which has some very strong highlights). Here five yearly EPs are compiled to add up to an eclectic two hour opus featuring both deliciously hokey Americana and melancholic imagery accompanied by what sounds like the greatest high school band of all time.
Nathan’s Christmas (I – VI, ongoing) – SuperMega
Every year, Matt Watson of the comedy YouTube duo SuperMega records and releases an album of Christmas music under the alias of Nathan, an alter ego of Watson who is a kind-hearted manchild living rent free with his exhausted family. Watson has a musical background too, so the results knowingly call to mind the best comedy Christmas music of the past.
A John Waters Christmas – (Comp), John Waters
The pope himself curates a list of holiday songs from the past that only he could have picked and only he could have remembered. It’ll make you lament that there is no successor to Tiny Tim.
AND ALSO SOME SONGS LISTED WITHOUT COMMENT:
Sympathy for the Grinch – 100 Gecs
Jesus Christ – Big Star
A Child’s Christmas in Wales – John Cale
Christmas Is Now Drawing Near – Coil
Christmastide – The Fall
Christmas Day – GFOTY
Christmas in my soul – Laura Nyro
Player’s Ball – Outkast
Welcome Christmas – Red Red Meat
Santa Dog ‘78 – The Residents
Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis – Tom Waits
The Day the “Conducator” Died (An Xmas Song) – Scott Walker
Frosty the Snowman – Xiu Xiu
Finally, one oddity that deserves an honourable mention:
A Christmas Carol (TV Movie, dir. Catherine Morshead)
This 2000 TV movie adaptation of Dickens’ novel starring British TV tough guy Ross Kemp used to be on every Christmas morning. It’s so fabulously awful that it became a weird family tradition in my house to watch it every year to the extent that we now seek it out if it’s not on. It wouldn’t be Christmas without it. All you need to know is that it concerns Eddie Scrooge, a loan shark that wreaks havoc on a council estate. I could talk about it forever, but finally, I’ll shut up.
Afterthought
I feel like a kid at show and tell; I want to show you everything, but of course I can’t. So enough said, more or less, but if you have any recommendations/personal traditions I’d love to hear about them!
I’ll leave you with these words:
From the same desert, toward the same dark sky, my tired eyes forever open on the silver star, forever; but the three wise men never stir, the Kings of life, the heart, the soul, the mind. When will we go, over mountains and shores, to hail the birth of new labor, new wisdom, the flight of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition, – to be the first to adore! – Christmas on earth!
– Arthur Rimbaud, trans. by Paul Schmidt
*
p.s. Hey. This weekend none other than the masterful Harper has put together a Xmas post for us all — appropriate thoughts for the season, possibly suggestions for your Xmas shopping/wants list, but definitely fodder for your souls. Please pore over their shebang and talk with them accordingly if you feel thusly inclined. And thank you ever so much plus the merriest Xmas to you, Harper. ** Morgan M Page, Thanks, I’ll see what I can find about them while awaiting your proper intro. And I’ll see if I can find Lauren’s novel. Intrigued. I’ve only gone to one mass in my life, and it was really, really long. And, yeah, dreamy. That’s kind of all I remember about it. Paris is kind of at its ultimate best around Xmas, it’s true. I have a few days to get better, so that’s the goal. Have a lovely weekend and beyond. ** Bill, Hi. Yeah, sickness sucks. I rarely get sick, but that doesn’t make it any easier. But I can walk and talk. You make me want to try Taipei. Maybe there’s a way. Maybe there’s a film festival there with sufficient bucks to fly us in. ** Laura, Well, thank you. I’m pretty sure I just have a baddish head/chest cold, but time will tell. I’ve certainly listened to people talk whilst seeming to be in a state of psychosis, but I don’t know if they were. People talking whilst in a state of shock can be pretty poetic. I have a roommate who will grab the reins if I get particularly zonked, but I think what I have is pretty survivable. No, never did a Paul Schmelzer. How curious that you did sort of. Huh. My cloudy being feels wonder, I think. ** _Black_Acrylic, I did nitrous oxide once or twice. It’s weird because, at least in my case, I didn’t feel high but I sure was acting like I was. ** Montse, Thanks, pal. You too? It’s so annoying, right? That’s what I feel. Like why me, this is so stupid. MC Yallah, yes! Lots of love and a portion of my medicine back to you. ** Dev, Hey, Dev, good to see you! I am still interested in the guest post, of course, but only if you feel like spending some of your precious free time making it. You too: sick. It’s weirdly comforting to know I’m not the only one, even though that comfort feels kind of evil. Enjoy a carefree weekend. ** Carsten, I’m taking it easy and downing possibly helpful supplements, and I think that’s all I can do. Bruce Hainley’s little description of RT is my favorite description of the film thus far. Dude nailed it, I think. Thanks. Then all fingers stranglingly crossed that the Jarmusch film meets your standard for his stuff. ** Steve, Seems like the blog was in a glitching mood yesterday. You would think re: those ‘trip reports’ but I haven’t seen any. I never really rest, and I have a lot to do, but at least I won’t have to do it while traveling. Yeah, the Korean market near me has a whole aisle devoted only to edible insects. ** HaRpEr //, Hey, buddy, thank you again ‘in person’ for the wonderful post up there! Any music project that loves GbV is going to automatically endear itself to me. In fact I just did a quick search and found a video of Sharp Pins covering GbV’s great ‘My Impression Now’ live so that cements it. Wow, a Xmas story too! Everyone, Bonus feature of Harper’s Xmas Shebang is a story they wrote about a boy who wants to kill Santa Claus. How can you resist? It’s here. Happy weekend! ** Uday, Grant, very nice. Write away. Granted my brain is inebriated in a bad way, but I didn’t notice any difference in your demeanour or writing yesterday. Interesting. Thanks, pal. ** julian, I would try Vicious Coffee in a heartbeat. Especially at this very moment. I’ll look for those writings on cruising and hope for a severe lack of nostalgia, the enemy. Curious. Thanks, julian. Have the healthiest weekend. ** horatio, Hi, horatio. I’m happy it sat well with you. I’ll go look for your instagram thing and pony up in return. Thanks re: my clogginess. I’m determined to thrash it into zero. ** Ryaha U•ᴥ•U, Hi! Welcome! When I was a teen I was locally famous for my ability to be very easily hypnotised. When my friends and I got bored, one of them would hypnotise me and see what they could get me to do for kicks. I don’t remember it like feeling much of anything, just kind of, I don’t know, like being muted physically and mentally or something. It was mostly like parlour trucks. Like they would tell me an extremely long series of numbers once, and then once I was post-hypnosis, I could rattle off the entire series of numbers. Stuff like that. So it wasn’t very mystical or anything for me. But I’m kind a pragmatic person, so that could be my fault. You’re a cinematographer? Say more. And about your film. Ideally I won’t be sick by then and can listen and respond attentively. Thank you! Glorious weekend to you! ** Okay. Please experience Xmas through Harper’s canny intervention, and I will see you on Monday.
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