Saturday, December 24, 2011 Happy Holidays!

Monday, December 12, 2011 Beware the Krampus!

From NPR:

Horror For The Holidays

Meet The Anti-Santa
by Peter Crimmins
December 10, 2011 from WHYY

For generations the Christmas season has been infused with sweetness, but
some families in Philadelphia are adding a dash of horror.

There are no Christmas lights up at Janet Finegar's house in the Northern
Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia. She does not deck her halls with
boughs of holly. Instead, hundreds of rib bones leftover from a neighborhood
barbecue hang on a clothesline strung across her backyard. They're bleaching
in the sun.

"They have been scraped, boiled, scraped again, bleached and are now strung
on strands and hanging out to dry," she says. "They smell. Rib bones, as it
turns out, are incredibly nasty."

She will drape the bones over herself and wear them like a grisly tunic.
It's her Krampus costume.

The Krampus is a character from European Alpine folklore, common in Austria
and Switzerland. The creature stands on two hooves and has horns growing out
of its skull. An extremely long tongue hangs out of its mouth, and it
carries a basket to haul away naughty children.

For hundreds of years, the Krampus and Saint Nicholas have worked a kind of
good cop-bad cop routine. Saint Nick rewards the good children; Krampus
terrorizes the bad.

For Finegar, it's the perfect antidote for Christmas.

"If everything is sweet and beautiful and lovely and the most wonderful time
of the year, some people, like me, start to get a little nauseated, want a
little salt to go with the sugar," she says. "I think there [are] a lot of
people out there who enjoy the idea of having a little salt."

Around the country, there are Krampus parties and club nights in December,
where people dress in leftover Halloween costumes to drink and dance.

Finegar is helping to organize a traditional Krampuslauf: a procession of
people dressed as Krampus, walking through the streets with noisemakers. The
idea for the Krampuslauf in Philadelphia came from Amber Dorko Stopper, a
mother of two.

"Spooky and scary has had a place in Christmas historically - A Christmas
Carol is a ghost story with scary things in it," she says. "I hate to see
everything get watered down because I remember how much fun those things
are."

Krampus parades are rare in the United Sates. Last year, Joseph Ragan
organized one in Portland, Ore., as a reaction to the way Christmas
dominates the winter season.

"Of all the 10,000 holidays that can be celebrated, we just have this one
particular version of this one particular holiday really shoved down our
throats for months at a time - in the most saccharine form," he says.

Consider that Christmas muzak you hear in grocery stores before
Thanksgiving. That really annoys Stopper. She's a fan of horror movies, and
enjoys the folk tales of Krampus stealing children, throwing them into icy
rivers or eating them alive.

"I realized really quickly how that was not popular in this time period. As
a parent of small children that was seen as suspicious behavior almost
immediately," she says. "Everything is so soft-pedaled these days with kids
to the point where you're not showing any kind of conflict to your kids,
much less folklore."

But even Stopper admits there are limits.

"Since both of our children are adopted, we're a little extra sensitive to
talking about being taken away," Stopper says. "But we did tell them that,
'He'll take you to his house, you'll have to eat spicy vegetables and watch
boring adult television - and then he'll bring you home.' "

The horror. The horror.

I'm right there with Ragan and Stopper. As much as I love the holidays, I hate hate hate how it's forced upon us so early. And it just keeps getting worse every year, especially in these economic times*.   This year I started hearing the Christmas muzak pumped into stores before Thanksgiving.

Christmas isn't special if you celebrate it for three straight months. Christmas decorations aren't special if you hang them up in November and leave them up until March. The four seasons of the year are not Spring, Summer, Fall, and Christmas!

The Krampus is pretty cool.  I read about him as a kid, but forgot all about him until he turned up in a Venture Bros. episode a few years back.  I don't know how much success a demonic ant-Santa will have in a country obsessed with fighting a non-existant "War on Christmas", but I wish him the best.

I'm not down with the Leatherface bone costume, though.


*Hey, you want consumers to spend more money?  Give them more money to spend!  Quit cutting back on salary and benefits, quit sending jobs overseas, quit laying off employees by the hundreds to spur short-term stock market increases, quit dancing to the tune of the corporate interests that control us all... oh, wait. 

Friday, December 2, 2011 Santa Claus is Coming to Town

 And he's bringing Martians with him!

Holland Releasing is bringing this holiday "classic", along with a bevy of seasonal shorts and cartoons, back to theaters across the country this Christmas. A list of theaters and screen dates are available at the site.

I've already seen SCvM on the big screen at a Cinematic Titanic event a few years back, but if you haven't yet experienced this "space-blazing" spectacle this is a great opportunity to do so!

Saturday, December 20, 2008 Coal in Your Stocking

Very quick post this time out, as I am so busy with Christmas activities that I can't stop and tell you what an awesome time I had at the sold-out Cinematic Titanic show at the Lakeshore Theater Thursday night. I do have time to share yet another batch of holiday goodies because I love you, my non-existent readers.

This collection ranges from the cute to the annoying, with a downright awesome Louis Armstrong classic thrown in for good measure. Ethnic stereotype "humor" is well-represented, and we not only have a Jerry Lewis impressionist but the man himself, duking it out in a cataclysmic battle to see who can set your teeth furthest on edge.

Abboud, Mona - The Pretty Little Dolly
Armstrong, Louis - 'Zat You, Santa Claus
Blanc, Mel - The Hat I Got for Christmas is Too Beeg
Carney, Art - Santa and the Doodle-Li-Boop
Chipmunks, the - The Chipmunk Song
Colonna, Jerry - He's Too Fat for the Chimney
Count Floyd - Reggae Christmas Eve in Transylvania
Droids - Bells Bells Bells
Enchanters, the - Mambo Santa Mambo
Freberg, Stan - Nuttin' for Christmas
Grandaddy - Alan Parsons in a Winter Wonderland
King Sisters, the - Chree-see-mus
Lewis, Jerry - I've Had a Very Merry Christmas
Monte, Lou - Dominick the Donkey
Peevey, Gayla - I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas
Rose Marie - Santa Send A Fella
Royal Guardsmen - Snoopy's Christmas
Shawn, Dick - Snow Miser
South Park Kids - O Holy Night
Spike Jones & His City Slickers - All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth
Stevens, Ray - Santa Claus Is Watching You
Yorgesson, Yogi - I Yust Go Nuts At Christmas

I can't think of any better way to spend the holiday than by playing these songs for people you don't particularly care for.

Click on this link to download the collection via Rapidshare.

Monday, December 15, 2008 Preterite's Xmas Playlist!

Jeebus, is it that time of year already?

I love Christmas, but really hate the fact that people start celebrating it a few days before freaking Halloween. I can understand stores doing it - not approve, mind you, but understand - but when I see halfwits putting up their lawn decorations in late October, I want to start a firebombing campaign.

From 2004-2006, I was "lucky" enough to miss the Yule overload. I spent most of those holiday seasons in India on business, flying out the day after Thanksgiving and coming back a week or so before December 25th. Two weeks - dare I say twelve days? - of Christmas is just about right in my book.

I'm not getting the overload this year, despite being Stateside. Maybe it's because I'm doing most of my shopping over the internet. Maybe I've just been too busy to notice. Or maybe I've just become really, really good at tuning the cheer out. I hope I can tune it back in again when I want it.

Time to bust out the seasonal playlist. Here, in one handy* RAR file, are my favorites from that ginourmous hard drive folder marked "Xmas". I make no claims to originality - the usual suspects are well-represented here - but let's face, this season is all about traditions. So screw your indie cred!

Belle & Sebastian - Santa Claus, Go Straight to the Ghetto
Brian Setzer Orchestra - Jingle Bells
Brown, Charles - Merry Christmas Baby
Carter, Clarence - Back Door Santa
Cocteau Twins - Winter Wonderland
Cole, Nat King - The Christmas Song
Crosby, Bing - I'll Be Home For Christmas
Crystals, the - Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
Drifters, the - White Christmas
Eels - Everything's Gonna Be Cool This Christmas
El Vez - Feliz Navi-Nada
Fatboy Bing - Here Comes Santa Claus
Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal
John & Yoko - Happy Xmas (War is Over)
Low - Just Like Christmas
Martin, Dean - Baby, It's Cold Outside
Matt Pond PA - Holiday Road
Mogwai - Christmas Song
Ramones, the - Merry Christmas (I Don't Wanna Fight)
Run DMC - Christmas in Hollis
Saint Etienne - Driving Home for Christmas
Springsteen, Bruce - Santa Claus is Comin' to Town
Stevens, Sufjan - Get Behind Me, Santa!
U2 - Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)
Vince Guaraldi Trio, the - Christmas Time Is Here (Vocal)
Williams, Victoria - Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
Youngsters, the - Christmas In Jail

The Dean Martin track is a duet with Martina McBride from 2006's Christmas with Dino. It's a hell of a lot of fun.

"White Winter Hymnal" by the Fleet Foxes is new to the playlist this year. Let's see if I'm completely sick of it by this time next year.

The "Fatboy Bing" track is a Bing Crosby/Fatboy Slim mash-up done for a JC Penney commercial a couple of years back. It's never been officially released, but you can find the mp3 out there in the world wide web if you look around a bit. At just over 30 seconds, it makes a nifty seasonal ringtone.

It's kind of a mellow collection. But let's face it, you need to unwind right about now.

Preterite's Xmas Playlist via Rapidshare



*Unless you don't know how to deal with RAR files, in which case it's in one pain-in-the-ass file.