American Fez

Farewell 2015, We Hardly Knew Ye.

The Old Year shuffles towards its place of execution: a two-sided scaffold where Olde Father Time waits for the chimes of midnight with his gleaming scythe.

A drunken crowd has gathered: Champagne Charlies and Charlottes wearing spangled party hats, draped in colorful streamers, chewing the plastic mouthpieces of silent, broken noisemakers, occasionally casting a bleary eye at the clock.

Meanwhile, in another time zone, it's still afternoon and Uncle Janus can't remember which of his two faces should be facing forward when he exhales January winds into his part of the world

And the New Year itself? A pink, puffy child screaming on the threshold of a door marked 2016. I hope you know how to change a diaper, dear reader, because there's going to be a lot of crap coming.

Getting Figgy With It

I was not serenaded with the final verses of "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" until I was in my college; my younger self being spared the tiresome demands for figgy pudding and a cup of cheer that conclude the song in question.

As far as I was concerned, carol singers congregated around our family doorstep solely to convey glad tidings to me and my kin. All they wanted in return were a few measly coins to rattle in their collecting tin (no doubt the money would fund the purchase of a more energy efficient lantern for next year). A brisk exchange of seasonal greetings for my father's cash would bring the performance to an abrupt conclusion, its premature termination apparently a satisfactory outcome for all concerned

So when I did eventually hear those final verses, while trapped in the audience at a college glee club recital one bleak December night before Christmas break, my older, slightly louche self misheard the lyrics...

"Bring us some frickin' pudding! Oh bring us some frickin' pudding!"

I thought the mild profanity was all part of the act. In fact, this gluttonously aggressive chant was the only part of the evening I found remotely entertaining (or musical, for that matter). I even considered joining the glee club if singers were permitted to curse with such joyful abandon. It was not to be, of course.

Figgy pudding? How absolutely disgusting. I can't imagine anything less appetizing. Some traditions should really remain buried in the past.

Meanwhile, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Glad tidings I bring to you and your kin (and you don't have to give me any money or clumps of appalling dessert in a disposal bowl, either). 

Christmas Conscientious Objector

There is a War on Christmas in my place of work each December, and the open plan design of our offices is ideal for fighting this war on many fronts at once. 

We are a mixed bag of believers, non-believers, don't knows, don't cares, two Jews, a Muslim, and a Wiccan Priestess who is on a part time contract, so the battles rage unabated all through Advent.

When to put the decorations up, what decoration are permitted, where the decorations are allowed to be, and when the decorations should be taken down: all fodder for the blazing cannons.

The last week before New Year's, however, is a sort of Treaty of Versailles: an unsatisfactory and merely temporary peace, ultimately resulting in nothing but rapid inflation of pique and a powder keg of resentment.

Hostilities resume when the combatants return to work in the first week of January and Frank the militant atheist from Sales occupies the water cooler with his booming blitzkrieg voice. "We shall fight in the cubicles," says Joan, the born-again Christian from HR. "We shall fight n the loading zones. We shall fight in the hallway and the lobby. We shall never surrender."

Which probably means she's going to hang that horrendous "musical" Holy Family mobile in the canteen again next year, despite the fact that Frank continually tries to destroy it with his squadron of flicked elastic bands.

Personally, I am tired of being deafened by the conflict and wish to declare my ears a No Fly Zone next year.

Apostatizing In A Winter Wonderland

You can be sure there is a War on Christmas when young lovers frolicking in the snow refrain from naming their snowmen 'Parson Brown.'

Alas, almost all snowmen built these days are exclusively secular. Any couple wishing to be married by an anthropomorphic snow creation today would invent a 'Justice of the Peace Brown,' no doubt wearing a Harry Potter baseball cap and a gender neutral scarf.

Parson Brown has become a figure from an ancient, musty and best-forgotten past; as foreign as an Eleusinian Hierophant; as alien as Almondine, the triple-breasted Nougat priestess from the Planet Marzipan (from where it takes at least eight million light years to get a marriage license approved anyway).

The only vaguely Christian snowman I'm aware of this year is Father Melti, outside St Igbert's Chapel of the Defrosted Martyr, and his head has already collapsed and unpleasant yellow spots have appeared around his cratered torso.

Yes, the Winter Wonderland of our modern age is a well-populated pagan landscape of carrot-nosed, atheist snow-persons.

So never send to know for whom the sleigh bell rings; it rings for thee, Baby Jesus.

Fetus Creepus

It is hard to hold out much hope for the generously named species of so-called homo-"sapiens." The moment our squidgy ancestors crawled out the sea they slipped on the banana peel of evolution.

Then the first caveman realized his hunting tools could also be employed to kill his fellow and the rot truly began. We were already pretty much post-human pre-Ice Age, if you ask me.

But now come tidings of genetically-modified "designer" babies: the embryo as rich person's plaything. We will truly become a society of sculpted Eloi and a hodge podge of Morlocks.

Of course, some irresponsible, self-aggrandizing pop music superstar will take it all too far. A glittery blue-skinned baby with purple eyes and emerald hair, like an expensive Hermes handbag that can puke and scream.

One can only imagine the hospital sample sales: "Slightly Imperfect Children. Shop Now. Everything Must Go."

Sardine Workshop

Canned sardines: packed tightly together like humans on a subway train (although the little fishes smell much nicer.) 

Salted, slathered with olive oil, sometimes skinless and deboned, like the unfortunate captives of a particularly sadistic Mongol emperor 

Sometimes they are called pilchards, like a drunken literary critic mispronouncing Rosamunde Pilcher's surname in a Bloomsbury pub.

Sardines contain lots of Omegas, just like the attic at Roger Fry's house.

But they don't stretch much, unlike the present blogger trying to make that last comparison. 

So endeth the Sardine Workshop unsuccessfully. Eat your heart out King Oscar.