Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

Fight them, without becoming them!

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

When they say they are pro-life, they do not mean yours.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Trump should be leading, not lying.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

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Late Night Horror Show Open Thread

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Wren Day (Commentor Raven sent me down a YouTube wormhole on an earlier thread). Whenever the Aould Folks or my mother the incorrigible ‘history buff’ would wax nostalgic about some quaint folk custom like the above, my Manhattan-born dad would say “Aren’t you kids glad for television, so we don’t have to ‘make our own fun’ anymore?”

Today, he’d substitute ‘the internet’ for ‘television’, but you see the idea. In my heart I suspect a lot of these Ancient Midwinter Rituals from the Unknowable Past, for all it was important to ritually remind the Sun ‘to stop lurking along the horizon and do a proper day’s work again’, were also about giving the young folk something to do after the last of the harvest until the days started lengthening. Making one’s festival costume, recruiting a gang, planning a dance routine that wouldn’t shame you in front of those bogtrotters from the other side of the hill — and then, you’d have memories of the event to talk about for the ensuing three months of short rations and close quarters.

(And, yes, Steeleye Span’s “The King” is a wrenboy song.)

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24Comments

  3. 3.

    ? Martin

    Whenever the Aould Folks or my mother the incorrigible ‘history buff’ would wax nostalgic about some quaint folk custom like the above, my Manhattan-born dad would say “Aren’t you kids glad for television, so we don’t have to ‘make our own fun’ anymore?”

    Uh huh. As if Manhattan wasn’t the birthplace of the modern New Years and Christmas celebrations and Festivus. NYC has had no shortage of their own fun-making.

  6. 6.

    Schlemizel

    Irish kids had another holiday, it may have been Wren Day but I forget when it took place exactly. You would go kill a wren then take it door-to-door asking for money so you could have a funeral for the bird which you displayed on your travels.It was accompanied with singing & drinking (but then again what wasn’t in the Auld Kuntry?)

    Tommy Makem used to sing a song about the festival.

  14. 14.

    raven

    This book talks about Dickens and modern Christmas:

    The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits

    ust before Christmas in 1843, a debt-ridden and dispirited Charles Dickens wrote a small book he hoped would keep his creditors at bay. His publisher turned it down, so Dickens used what little money he had to put out A Christmas Carol himself. He worried it might be the end of his career as a novelist.

    The book immediately caused a sensation. And it breathed new life into a holiday that had fallen into disfavor, undermined by lingering Puritanism and the cold modernity of the Industrial Revolution. It was a harsh and dreary age, in desperate need of spiritual renewal, ready to embrace a book that ended with blessings for one and all.

  16. 16.

    Gretchen

    There’s a wren song on The Chieftans’ Bells of Dublin, but I didn’t know the history of it.

  17. 17.

    maurinsky

    @Schlemizel:

    My father grew up in Galway, this sounds very much like what he described. Also, when I was a Duran Duran fan in the early 80s, every time he heard their name he’d sing “oh, de wren, oh de wren, he’s the king of the birds”

  18. 18.

    Origuy

    Anne Laurie, you’re in the Boston area, right? Have you ever been to the Christmas Revels in Cambridge? I go to the one in Oakland every year. They put on a different show every year, featuring Christmas/Solstice/Yule traditions of a different place or time. This year’s California Revels was set at Haddon Hall in Darbyshire.

    Love Steeleye Span.

  19. 19.

    gogol's wife

    @Groucho48:

    I saw them open for Jethro Tull in Kansas City some time in the 1970s. It was excruciating. I have no idea why I went to that.

  20. 20.

    HelloRochester

    Mumming freaks me the fuck out. When I first moved to Philly, I was having a smoke in my now-wife’s apartment early on Jan 1 and I said “Why does Philadelphia have Gay Pride on New Year’s Day?” She couldn’t believe I’d never seen straight (drunk) union pipefitters dressed in sparkles, makeup, and feathered headdresses walking in a parade. It’s still exceptionally odd to me.

  21. 21.

    MD Rackham

    @gogol’s wife: I saw them together at the Forum in LA on that tour. 1973?

    I really enjoyed that concert. But Steeleye Span was best in small clubs, like the Troubadour.

  22. 22.

    gogol's wife

    @MD Rackham:

    Yes, hockey arena wasn’t probably the best choice. Before the concert, a guy came out and said, “Someone has stolen one of Steeleye Span’s costumes!” It was surreal. That’s what I remember most vividly.

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