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Christmas Poop & Magic Mushrooms

December 19, 2016 by Bill McCormick

Our holiday helpers are cooler than yours.
Our holiday helpers are cooler than yours.
Back on Christmas Eve, 2012, I tossed up this festive article about holiday traditions. A couple of things happened today to make me dig it out of mothballs and toss it back to the forefront of your mind. First, and by far foremost to me, Slashing Through the Snow: a Christmas Horror Anthology is out in time for the holidays and has the good fortune to count me among its authors. Second, probably more salient to you, is the fact that Edith Carlin, of the Aurora Carlins, asked me to. Since she and all the others who listen to me ramble every Friday on The Big Wake Up Call are why I get to keep doing that, making a listener happy is kind of part of my job. Also, Edith promised to split the dollar she was about to win when I posted this. In our modern economy you just don’t turn down big money like that without cause. And I couldn’t come up with any. So here you go, a fun look back at how we got to where we’re at with this season.

Well, at least one interpretation of same anyway.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Merry Christmas everyone. It’s time, once again, for us to take a look at the glorious traditions that surround this odd holiday. We have already discussed the Krampus, that lovely little fellow who either casts your children into hell or eats them, depending on what part of Austria you hang out in. But, we neglected his female cousin Perchta: The Belly Slitter. Because nothing says HAPPY HOLIDAYS like eviscerated children. Have I mentioned that Austria was the home for the beginning of two world wars? Yeah, I’m pretty sure I did. When people tell you that they think the Japanese are insane for making Colonel Sanders the symbol of Christmas, feel free to point out Austria. At least in Japan they use the holiday to get laid. That’s an acceptable use of any holiday as far as I’m concerned. In fact I think it should be the point of almost every holiday, but that may just be me.

Another holiday tradition I seem to have missed happens in Spain, the home of great Christian traditions such as the footprint of Jesus, the tour of Mary Magdalene and her servant Veronica and, of course, the Caganer. The caganer represents a lovely tradition of displaying the Nativity scene, the usual array of farm animals, the Star of Bethlehem and a random peasant taking a dump. Yes, you read that right. And it’s not just implied. All statues come with a steaming pile so you can make no mistake as to what the caganer is doing. Granted, seen from a strictly logical viewpoint it makes sense. Someone had to be taking a dump when Christ was born. We all have bowels and those bowels need to move from time to time.

Still, it seems a touch odd, even by Spanish standards.

But all of the above pales when compared to the article my friend Suzy Solar sent to me. According to Live Science, we may owe a big debt of holiday gratitude to magic mushrooms.

This Christmas, like many before it and many yet to come, the story of Santa and his flying reindeer will be told, including how the “jolly old elf” flies on his sleigh throughout the entire world in one night, giving gifts to all the good children.

But according to one theory, the story of Santa and his flying reindeer can be traced to an unlikely source: hallucinogenic or “magic” mushrooms.

“Santa is a modern counterpart of a shaman, who consumed mind-altering plants and fungi to commune with the spirit world,” said John Rush, an anthropologist and instructor at Sierra College in Rocklin, Calif.

According to the theory, the legend of Santa derives from shamans in the Siberian and Arctic regions who dropped into locals’ teepeelike homes with a bag full of hallucinatory mushrooms as presents in late December, Rush said.

“As the story goes, up until a few hundred years ago these practicing shamans or priests connected to the older traditions would collect Amanita muscaria (the Holy Mushroom), dry them, and then give them as gifts on the winter solstice,” Rush told LiveScience. “Because snow is usually blocking doors, there was an opening in the roof through which people entered and exited, thus the chimney story.”

But that’s just the beginning of the symbolic connections between the Amanita muscaria mushroom and the iconography of Christmas, according to several historians and ethnomycologists, or people who study the influence fungi has had on human societies. Of course, not all scientists agree that the Santa story is tied to a hallucinogen.

Presents under the tree

In his book “Mushrooms and Mankind” (The Book Tree, 2003) the late author James Arthur points out that Amanita muscaria, also known as fly agaric, lives throughout the Northern Hemisphere under conifers and birch trees, with which the fungi —which is deep red with white flecks — has a symbiotic relationship. This partially explains the practice of the Christmas tree, and the placement of bright red-and-white presents underneath, which look like Amanita mushrooms, he wrote.

“Why do people bring pine trees into their houses at the Winter Solstice, placing brightly colored (red and white) packages under their boughs, as gifts to show their love for each other … ?” he wrote. “It is because, underneath the pine bough is the exact location where one would find this ‘Most Sacred’ substance, the Amanita muscaria, in the wild.”

Reindeer are common in Siberia, and seek out these hallucinogenic fungi, as the area’s human inhabitants have been known to do. Donald Pfister, a biologist who studies fungi at Harvard University, suggests that Siberian tribesmen who ingested fly agaric may have hallucinated into thinking that reindeer were flying.

“Flying” reindeer

“At first glance, one thinks it’s ridiculous, but it’s not,” said Carl Ruck, a professor of classics at Boston University. “Whoever heard of reindeer flying? I think it’s becoming general knowledge that Santa is taking a ‘trip’ with his reindeer,” Ruck said.

“Amongst the Siberian shamans, you have an animal spirit you can journey with in your vision quest,” Ruck continued. ” And reindeer are common and familiar to people in eastern Siberia. They also have a tradition of dressing up like the [mushroom] … they dress up in red suits with white spots.”

Ornaments shaped like Amanita mushrooms and other depictions of the fungi are also prevalent in Christmas decorations throughout the world, particularly in Scandinavia and northern Europe, Pfister points out. That said, Pfister made it clear that the connection between modern-day Christmas and the ancestral practice of eating mushrooms is a coincidence, and he doesn’t know about any direct link.

Many of these traditions were merged or projected upon Saint Nicholas, a fourth-century saint who was known for his generosity, as the story goes.

The Santa connection

There is little debate about the consumption of mushrooms by Arctic and Siberian tribes’ people and shamans, but the connection to Christmas traditions is more tenuous, or “mysterious,” as Ruck put it.

Many of the modern details of the modern-day American Santa Claus come from “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (which later became famous as “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”), an 1823 poem credited to Clement Clarke Moore, an aristocratic academic who lived in New York City.

The origins of Moore’s vision are unclear, although Arthur, Rush and Ruck all think he probably drew from northern Europe motifs that derive from Siberian or Arctic shamanic traditions. At the very least, Arthur wrote, Santa’s sleigh and reindeer are references back to various related Northern European mythology. For example, the Norse god Thor (known in German as “Donner”) flew in a chariot drawn by two goats, which have been replaced in the modern retelling by Santa’s reindeer, Arthur wrote.

Ruck points to Rudolf as another example of the mushroom imagery resurfacing: his nose looks exactly like a red mushroom, he said. “It’s amazing that a reindeer with a red-mushroom nose is at the head, leading the others.”

Some doubt

Other historians were unaware of a connection between Santa and shamans or magic mushrooms, including Stephen Nissenbaum, who wrote a book about the origins of Christmas traditions, and Penne Restad, at the University of Texas.

One historian, Ronald Hutton, told NPR that the theory of a mushroom-Santa connection is off-base. “If you look at the evidence of Siberian shamanism, which I’ve done,” Hutton said, “you find that shamans didn’t travel by sleigh, didn’t usually deal with reindeer spirits, very rarely took the mushrooms to get trances, didn’t have red-and-white clothes.” But Rush and Ruck say these statements are incorrect; shamans did deal with reindeer spirits, and the depiction of their clothes’ coloring has more to do with the colors of the mushroom than the shamans’ actual garb. As for sleighs, the point isn’t the exact mode of travel, but that the “trip” involves transportation to a different, celestial realm, Rush said.

“People who know about shamanism accept this story,” Ruck said. “Is there any other reason that Santa lives in the North Pole? It is a tradition that can be traced back to Siberia.”

I have already noted how Clement Clark Moore didn’t want his poem published. He was a serious author and thought that children’s literature was beneath him. His friends and family disagreed and we have a little epic that gets read every year.

As to Santa, trying to pin one origin story on him has proved impossible. And that is because the story has evolved so much over the centuries. From the skinny and dour Sinterklaas to the jolly elf we all know today, Santa’s taken many forms.

But they all have one thing in common, they love you and want you to be your best.

That’s not such a bad thing.

From all of us here at the World News Center to all of you where ever you are, have a very merry and safe Christmas.


Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
contact Bill McCormick

Filed Under: News

Christmas Films You Need to See

December 23, 2015 by

Santa’s little helpers are wonderful.
Back in 2012 I wrote a fun little blog about Holiday films everyone needed to see. Most people will point you to the classics like Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, a fun story which reminds children that they’re all useless and will be shunned until they provide a service to their overlords, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, which seems like a pedophile’s wet dream today but was actually very sweet when it was first released (and is still a personal fave of mine since I’m not a pervert – well, not that kind of pervert), Frosty the Snowman, a fun story that reminds kids how much fun it can be to hop a freight train with a stranger, and, of course, A Christmas Story, the first holiday special to ever feature bad lingerie and guns. Certainly there are others, from It’s a Wonderful Life to Die Hard, there are plenty of movies for the older viewers who need chronic depression and death with their holiday.

But the list I created had nothing to do with any of them. Any third rate blog could cough them up. No, my list is for those among you who are connoisseurs of cinema. Who are willing to experiment with your palate. For those who might prefer a moment off the beaten path.

You know who you are.

Merry Christmas!

**********************************

By now you’ve opened the gifts, had your Christmas breakfast and settled in for another year of holiday entertainment. At least until the NBA takes over your TV. This is truly a magical time. The toys haven’t been broken yet. Uncle Ned is still mostly sober. Aunt Edna, still aglow from the kisses from the kids, has yet to begin her annual screed about what a failure you are. Cousin Tony seems to have taken his meds today so that’s one less thing to worry about. As I said, it’s a magical time. But you and I know that if you have to watch A Christmas Story or Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer one more time it is quite possible that you will react badly. Not to worry, it is exactly moments like this that the World News Center was designed to address. Well, these and stripper based funerals. Below you will find an alphabetical list of 11 movies, because Top 10 lists are for amateurs, that will brighten up your day.

Babes in Toyland
All you need to know about this super-happy film, beyond the songs, toy soldiers and dancing puppets, is the super-happy story line. “On the eve of their wedding, evil miser Barnaby hires two henchmen to drown Tom and steal Mary’s sheep, cared for by Little Bo Peep, thus depriving Mary and the children she lives with of their livelihood, forcing her to marry Barnaby.” Kind of makes you misty, doesn’t it? Your kids will be in therapy for decades.

Christmas that Almost Wasn’t (The)
“It is the week before Christmas, and Santa Claus visits attorney Sam Whipple, asking for his help. It turns out that the evil businessman Phineas T. Prune holds the lease on the North Pole, and is about to kick Santa out for nonpayment of rent! As such, there will be no more Christmas!” It is never explained why Santa needed the cash and took a mortgage on the North Pole and Phineas T. Prune is so over the top evil, right down to his mustache, you’ll forget to worry about it. The film has every Christmas cliche, including the bad guy who falls in love with a toy, so it may be the only Christmas movie you’ll ever need to see.

Ernest Saves Christmas
Oh, this is a joyful mess. Santa goes to jail because this guy (a children’s show host) thinks his name is Santos, no racism there, and Ernest loses his job for giving a free ride to Santa and Santa seems to suffer from Alzheimer’s. Nothing like creeping dementia to make your holiday joyous. Plot points include this heart warming gem; “Ernest and Harmony (whose real name is later revealed by Santa to be Pamela Trenton) discover the magic power of Santa’s sack, and immediately Pamela starts to abuse it. She steals the sack, and attempts to run away yet again.” Santa’s magical sack is clearly different than mine.

Eight Crazy Nights
Yeah, it’s a Hanukkah movie, so what? A plate of latkes warm the tummy no matter your religion. And it’s Adam Sandler, that master of subtlety and gentle wit. Doesn’t this plot just scream ‘group hug’? “Davey Stone, an alcoholic with a criminal record, is sentenced to community service under the supervision of an elderly referee. Davey is then faced with trying to reform and abandon his bad habits.” The special part are the songs, all of which sound like they were written by an inmate with anger issues.

Fitzwilly
This movie has everything you could possibly want in a holiday movie. Dick Van Dyke had yet to join A.A. and he is clearly drunk in this film. Add in a soundtrack that was obviously mailed in after a month-long bender by John Williams, who would later redeem himself with that whole Star Wars thing, and you have oodles of family fun. But wait! There’s More! There’s a plot too; “Claude Fitzwilliam, leads the household staff to rob from various businesses by charging goods to various wealthy people and misdirecting the shipments, all to keep Miss Vicki’s standard of living.” Gosh, it’s like every role model you want for your kids in one film.

Fred Claus
“A garrulous hustler running from the emotional fallout of the ultimate sibling rivalry, poor Fred keeps trying to find happiness through one failed scheme after another, pushing away the people who care about him most.” This movie is so grandly contrived that you can pick out what will happen next in every single scene. It even has Santa’s boss. You might be forgiven for thinking that Santa doesn’t have a boss, but Kevin Spacey exists to prove you wrong. Not for anything else that I can see, but there you are.

Great Rupert (The)
Forget the plot on this one I’ll tell you all you need to know. This film has a magic squirrel, Jimmy Durante doing barroom versions of Christmas carols and lots of plucky poor people. Oh, and it has a dude who talks to the magic squirrel and plays a concertina too. Did I mention that the magic squirrel steals money from their landlord so the family can eat and pay rent to the landlord the squirrel just stole from? No? I probably should have. Lots of feel good stuff here.

Polar Express
“On Christmas Eve, a doubting boy boards a magical train that’s headed to the North Pole and Santa Claus’s home.” Oh, that only scratches the surface. This movie has Tom Hanks in full on schizophrenic mode. All of the adult male characters are played by Hanks. So we get him as a condescending prick who doubles as a train conductor and as a drunken hobo. The kids in the film are subjected to horror after horror, all needlessly, until they succumb and believe in Santa again. The films modernized version of rotoscoping gives it a nightmare feel. It is a must see film in my home.

Santa Claus (1959)
What can I say about this masterpiece? Shot in Mexico and dubbed into English it takes the myth of Santa to logical, if unusual, conclusions. Santa knows if you’ve been bad or good because he has a telescope in his space station (what do you mean you never heard of Santa’s space station?) and he peeps into bedrooms. This classic features Santa versus Satan for control of the holiday. Satan, the bad guy in the red suit, tries to turn kids against the holiday by giving them stark nightmares where they are attacked, and possibly eaten, by their dolls. The plot line doesn’t do this work of art justice, “With the aid of Merlin, Santa Claus must defeat the evil machinations of the devil Pitch to ruin Xmas.” The whole Merlin thing is never explained and, by the end, you just won’t care.

Santa Claus Conquers The Martians
This incredible film used to be an annual staple on WGN until someone sobered up. There’s just not enough space to capture everything worth seeing but here’s a start; the Martians come to Earth to kidnap Santa so their kids, who are suffering from planetary depression, can learn to laugh and play like earth kids. The Martians have technology that could lay our planet to waste but they keep forgetting to use it. So, they are immediately discovered by the U.S. Department of Defense and are forced to land and hide. On an on it goes. Add in the fact that Santa smokes and his wife is a controlling bitch and you have holiday magic. The opening theme song is so bad as to sound as if it were imported from a Jap/Pop satire. The fact that this was Pia Zadora’s big screen debut is only a minor bonus. And, no, she couldn’t act then either.

Year Without Santa Claus
“Mrs. Claus tells us about the time Santa had a bad cold and decided to take a vacation from Christmas. Two of his elves, Jingle Bells and Jangle Bells decided to go out (with Vixen) to find children to convince Santa that the Christmas spirit is still important to everybody else. But they have to get past Heat Miser and Snow Miser, first, before they land in Southtown, USA, where it never snows for Christmas. But the Miser Brothers can’t agree to let it snow in Southtown. But Mrs. Santa knows their mom–Mother Nature.” The songs by the Miser brothers alone make this a must see but the Santa themed jail break in Southtown make this must see TV on an epic scale. Also it is the first clearly feminist Christmas film. Mrs. Claus and Mama Nature don’t take no guff, no sirree bub I tell you what. A friend of mine claims this movie was written by a bitter lesbian, but I don’t think so. It has a weird sweetness that permeates throughout. Maybe a bitter lesbian who got a second date then.

So there you have it, 11 films to fill your holiday with heretofore unimagined joy. You can thank me later.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
contact Bill McCormick
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Filed Under: Uncategorized

Merry Christmas

December 25, 2013 by

This is Lil & Marleen sharing their holiday with us.
This is Lil & Marleen sharing their holiday with us.
I got up this morning and thanked God for all the wonderful things that have happened in 2013 and seem poised to keep happening in 2014. It seemed only fair since I had bitched at Him pretty vividly over all the bad shit that had come before. Writing for the World News Center, and doing the attenuate radio show on Fox Sports WBIG, is an honor and a pleasure. Thanks to the internet and the fact that the world is round I am constantly reminded that I’m not just writing for a couple of folks in Chicago. I’ve gotten emails from India, Singapore, Japan, Germany, Serbia, South Africa, Monaco, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Liberia as well as Chicago. Heck I’ve even gotten some from Indiana and Florida. I’m not well loved in Florida, but that’s okay. We can’t all be loved by everyone. I don’t even try.

Normally I take this time of year to talk about odd traditions, have some fun with the Gospel of Luke and explain why Kentucky Fried Chicken is the most romantic food in Japan right noew.

Today, though, I thought I’d take a moment to thank you for following along. Each of you make this possible. When I started blogging here on October 19, 2010, the idea was that I’d “be bringing you my peculiar take on news from around the world, occasional updates on what’s going on in my life and, if I get it right, stuff that makes you think.”

For the most part that seems to have worked out well.

About 6 months later, when I did the first radio show it was hosted by JoAnn Genette and Ryan Gatenby. JoAnn has gone on to bigger and better things but Ryan and I keep plugging away. Usually on Friday’s at 9:10 AM, but it has been a movable fast throughout the week.

Yet, thanks to Facebook & Twitter people keep finding it.

A quick funny story here.

After about a year of doing the radio show I quit smoking in December of 2011. About three months later I got a wonderful email from a lady named Helen. In it she said the following, “I used to listen to your dad do the show and now I listen to you. Don’t tell your dad but I think you’re funnier and more informative.”

Yes, she thought I was my own dad. It took a very confusing chain of emails to finally explain that I was both people. I later listened to some old podcasts and realized that I saw her point. I was wheezing and gasping in all of them. Those shows, all essentially unlistenable, are no longer online.

In all this has been a fun ride and it shows no signs of slowing down. Which is good because I like doing it. And, to the nice man who clicked the link below to ask me if that link was really my email ….. umm, yes.

So keep those cards and letters coming.

On behalf of Ed Silha, Ryan Gatenby, me and all the elves who make this possible, Merry Christmas.

Cozy Hawks – Goddamnit, It’s X-mas from Sharkitect on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
contact Bill McCormick
Your Ad Can Be Here Now!

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Merry Christmas Ya’ll (The Movie Edition)

December 25, 2012 by

Santa’s little helpers are wonderful.
By now you’ve opened the gifts, had your Christmas breakfast and settled in for another year of holiday entertainment. At least until the NBA takes over your TV. This is truly a magical time. The toys haven’t been broken yet. Uncle Ned is still mostly sober. Aunt Edna, still aglow from the kisses from the kids, has yet to begin her annual screed about what a failure you are. Cousin Tony seems to have taken his meds today so that’s one less thing to worry about. As I said, it’s a magical time. But you and I know that if you have to watch A Christmas Story or Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer one more time it is quite possible that you will react badly. Not to worry, it is exactly moments like this that the World News Center was designed to address. Well, these and stripper bsaed funerals. Below you will find an alphabetical list of 11 movies, because top 10 lists are for amateurs, that will brighten up your day.

Babes in Toyland
All you need to know about this super-happy film, beyond the songs, toy soldiers and dancing puppets, is the super-happy story line. “On the eve of their wedding, evil miser Barnaby hires two henchmen to drown Tom and steal Mary’s sheep, cared for by Little Bo Peep, thus depriving Mary and the children she lives with of their livelihood, forcing her to marry Barnaby.” Kind of makes you misty, doesn’t it? Your kids will be in therapy for decades.

Christmas that Almost Wasn’t (The)
“It is the week before Christmas, and Santa Claus visits attorney Sam Whipple, asking for his help. It turns out that the evil businessman Phineas T. Prune holds the lease on the North Pole, and is about to kick Santa out for nonpayment of rent! As such, there will be no more Christmas!” It is never explained why Santa needed the cash and took a mortgage on the North Pole and Phineas T. Prune is so over the top evil, right down to his mustache, you’ll forget to worry about it. The film has every Christmas cliche, including the bad guy who falls in love with a toy, so it may be the only Christmas movie you’ll ever need to see.

Ernest Saves Christmas
Oh, this is a joyful mess. Santa goes to jail because this guy (a children’s show host) thinks his name is Santos, no racism there, and Ernest loses his job for giving a free ride to Santa and Santa seems to suffer from Alzheimer’s. Nothing like creeping dementia to make your holiday joyous. Plot points include this heart warming gem; “Ernest and Harmony (whose real name is later revealed by Santa to be Pamela Trenton) discover the magic power of Santa’s sack, and immediately Pamela starts to abuse it. She steals the sack, and attempts to run away yet again.” Santa’s magical sack is clearly different than mine.

Eight Crazy Nights
Yeah, it’s a Hanukkah movie, so what? A plate of latkes warm the tummy no matter your religion. And it’s Adam Sandler, that master of subtlety and gentle wit. Doesn’t this plot just scream ‘group hug’? “Davey Stone, an alcoholic with a criminal record, is sentenced to community service under the supervision of an elderly referee. Davey is then faced with trying to reform and abandon his bad habits.” The special part are the songs, all of which sound like they were written by an inmate with anger issues.

Fitzwilly
This movie has everything you could possibly want in a holiday movie. Dick Van Dyke had yet to join A.A. and he is clearly drunk in this film. Add in a soundtrack that was obviously mailed in after a month-long bender by John Williams, who would later redeem himself with that whole Star Wars thing, and you have oodles of family fun. But wait! There’s More. There’s a plot too; “Claude Fitzwilliam, leads the household staff to rob from various businesses by charging goods to various wealthy people and misdirecting the shipments, all to keep Miss Vicki’s standard of living.” Gosh, it’s like every role model you want for your kids in one film.

Fred Claus
“A garrulous hustler running from the emotional fallout of the ultimate sibling rivalry, poor Fred keeps trying to find happiness through one failed scheme after another, pushing away the people who care about him most.” This movie is so grandly contrived that you can pick out what will happen next in every single scene. It even has Santa’s boss. You might be forgiven for thinking that Santa doesn’t have a boss, but Kevin Spacey exists to prove you wrong. Not for anything else that I can see, but there you are.

Great Rupert (The)
Forget the plot on this one I’ll tell you all you need to know. This film has a magic squirrel, Jimmy Durante doing barroom versions of Christmas carols and lots of plucky poor people. Oh, and it has a dude who talks to the magic squirrel and plays a concertina too. Did I mention that the magic squirrel steals money from their landlord so the family can eat and pay rent to the landlord the squirrel just stole from? No? I probably should have. Lots of feel good stuff here.

Polar Express
“On Christmas Eve, a doubting boy boards a magical train that’s headed to the North Pole and Santa Claus’s home.” Oh, that only scratches the surface. This movie has Tom Hanks in full on schizophrenic mode. All of the adult male characters are played by Hanks. So we get him as a condescending prick who doubles as a train conductor and as a drunken hobo. The kids in the film are subjected to horror after horror, all needlessly, until they succumb and believe in Santa again. The films modernized version of rotoscoping gives the film a nightmare feel. It is a must see film in my home.

Santa Claus (1959)
What can I say about this masterpiece? Shot in Mexico and dubbed into English it takes the myth of Santa to logical, if unusual, conclusions. Santa knows if you’ve been bad or good because he has a telescope in his space station (what do you mean you never heard of Santa’s space station?) and he peeps into bedrooms. This classic features Santa versus Satan for control of the holiday. Satan, the bad guy in the red suit, tries to turn kids against the holiday by giving them stark nightmares where they are attacked, and possibly eaten, by their dolls. The plot line doesn’t do this work of art justice, “With the aid of Merlin, Santa Claus must defeat the evil machinations of the devil Pitch to ruin Xmas.” The whole Merlin thing is never explained and, by the end, you just won’t care.

Santa Claus Conquers The Martians
This incredible film used to be an annual staple on WGN until someone sobered up. There’s just not enough space to capture everything worth seeing but here’s a start; the Martians come to Earth to kidnap Santa so their kids, who are suffering from planetary depression, can learn to laugh and play like earth kids. The Martians have technology that could lay our planet to waste but they keep forgetting to use it. So, they are immediately discovered by the U.S. Department of Defense and are forced to land and hide. On an on it goes. Add in the fact that Santa smokes and his wife is a controlling bitch and you have holiday magic. The opening theme song is so bad as to sound as if it were imported from a Jap/Pop satire. The fact that this was Pia Zadora’s big screen debut is only a minor bonus. And, no, she couldn’t act then either.

Year Without Santa Claus
“Mrs. Claus tells us about the time Santa had a bad cold and decided to take a vacation from Christmas. Two of his elves, Jingle Bells and Jangle Bells decided to go out (with Vixen) to find children to convince Santa that the Christmas spirit is still important to everybody else. But they have to get past Heat Miser and Snow Miser, first, before they land in Southtown, USA, where it never snows for Christmas. But the Miser Brothers can’t agree to let it snow in Southtown. But Mrs. Santa knows their mom–Mother Nature.” The songs by the Miser brothers alone make this a must see but the Santa themed jail break in Southtown make this must see TV on an epic scale. Also it is the first clearly feminist Christmas film. Mrs. Claus and Mama Nature don’t take no guff, no sirree bub I tell you what. A friend of mine claims this movie was written by a bitter lesbian, but I don’t think so. It has a weird sweetness that permeates throughout. Maybe a bitter lesbian who got a second date then.

So there you have it, 11 films to fill your holiday with heretofore unimagined joy. You can thank me later.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
contact Bill McCormick

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Does the Pope Hate Christmas?

December 2, 2012 by

Okay, raise your hands if you love Christmas!
“If you read it on the Internet it must be true.” – Aristotle. Look, I understand that many people are stupid. It is one of the reasons I have so much material to choose from each day when I write this blog. How much stuff do I get? I’ll put it this way, a young lady who took to Facebook to demand that gay people stop having gay children didn’t even get a link from me. Nor will she now. Granted that’s a glorious level of stupid, but not stupid enough to get a mention here. Although I did ponder, briefly, about how useless a modern education truly is. Certainly they have lowered the bar in the basic knowledge of biology. I will admit that I, like everyone else, have been fooled by the occasional Facebook factoid. But some just leave me shaking my melon. The whole Papa John’s thing? The reason the furor has died down is because he never actually said the things he was accused of. All you needed to remember is that he sells franchises and doesn’t own a single pizza parlor. There was no one for him to fire in the first place. My personal favorite was the DHMO warning that had people losing their minds. It read as follows; “Dihydrogen monoxide is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year. Most of these deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO, but the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide do not end there.” People Googled (when did that become a verb?) the compound and found that it is in damn near everything. What they did not notice is that it has a more common name that seems far less threatening; water.

See? Paying attention in High School can save you a lifetime of stupid.

The latest hyperventilating message to be flopping around the Interweb is that the Pope has cancelled Christmas. You would think, given his job description, that this wouldn’t pass the smell test of even the most casual reader. You would be wrong. The Vatican has been forced to post a whole web page dealing with this. Philip Pullella of MSNBC has the whole story.

And so it came to pass that in the eighth year of Pope Benedict’s reign, some tabloid and social media decreed that he had cancelled Christmas.

The day after Benedict’s latest book “The Infancy Narratives – Jesus of Nazareth” – was published on November 20, Vatican officials found some headlines they were not expecting.

“Killjoy pope crushes Christmas nativity traditions,” read one tabloid headline, claiming that Benedict had snubbed traditions such as animals in nativity scenes and caroling.

“Pope sets out to debunk Christmas myths,” ran another.

Holy Scrooge! Some blogs unceremoniously branded Benedict the new Grinch that stole Christmas and one rocketed him to the “top of the grumpy list for 2012.”

And then there was this zinger headline from a web news site: “Pope bans Christmas”.
Coming little more than a month before Christmas, it was the last thing the Vatican needed – another image problem for the pope.

Alarmed by some of the headlines, the Catholic social network XT3 felt compelled to run a blog that dissected the media’s coverage of the book.

It was headlined: “The pope has not banned Christmas”.

So what was all the fuss about?

In the 137-page book, the pope states a fact: that in the gospels there is “no reference” to the presence of animals in the stable – actually, it was probably a cave – where Jesus was born.

Bloggers had a feast with that, with one calling it “Bombshell number one”.

What some neglected was that just a few sentences down, the pope states that even today, “No representation of the crib is complete without the ox and the ass”.

He explains: The tradition of the ass and ox came from reflecting on parts of the Old and New Testaments. Christian iconography then adopted the motif early in Church history to show that even animals knew Jesus was the son of God.

KEEP ON CAROLING

In other words, the tradition that has developed over the centuries matters more than an unverifiable fact, at least as far as the case of the ox and ass in the stable is concerned.

“I think that what people need to realize here is that the pope is trying to be as historical as he can be,” said Father Robert Dodaro, professor of patristics, or the study of early Church writings, at Rome’s Patristic Institute.

“He wants to see the biblical narratives as history where possible but he is also trying to explain details in the narratives that cannot be historically verified,” he said.

Some bloggers, taking their cue from television and website headlines, even wrote that the pope had spoken out against Christmas carols.

In the book, the opposite was true.

Benedict says the evangelist Luke wrote that at the moment of Jesus’ birth the angels “said” the well-known phrase “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased”.

But in the next line he explains that “Christianity has always understood that the speech of angels is actually song”, that “the angels’ song of praise has never gone silent”, and that it is “only natural that simple believers (even today) join in their caroling on the Holy Night”.

So, no need to cancel any school performances.

Another section of the book that irked some bloggers is where the pope restates what biblical scholars have known for decades, if not centuries – that Jesus was born several years earlier than the first century AD.

Benedict writes that since King Herod died in 4 BC, Jesus was probably born “a few years earlier”. He attributes the erroneous fixing of the year of Jesus’ birth to a miscalculation by the monk Dionysius Exiguous some 500 years later.

“No one’s faith should be shaken by this book,” said Dodaro. “On the contrary, it should be fortified by this account. This is a believable account of the birth of Christ,” he said.

And in St Peter’s Square, workmen have started building the Vatican’s larger than life nativity scene, which is expected to have animals and singing angels.

First off, if you want a history of all the popular Christmas traditions, including when it’s okay to eat your young, just CLICK HERE for wonderful collection of stories.

As to the story above, how dense are people? The man is the highest authority of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. That whole “Christ” thing is kind of integral to what they do. Dropping His birthday from the list of approved holidays wouldn’t really be a good PR move.

Of course, if it was true, Fox News would be Must See TV for the next three months.

Carol of the Bells – Computer Controlled Christmas Lights from Richard Holdman

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
contact Bill McCormick

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