It’s Christmas season, and some people are actually saying “Merry Christmas” instead of the limp “Happy Holidays.”
We are hearing stories about porch pirates and organized scum stealing toys meant for poor children. The scum are out in force. So are the professional bedwetters who call themselves social justice warriors. They are signaling how aware they are by attacking the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” and the film “Rudolph.”
They say the song is an ode to sexual harassment and the film is about bullying.
Last time I checked, the Rudolph film had no references to the Christ Child, even though it was a wonderful story for children and overanxious parents.
Santa was a tough old customer. He was grumpy and critical, like people with a lot of responsibilities sometime are. Mrs. Claus was his good wife, encouraging the elves even when the elf foreman ripped them. The adult deer mocked Rudolph for his nose even though he jumped higher for Santa than the other male fawns.
Rudolph did get ridiculed, excluded, and run into the ground, so much so that he ran away from home. He runs into Hermey the Elf, another runaway from Christmas Town because he wants to be a dentist. Hermey was a nerd before the term was coined. The “toxic male” Yukon Cornelius, the luckless prospector, saves them from the Abominable Snowman.
When the trio land on the Island of Misfit Toys, the flying lion who runs the island, King Moonracer, will not give them sanctuary. King Moonracer’s mission is to provide a home for unwanted toys, not living creatures who can help themselves. King Moonracer lets them stay overnight, and he asks the trio to tell Santa Claus about the misfit toys who wanted to be loved by children too.
King Moonracer gives orders to Rudolph, Hermey, and Yukon Cornelius. The Spotted Elephant, one of the Misfit Toys, is there with our pals.
Rudolph and Hermey realized they couldn’t run from their troubles. Rudolph selflessly set out alone so his nose wouldn’t give away Hermey or Yukon Cornelius or his dogs to the Abominable Snowman. He grows into a young buck on the journey home.
The climax of “Rudolph” comes when the Abominable Snowman traps Rudolph’s parents and a young doe named Clarice (who had a little crush on Rudolph) in his cave and prepares to eat them. Rudolph attacks the monster, and gets knocked unconscious. Just then Yukon Cornelius and Hermey and the dogs show up. Hermey lures the monster out of his cave, and Yukon Cornelius knocks him cold by avalanching some boulders on his head. Hermey pulls the monster’s teeth. Then Yukon Cornelius tries to back the monster off the mountainside and into a canyon, but the snow and ground give under their weights, taking Yukon Cornelius and his dogs with the monster.
“He’s gone! Oh, he’s GONE!” Rudolph wails in sadness for the man who rescued all of them..
The deer and Hermey return to Christmas Town. This time, Santa and the other deer and the elf foreman are much more accepting of Rudolph and Hermey. Santa agrees to rescue the misfit toys if he can.
Then Yukon Cornelius, the dogs, and the Abominable Snowman, minus his teeth, show up. Yukon Cornelius asks Santa if he will hire the “reformed bumble” to trim the tree and do other work around Christmas Town.
Rudolph’s nose saves the day on a foggy Christmas Eve. Santa saves the year for the poor misfit toys by landing on their island, fixing them, and getting them onto the sled.
The pants-wetters who attack “Rudolph” are ignorant of Saga 101 and what makes a good story.
You cannot be a hero unless you overcome your fears. Rudolph is willing to sacrifice his safety to keep his pals from getting noticed by the Abominable Snowman. He bravely attacks the Snowman to save his parents and Clarice, even though the odds are against him.
Yukon Cornelius, a grown man, is expected to be bold. That’s who “toxic masculine” real men are, that’s what they do. But the monster could have killed him too. Instead, he emboldens Hermey the Elf to do his best, and he is even willing to let bygones be bygones once he has defeated the Snowman and the Snowman agrees to behave.
Dolly for Sue and some of the other Misfit Toys rescued by Santa Claus.
Adult females (Mrs. Claus and Rudolph’s mother Mrs. Donner) showed kindness and tried to make their husbands kinder. Adult males were tough, showed initiative, and two (Santa and Rudolph’s father Donner) admitted errors in judgment. King Moonracer reminded our pals of their duty in life. Donner and Yukon Cornelius risked their lives for others. Santa rescued the misfit toys from being unwanted and abandoned. And King Moonracer was awesome – a flying male apex predator who used his “toxic masculinity” to protect the helpless cast-off toys.
My brother Bryan, born three months premature in the late 1950s, could have been confined to a facility. He had to undergo a shunt valve operation, including having a half-dollar-size hole cut thru his skull, to relieve fluid pressure on his brain. Dad and Mom mainstreamed him before there was such a term.
Bry loved “Fury,” the boy’s horse show. He and I also loved “Flipper,” the dolphin show. And he loved “Rudolph.” Sadly, it reminded him of his own situation in life. Shitbirds picked on him for his looks and his handicaps.
Fury, and Joey, the orphan boy who rode him at the Broken Wheel Ranch
Bryan got thru grade school and high school. Dad, God rest his soul, stood 6′ 3″ and weighed north of 200 pounds. Dad choked and beat the hell out of a public middle school gym coach who bullied Bry when Bry was an eighth-grader. The gym coach’s colleagues were afraid to help him because my Uncle Chuck and cousin Tommy, just home from Vietnam, were even bigger and they came to the school with Dad.
It was my job to beat up kids who tried to bully Bryan. I wasn’t any world-beater as a kid. I was little and looked like Buddy Holly, but I thought I was Johnny Cash. The kids who tried to bully Bry were punks; that’s why they acted the way they did toward Bry. They were not too hard to beat up. The bigger ones ran too, when hit often enough with a bat or a chain. My sister and cousins also helped Bry against punks. My friends were friendly to Bry.
Mom and Dad had plenty of love and patience in raising Bryan to stand on his own. They also were tough on him, like they were on my other brother and me and our sister. Other parents talked behind my parents’ back about this; Mom and Dad told them to their faces to STHU. Bryan and we needed their toughness, and it helped all four of us develop character. (Lizzie, my other sister, died as a very little girl.)
Bryan eventually grew taller and stronger than me, he got an associate’s degree in wildlife management, and he worked on computers. After Mom and Dad died, I worked with Bry enough so he was able to stand completely on his own. Bry had frontal lobe damage that limited his ability to think on his feet, but if he had a moment or two more time, he could reason out what he needed to do. I had Bry carry a pocket notebook like we soldiers did, and organize his thoughts and keep a good schedule. When a psychologist tested Bry and said he read at the college level and did math at the business math level, I said since he knew he couldn’t spend more than he had, that made him better than most of Congress. The startled woman gasped, then laughed, and said she had never looked at the matter that way before.
Bryan developed enough skills that he was able to win a job as a park maintenance man. One of his supervisors, a former bartender named Maria, took a liking to Bry and trained him properly. And he came back to the Midwest and helped us plant our orchard. Bry was part owner of the orchard.
Bryan was in on the fight against the wildfires of California. In 2003, Bry, a good horseman, rescued a stable full of panicking horses from burning alive. Even though he wasn’t the fire-fighter the men on the line were, none of them could handle horses like Bry could.
YOU CANNOT BE A HERO UNLESS YOU OVERCOME YOUR FEARS.
Bry at the Beach. He has just noticed park visitors needing help.
He stood 6’2″ and about 190 lbs. He never lost sight of who he served.
Bryan did more with less than many a person. Bry was a contributor to society, had girlfriends, and had other people who appreciated his work. And he manned up and rescued those horses when others were afraid to. Fury would have appreciated the rescues.
One year I took Bryan to Gettysburg, and when he stood on the spot where Lincoln gave the Address, Bryan was overcome with emotion and trembled uncontrollably. He was a huge Lincoln fan. Like Lincoln, Bryan was a “malice toward none, charity toward all” guy.
Bry did note government pukes banned the Ten Commandments from government buildings because their prohibitions of lying, cheating, stealing, covetousness, adultery (including child molesting), murder (including abortion) and idolatry created a hostile environment for the government lawyers, politicians, teachers, administrators, and bureaucrats.
Bryan reported for duty in Eternity in 2009, right before Lincoln’s Birthday.
All you Rudolph haters out there, I’ve got an even meaner role model for you to wet your pants over.
A decade or so ago, a worker at a client of mine’s mining machine manufacturing firm complained his wife was feeding their children Barney the Dinosaur videos.
It was an understandable complaint. But he wasn’t acting manfully enough.
So I gave him the kindly uncle pep talk.
“Throw out the Barney videos, and replace them with Popeye videos,” I rasped. “Popeye ate his spinach, beat up bullies, and had enough confidence that he pulled a much taller girlfriend!” Everyone within earshot had a good laugh.
Strong to the finish ’cause he eats his spinach. Popeye the Sailor Man.
Not long ago, I ran into my young friends Michelle and Sean, her husband. Michelle is a tall graceful brunette. Sean is solid and tough, with curly reddish hair, but about 5’6″, noticeably shorter than Michelle. I told Sean I was a Popeye apologist for the three reasons I listed above, He laughed and said he considered Popeye a role model too.
Now for the “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” kerfuffle.
Last time I checked, this song had no references to the Christ Child.
But it is a fun and harmless teasing song by both the young man and young woman who sing it.
My favorite version had Dean Martin singing the man’s part. Dino and Marilyn Maxwell killed it. Bing Crosby and noted cheerful tease Doris Day did an above-average version of the song also.
And those of you who watched “American Idol” can’t forget cute and adorably wholesome Isabelle Parell, a teenager from Indiana, singing it with singer Keith Urban. Isabelle, shown below, didn’t go far on the show, but she did that song perfectly with a Nashville veteran. I’m guessing her good morals had something to do with her quick exit from the show. Last I heard, she was a coed at Hillsdale College.
Deana Martin defended the song and her father to the media a few days ago. Deana has a syndicated radio show where she plays the standards, then tells stories about the artists, because she met so many of them as a daughter of one of popular music’s and Hollywood’s biggest stars.
“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is a fun song, not a Christmas song. But it is appropriate when the northern parts of the nation start to see snow.
Connie Francis. The Singing Star who sticks up for rape victims and veterans.
Why aren’t the “Mee Tooo” gals and the professional bedwetters complaining about “Santa Baby?” Perhaps the gold-digger song reminds them of the casting couch they used to get a leg up, so to speak, on their competition. Remember, when singer Connie Francis campaigned for tougher punishment for rapists, Jane Fonda was too busy moaning about not being able to have had sex with Che Guevara, and screaming for abortion, to stand in solidarity with Ms. Francis. And other females like Barbra Streisand, Cher, and Sally Field were quiet while the scumbags of the Washington Post attacked Connie.
Sally, in her recent memoir, alleged her stepfather, who was an actor, molested her but didn’t enter her. She said she got promiscuous enough to get pregnant, and her stepfather, mom, and family doctor took her for an abortion in Tijuana just before she was supposed to start filming “Gidget.” Sally didn’t really say who the sperm donor was. But, given her acting aspirations, and her parents’ aspirations for her, IMHO, is it a stretch to think he was someone who was able to make her a star?
Back to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”
That song, and virtually all Christmas season songs you hear on the radio or in the stores are not religious songs.
Not counting Catholic and Protestant radio stations, and country music stations, when was the last time you heard a broadcast recording of any of these 25 songs:
“Silent Night”
“O Come, All Ye Faithful”
“Hark the Herald Angels Sing”
“O Holy Night”
“Angels We Have Heard On High”
“We Three Kings”
“What Child Is This?” (Greensleeves)
“Away in a Manger”
“Joy to the World” (the Christmas song, not the song that starts out “Jeremiah was a bullfrog”)
“The First Noel”
“Little Town of Bethlehem”
“It Came Upon a Midnight Clear”
“God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”
“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”
“While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks”
“Once In David’s Royal City”
“Lo How A Rose Ever Blooming”
“Good King Wenceslas”
“Jehovah, Hallelujah, The Lord Will Provide”
“There’s a Star in the East”
“Go Tell It on the Mountain”
“See How the Virgin Waits for Him”
“I Saw Three Ships on Christmas Day”
“O Come O Come Emmanuel”
“O Come, Divine Messiah”
I just named 25 Christmas songs that are actually about Christmas.
And you could throw in “Mary’s Little Boy Child” and “Little Drummer Boy” and “Do You See What I See?” as bonus tunes.
Sorry, Rudolph, Frosty, the Hippo, the two front teeth, Granny with reindeer prints on your backside, and all the other non-Christ songs. “Silver Bells” and “Home for the Holidays” and “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” are classics, but they don’t mention the Reason for the Season either.
I’ve revealed my age again. I remember when Perry Como and Tennessee Ernie Ford and the McGuire Sisters and Connie Smith and Connie Francis and Anne Murray and Johnny Cash and Elvis and Harry Belafonte and Frankie Yankovic actually dared to sing these songs live, and recorded them so they could play on radio and in the stores.
Perry was a much more emotional singer when he sang sacred songs. Tennessee Ernie’s big booming voice hammered many a Christmas carol into the national consciousness. Connie Francis was incapable of doing a bad job singing, and she sang Jewish songs for her Jewish fans too. Connie Smith brought “When Shepherds Watched Their Flocks” to life for me. Anne Murray sang “Midnight Clear” in the voice of a woman who had known nothing but disappointment, but the coming of the Christ Child would be different.
Johnny Cash did an incredible version of “I Heard the Bells.” It was moody and sorrowful, and eventually declaratory in faith. As an aside. Cash and his wife June and her sisters Helen and Anita and their mother Maybelle did the ultimate Eastertide hymn – “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” Cash’s stark narrative voice, Maybelle’s introspective and melodic guitar playing, and Anita’s eerie “Aa-a, Aa-a, Sometimes it causes me to tremble ….” like a keening woman who is between agony and ecstasy, made that song as good as it gets in interpreting the Passion and Resurrection of Our Lord.
We can bag on Harry for his politics, but he brought the carols black Americans have given us to life with the singing talent God gave him.
And Frankie Yankovic the Polka King did “Silent Night” with a recitation about Midnight Mass and his mother making Christmas dinner, and the hard times he saw for the immigrant boarders from the Balkans who his parents put up in their home. Those of us of Slavic background know this all too well. Try to get thru that recitation without clouding up, if you can.
In the 1950s, when I was a child, a composer named Al Burt, who was searching for peace after World War Two and during the Cold War, wrote a number of Christmas carols that gained some popularity. Search the Net under “Al Burt” and you will find his carols. Some are so-so, but others are excellent. He died young, so he was unable to publicize them like he would have wanted to do.
Jews celebrate Hanukkah during the Christmas season. There is no reason not to include Hanukkah songs on the radio or in the stores during Christmas season. Without the Maccabees, who instituted Hanukkah, there would be no Jews left in Israel. Without the Jews, there would be no Christians, for before Christ, they were the only guardians of a faith in the True God, Who is holy and demands His people to be moral.
Most non-Christians of the Moslem or Hindu or Buddhist or other such faiths are immigrants or descendants of immigrants who came here in the middle to late 1900s knowing the United States was a Judeo-Christian nation. We’re not forcing church services on them. We don’t mock their deities. And they understand America has room for them too.
Non-Christians at Christmas season should be like non-Red Sox fans in Boston when the locals are celebrating a World Series win. Be gracious. Majority rules.
I don’t blame most atheists for the absence of Christ on the airwaves. Most atheists and agnostics are live-and-let-live types. I know them and have friends among them. But there are some professional atheists who use the Christmas season as a way to protest and solicit donations.
For every professional Moslem or other non-Christian of non-European roots who claims offense, there are many white leftists who claim offense so they can publicly show what assholes they are. In their circles, it is politically correct to be anti-American and anti-Christian.
Public schools, whose teachers molest tens of thousands of children a year, are home to many Nazis like the principal in Nebraska who banned candy canes because she considered them reminders of the Christ Child, and of course such symbols were verboten in her Hitler Youth Camp, errr, public elementary school. “Historically, the shape is a ‘J’ for Jesus. The red is for the blood of Christ, and the white is a symbol of His resurrection,” Belsen Bitch, errr, principal Jennifer Sinclair said, in banning the offensive sweets. At least this Nazi recognized the truth about Christ, then said she had to keep the candymakers’ “toxic Christian” products from the children.
(Source: WHDH, Boston, 12/11/18)
The pagan money makers banned Christ from mainstream radio and stores long ago.
The corporate chiefs and politicians, even those who claim to be Christians, really worship money. They keep Christ out of Christmas in the mistaken belief it will boost their sales or boost their power.
The ACLU, IMHO, has a multimillion dollar extortion racket involving Christmas. Whenever the town fathers of a small town put a Nativity scene or even a Menorah on town property, an ACLU lawyer gets the town jagoff to claim he or she or shim is offended. Then they sue on his/her/shim’s behalf about some sort of “separation of church and state” nonsense. They judge-shop to put the case in a court where the judge or the appellate judges are pervs and/or pinheads, so they can get a ruling or an overruling in their favor. They get full legal fees, even if the town jagoff gets $1 in compensatory damages for the damage done to his/her/shim’s fragile ego.
So most towns’ leaders listen to the advice of their town attorney, who may be in on the extortion scam, and settle the cases. Others seek to avoid the trouble, and the jagoffs still win.
Being aggrieved over nothing is a lucrative business for others as well.
There are some among the feminine workforce who look to feel aggrieved, and they make charges resulting in go-away payments. We covered this in my recent post about crooked prosecutors (sorry about the redundancy).
Some savvy execs are telling male subordinates not to meet one-on-one with female employees or hang out with them when on job-related trips or projects to avoid false harassment charges. Legitimate females lose out on mentoring and mingling time, which hurts them careerwise. Other risk-averse corporate heads have decided hiring women white collar workers is more trouble than it is worth. They are sharp enough to hide the decision behind their screening of applicants. So other legitimate females lose out on even getting their foot in the door to try to succeed at business.
Lesson? When shyster lawyers can make money off of whining, the vast majority lose. And even some of the people they claim to be fighting for lose out.
So it’s bigger than “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” being suggestive or inappropriate.
It’s about whether our society’s movers and shakers hide the Christ Child like an unwanted pregnancy because they want to make money instead of being confronted with the command to live better lives and give God what is His. And stop all the stealing and lying and debauchery.
There is a lot of chicanery and profiteering at Christmastime, which violates the commandment against stealing. There is a lot of showboating at Christmastime, which is akin to the sin of pride, and which causes the sins of envy or jealousy, and anger. There are many people who can’t afford the commercialized Christmas, and they are made to feel like poor children looking in a display window, unable to hope to enjoy any of the gifts shown inside.
But only we as Christians can marginalize ourselves. We could easily push the anti- Christ thought police out of the way if we want to. We still outnumber them.
We as Christians of Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox faiths could listen to the real sounds of the season on radio stations whose people play religious Christmas carols. We could call them in support, and buy from their sponsors.
We as Christians of Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox faiths could reduce much of our idle spending and really use the season to honor Christ (and show some practical charity for the needy), and use it as a springboard for a reform of ourselves in the coming New Year.
This would give the corporate vermin who despise us but love our money a kick in the crotch, to see their sales drop.
If we as Christians lived our faith, we’d stick out in this godless society like the Amish. And if enough of us lived our faith, we would bend society to our way of thinking. We would be putting Christ back in Christmas, not out of “better ‘n’ you showboating or coercion, but out of a realistic sense of Who Christ is and why He matters. The purveyors of commercialism would have to do our will instead of spit on us, or lose much.
We as Christians of Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox faiths could punish school people who abuse our faith and our national traditions. That Nebraska principal suffered pushback from parents, and is now under suspension. Nebraska has many cattle ranches. She deserves to suffer one of the ranch hands branding her rump. But firing and blacklisting should suffice to let her know Nazi witches don’t belong around children.
If we lived the Ten Commandments, there would be many fewer crimes, many fewer broken victimized people, and more people to shoulder the load with those who need help. Isn’t a more just society what we should want anyway?
Government employee rolls, full of people who don’t really solve these problems anyway, could shrink faster than their credibility. Thus the stiffed greedy corporate types would have company, among the canned government people.
As the writer of “O Holy Night” would say,
“Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother;
And in His name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
Let all within us praise His holy name.
Christ is the Lord! O praise His Name forever,
His power and glory evermore proclaim.
His power and glory evermore proclaim.”
Charley Pride, the smooth and talented country singer who lit up radios from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, included that seldom-performed verse in his rendition of “O Holy Night.”
Country superstar Charley Pride
Putting Christ back in Christmas will welcome all those of good will. And it will chase away those who work against God like the Cross chases a vampire.
The door will be open to those who now work against God, like us. if they choose to reform, too, as we all need to do. Only their own choice will keep them away from God. May their number decrease.
The less bloodsuckers the better, now and forever.
Blessed Christmas and New Year to all of you …. even to those of you who are nonbelievers – for now.
SHERLOCK JUSTICE
WE CAN SHOW YOU HOW TO BE YOUR OWN DETECTIVE.
PS. I was out on a case 12/20, and when I came in the door, the TV was playing a track of children singing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.” 99 was watching Charlie Brown’s Christmas special.
From that show, we’ll give Linus the last word, as he recites, from memory, this passage from the gospel of Luke, and adds his own little commentary:
“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.
That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”
