Monthly Archives: December 2022

I always liked the song "Jingle Bell Rock" as recorded by Bobby Helms in 1957. But I think I like it better in Spanish as performed by the great singing star of Mexico, Emmanuel, and a bunch of pretty people pretending to be playing musical instruments…

I allowed myself some web-browsing time this morning and came across a number of pieces I wish to recommend to you…

Alison Stine wrote a piece headlined "How to be a helpful host to your friends with food allergies this holiday season." I have plenty of them, though mine are quite different from Ms. Stine's. She can't eat certain sweets but craves others. I crave none…and it's not really an allergy in this case. My sweet tooth went away some years back and has not returned. But I like when she writes…

Respect what someone tells you about what they can consume. We're not doing it on purpose. We're not doing it to make you uncomfortable. One of the things I hate about my food allergies and sensitivities is that it draws unwanted attention. I just want to eat off the regular menu or have what everyone else is having. But my body, through no fault of my own, reacts otherwise. Just like an allergy to ragweed or dogs, we can't control it.

Is it an allergy, is it an intolerance or sensitivity — or is it just a preference? It really shouldn't matter. If someone says they can't or would prefer not to eat something, you should never pressure them. Even if you worked hard on it.

You'd be amazed how many people say things like, "What do you mean you can't eat this? I can eat it!"  I have a post I need to finish with more about the problems I've encountered by not being able to eat what others can eat.

And now I also call your attention to…

• Kevin Drum lists a lot of things that have gone right in the last two years, legislative-wise.
• Donald Trump's financial records are being seen by more and more people. Amanda Marcotte looks over just what is known and concludes that the guy is a much worse businessman than anyone thought.
• Factcheck,org has prepared an explainer all about the charges that the January 6 committee is referring to the Justice Department regarding Trump's alleged culpability for the January 6 Insurrection.
• And Ari Melber welcomes to his MSNBC show one of Trump's past attorneys and they debate that issue.  It'll make you think the case for Trump's innocence is pretty weak and you may not even believe his lawyer believes it.

I already picked the ten Christmas videos I'm counting down this year but my pal Martin O'Hearn sent me a link to this one and I had to post it. It's more or less what last night's Christmas video might have been like if it was recorded today. The group is called VoicePlay…

There's a new Groo comic out — Gods Against Groo #1, the first issue in a four-issue mini-series. Sergio and I are hard at work on the next Groo mini-series and a few other interesting (I hope) projects.

In the meantime, Amazon seems to have an ample supply of the new Pogo book and people all over are writing to tell me they've received theirs. You can order it here or you can order it and the previous volume in a neat slipcase here.

I'm not following a lot of news but I was interested in the article by Fred Kaplan about Volodymyr Zelensky's visit to Washington and his speech to Congress.

Also of note is this article headlined "Sean Hannity admits under oath he 'didn't believe' Trump election lies — but aired them anyway." Fox News has never been about telling you what's going on. It's been about telling a certain segment of the population what they want to believe is so.

The other day here, I ran a photo of myself as a small child with a department store Santa. For some reason, folks are writing to me trying to guess what department store it was. I don't remember so I don't see why you think you can figure it out. The main department stores my family frequented back then were Robinson's, Bullock's and The May Company. It was probably but not definitely one of those.

Also, a couple of people think for some reason that the Santa must have been some later-famous actor back in the "have-to-do-this-to-pay-the-rent" part of his life, and they're making guesses as to who he might be. Good luck with that.

I heard from a lot of people who remember Mission Paks fondly — the commercials, not the actual Mission Paks. Many told me about George C. Page, a local businessman and philanthropist who founded the Mission Pak company. His name adorns many buildings here in Los Angeles including The George C. Page Museum which is part of the La Brea Tar Pits complex. So his name will live on as long as the Mission Pak jingle reverberates in all our heads.

More stuff later.

This is the N.J. Cantors Assembly Ensemble performing the same song I'm posting all this week, this time in Scotch Plains, New Jersey…

One of the best-selling Christmas songs of all time was "The Chipmunk Song" (aka "Christmas, Don't Be Late") written and performed by Ross Bagdasarian (aka David Seville). It was released on December 1, 1958 and shot to #1 in — no pun intended — record time. This clip of Mr. "Seville" performing it — lip-syncing to the record for obvious reasons — on The Ed Sullivan Show is dated 1958 but I'm not sure it isn't from a later time…

This first ran here on Christmas Eve of 2015. I repost it every two or three years to save myself a little bit of content creation for this blog and to offer photographic evidence that I was once cute…

The kid in the above photo is me and I don't care that you don't believe it. It's me. I'm not sure where it was taken — some department store, probably May Company — or how old I was. Seven? Eight? Beats me. But it's me. And is it my imagination or does Santa look like he's telling me not to tell my parents about something he said or did?

I don't have a lot of great Christmas memories left to share here. In all my years of blogging and telling tales of my past, I may have exhausted my supply. There weren't that many to begin with.

I do not remember ever seriously believing in Santa or of Christmas being that big a deal around our house. It was a time of love and joy and gifts but with my family, it was always a time of love and joy and gifts. The main features unique to Christmas time were a tree in the living room, a lot of TV specials I had to watch and a certain synchronization of presents.

Our family consisted of me, my mother, my father, my Uncle Nathan, my Aunt Dot and my Uncle Aaron. Nathan and Dot were my father's brother and sister. Aaron was Dot's husband. Nathan never married. One year, my mother's parents came out from Hartford and stayed with us for the holiday season. Then after Grandpa passed away, it was just Grandma one year. After Aaron died, we'd invite Aunt Dot's best friend Sally to join us for Christmas Dinner if she didn't travel out of town to be with other members of her family.

Since Sally was going to bring me a present, I felt I should get her one…and I never knew what to get for her. All she seemed to want was that I address her as "Aunt Sally" and you couldn't wrap that and put it beneath the tree. I think I usually gave her candy but the real gift was that I'd make the card out to "Aunt Sally." The rest of us were real good at taking the gift-selecting burden off each other by hinting with a minimum of subtlety as to what we wanted.

So we usually had six or less people at the table…and then as people died, it went down to five and then four…and at some point, it seemed a bit depressing to have much of a celebration at Christmas. It just reminded those of us who were left of those of us who were not.

At any given assemblage around the table, at least one person was Jewish and one was Catholic — and then you had me who had never been Bar Mitzvahed but identified as more-or-less Jewish but really had a foot in both camps. Early in my childhood, there had been a bit of polite, respectful debate about the co-existence of the two faiths in one family and then there had been that ghastly mistake of enrolling me in a Sunday Hebrew school. But the religious situation was never that serious nor was it divisive. There didn't seem to be any point to it.

One reason I find the whole current "War on Christmas" thing so phony is that each year I intermingled with people of different religions and there was never an issue. Not for one second did anyone attach any significance to wishing someone "Season's Greetings" instead of "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Hanukkah" instead of some other preferred form.

Not just in our house but throughout the neighborhood and at school, one good wish was as innocent and friendly as another. No hidden meanings or schemes to demean any faith were inferred or assumed. "Happy Holidays" meant "I hope your holidays (whatever they may be) are happy for you." It's amazing that some people have become convinced that that innocent little pleasantry could ever mean something menacing.

I've always felt that way about religious preference or even bigotry. Just let everyone be whatever they want to be and respect it. I feel the same way about racial prejudice or about prejudice over sexual orientation. If you just respect that others are what they are, it works out fine. It only becomes a war if you somehow feel threatened and choose to start one.

Getting back to the photo up top: I've been staring at it, trying to figure out what was on my mind when it was taken. This is a guess but I think it's a good one.

I never really believed in Santa…or if I did, I didn't believe the guy in the red suit at the May Company was the real Santa because — you know — he'd be too busy just before Christmas to sit around a department store all day. Besides, I was well aware there was a Santa down the street at Bullock's Department Store and another one over in Beverly Hills at Robinson's and what about that Santa outside on Wilshire Boulevard near Rodeo Drive who was out there all day ringing a bell for some charity and posing for photos?

So if I did ever believe there was a real Santa Claus — and I don't recall that I did — I'd figured out that I couldn't meet him or sit on his lap. The guy at May Company was some outta-work actor or someone they'd hire to impersonate The Man Himself to draw customers into their store. At that age, thinking like that is not cynicism. It's figuring out the world around you and all the fibs — some of them, no doubt well meant — that you need to overcome if you're ever going to grow up.

By the time this photo was taken, I knew there was no Santa. So I'm thinking I was pressured by some relative with the camera to get in the line to sit on the impostor's lap…and what was on my mind was probably something like this: "What am I supposed to do here? Pretend this guy is the real Santa, meaning that I go along with a fraud? Tell him my list of stuff I want this year? Or maybe I should rip that fake beard off him and expose him as the fake he is?"

I'm pretty sure I didn't do that last thing. I probably went along with the hoax just to get it over with.

Or knowing me, I may have climbed up on his knee and whispered to him, "I'll make a deal with you, fella. If you'll pull some strings to get me that Sneaky Pete Magic Set I want, I won't blow the whistle and tell all the kids in line that you're just an office temp in a fake beard!"

And history does show that one year, I did get my own Sneaky Pete Magic Set. So maybe this is the year that I learned that while racial or religious prejudice doesn't work, blackmail sometimes does. Have a Merry Whatever.

Here's that song again as performed in Ohio by Quire Cleveland…

Here's one of my favorite Christmas songs, especially when it was sung by Andy Williams.  It's "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" and here it is from one of Mr. Williams' many Christmas specials…

You know what I miss during the Christmas season? Mission Paks. Mission Paks were small crates of fruit — mostly dried, occasionally fresh — which I doubt anyone ever bought for themselves. It was something you arranged to have shipped to someone else for the holidays, especially if you were in a climate where fruit trees were still putting out fruit and they were in some climate where it snowed. The subtext was that if you lived in the latter, you could not possibly obtain lemons or oranges unless a kindly person in California or maybe Florida sent them to you.

I don't know when Mission Pak went out of business but I miss it. And yes, I hear you saying there are plenty of companies around these days that will overnight fruit to anyone anywhere. That's not the point. I don't miss sending or receiving Mission Paks. I miss their commercials.

Some folks think the Christmas season officially starts when the decorations go up in retail areas. In my neck o' the woods, it was when the Mission Pak commercials started appearing every three minutes on TV or radio…with their catchy jingle. Wanna hear it? I'm embedding a short video of that jingle but let me caution you: Once you hear it, you can't unhear it. And once it gets into your mental repertoire, you may hear it over and over and over, day and night, for as long as you live.

Here it is. Don't say I didn't warn you…

I don't even know if Mission Pak was a year-round business but their commercials and little pop-up stores would pop-up around November. One year, my mother worked a few weeks in a seasonal job at a Mission Pak store in Beverly Hills. She brought an actual Mission Pak home and I found its contents largely inedible…and not because of my notorious food allergies. The fruit was largely inedible because it had been treated with preservatives to make it shelf-stable for the next millennium or maybe the one after.

But I think they functioned like fruit cakes. The point was not to send someone something they'd enjoy consuming. It was to send them something so they'd think you cared enough about them to send them something, period. It may have also suggested that while you did care about them, you didn't care enough to go shopping and pick a gift you thought they'd like and to wrap and ship it. You just cared enough to call the Mission Pak number — which from all those commercials, I still remember — and charge ten or twenty bucks to your BankAmericard.

Most people never eat the fruit cakes they received, either. A lot of people just rewrap them and sent them out as gifts for others.

My mother, when she worked for Mission Pak, told me that someone told her that the most welcome Mission Paks were the ones that came in those neat wooden crates. You could dump the fruit or leave it on your coffee table for a few decades as a decoration…but the crate actually came in handy. People, I see, still sell them on eBay.

Anyway, that's just about all I know about Mission Paks and way more than you wanted to know. And I'm sorry about the jingle. If you're like me, you'll hear it in your head for the rest of your life…but after a decade or two, maybe not quite as often. Sorry to do that to you but you can't say you weren't warned.

Five comedians (well, six) who were arrested for saying naughty things on a stage. It was especially good of policemen to protect the delicate, easily-offended sensibilities of men who went to strip clubs.

As I'm sure you know, the House Select Committee on January 6 has issued a report that calls to mind the chants of "Lock her up! Lock her up!" if you change the "her" to "him" and note that, unlike the urgings to put Hillary Clinton behind bars, this report alleges actual crimes and includes evidence.

I'm sure you have your own views of the committee's findings and recommendations. What you might not have is a copy of the summary of the report. If you want to read or download all 154 pages of it, here's a link. Spoiler Alert: The butler didn't do it but Trump will probably throw him and everyone else under the bus.

This is the Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles…

Every time I post a number of videos within a short time span, I get several of these…

I'm sure you're receiving millions of messages telling you that you have your video links all screwed-up. In the box that's supposed to contain this one, there's that one and in the box that's supposed to have that one, there's the other one and…

Probably not. I probably have them in the right place. They're appearing in the wrong place on your screen because you need to flush your browser cache. Your browser of choice downloads all these elements and sometimes when it's too full of data, it gets confused on how to display them. Look up the information on how to clean yours out. You're probably also seeing the wrong fonts and maybe even some wrong images on some websites but they may not be as obvious.

From 1953: Gayla Peevey sings her hit record, "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas." Every holiday season, I run into at least one situation where a band of young carolers — usually four of them in Victorian garb — are taking requests and performing what's requested…just like in my Mel Tormé story.  I always ask for this song, they always know it, they always enjoy singing it — and everyone around enjoys hearing it…