My Christmas 2023 Playlist

Accurate depiction of my children every year. "*!#&* socks again."

 By Claire Booth

It’s time for my annual Christmas music list, and once again there’s no rhyme or reason to my picks. The last year I did this, readers responded with some of their own favorites, which have made their way onto my own list. Here are a few:

A truly lovely album.

“Hey, Skinny Santa” J.D. McPherson, recommended by Eric Cartner.

“She Won’t Be Home (Lonely Christmas)” Erasure, recommended by Marcus Donner.

A wonderful take on “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen” by Los Straitjackets, recommended by Andrew Blasko.

“Santa’s Got a Dirty Job” Rich & Rowe, recommended by Rosanne Urban. And if you want even more irreverence, I like “Christmas Dirtbag,” a Wheatus re-take of their classic “Teenage Dirtbag.”

“Hallelujah,” specifically the version by k.d. lang, recommended by Grace Koshida.

“River” was recommended multiple times, specifically the version by Jim Cuddy and of course, the original version by Joni Mitchell herself (recommended by Danna Wilberg and Grace Koshida).

And now for my list. These songs aren’t necessarily new, but they’re either new to me or ones that have re-entered my rotation this year.

“What’s that Sound?” J.D. McPherson

 “Rock the Christmas Cheer” The Bongos

 “I Want an Alien for Christmas This Year” Fountains of Wayne

 “Christmas Time” Rogue Wave

 “The Christmas Song” The Raveonettes

 “This Christmas,” Donny Hathaway

“Reindeer,” Jon Pardi. The best song off his new Christmas album. 

“Holiday Mood” The Apples in stereo

 “Christmas Wish,” Gregory Porter

 “Twinkle Twinkle Little Me,” Samara Joy

 “My Heart and Soul (I Need You Home for Christmas),” Suzi Quatro

A new song from The Bongos. A Christmas miracle!

 And if you’re just not feeling it this year:

“Another Lonely Christmas,” Prince

“Is It New Year’s Yet?” Sabrina Carpenter

And to readers near and far, have a wonderful holiday season, and as always, thanks for reading. - Claire

 

Abel Ferrara's 'R Xmas

Well, here we are once again, holiday season, which includes Christmas season, and among other things, it's a time, if you're so inclined, to watch your famous Christmas movies. Films with a Christmas season connection of whatever type and genre. Apropos of that, I thought it would not be out of line to mention a Christmas film favorite of mine, even though it's a film I've written about before. That piece was for the unfortunately defunct blog that Jed Ayres, film maven extraordinaire, used to administer, called Hardboiled Wonderland, and I thought I would repost the piece here, because it's a film that still somehow seems a bit under the radar when it comes to Christmas films. I'm talking about Abel Ferrara's 'R Xmas, from 2001, a film that's not all that easy to find but well-worth seeking out. It's a small gem of an unconventional Christmas film, with crime involved of course, and anyway...here's the piece:

Few movies integrate a crime plot and a Christmas story as well or as completely as Abel Ferrara’s ‘R Xmas.   And it’s Christmas in a very specific time and place, as a pre-credit scroll tells us: “In December of 1993 the Honorable David Dinkins was completing his first and only term as Mayor of New York.”  I’m not sure how much these words mean to somebody not from New York City, but for those who lived in New York through the Dinkins years, from 1990-1993, it has a clear connotation.  New York City was at a low point, with both crime and economic struggle high.

Even if you’re not from New York, you sense from the words that the city could not have been thriving. If it had been, wouldn’t the mayor have been elected to a second term?

The movie opens with what’s clearly a scene from a Christmas past.  Little children wearing adult costumes, we soon realize, are performing a theatrical version of A Christmas Carol for an elementary school production during the holiday season, and in the auditorium watching are all the parents.  The school looks like one with resources; the parents, nearly all-white, are well-dressed and apparently affluent.  One father (Lillo Brancato) has his camcorder trained at his daughter, who has a lead role, and we’ll follow this father as he leaves the school with his daughter and wife (Drea de Matteo) after the play.  The daughter has brown skin, and the family speak Spanish together as well as English, since they are, we realize, Latinx.  On a horse and buggy ride downtown, as they proceed down Museum Mile on 5^th Avenue in Manhattan, the mother asks her daughter what museum they are passing – the Guggenheim Museum – and they have a humorous back and forth about how to pronounce the word “Guggenheim”.  The parents seem like they are intent on educating their child well, with culture, but their manner and down to earth way of talking mark them as grounded.  They take their daughter to a department store Santa – how much more typical a Christmas thing could you do – and while at the store, the father does all he can to acquire for their girl a Party Girl doll, the must-have toy that year.  He fails at the store when another woman grabs the last doll off the shelf just before he reaches it (and he gets to watch the fortunate woman nearly come to blows with another woman who puts her hands on the doll), but that doesn’t mean he and his wife will give up their pursuit for that gift.

So far, so good.  Later that evening, grandma comes over to watch their girl, and the mother and father go out.  Good Manhattanites in a fancy building, they have little red Christmas envelopes of cash for their doorman and for the guy out front who has brought their car around from the garage.  Only after they take a long ride in this car, going past Yankee Stadium and up to what appears to be Washington Heights (northern Manhattan) or the Bronx and then walk into another apartment they have in a decidedly unglamorous apartment building do we see how they make their money, as serious, calm, disciplined drug dealers.  The father heads a crew that labels its cocaine bags “TKO”, and that coke is sold by their associates/employees on the street.  What began as a film that showed us a nostalgic view of a non-commercialized Christmas, with kids in all the parts, has turned into a movie about commercialism in different forms, both the crass commerce of Christmas and the viciousness that can breed (the two women fighting over the party doll) and the just as blunt and even more dangerous commerce that comes with drug dealing. 

‘R Xmas is Abel Ferrara working in top form, quietly subversive. The mother and father’s drug dealing is viewed with the matter-of-factness you’d give to any job.  It’s somewhat mundane, takes focus, and comes with aggravations and anxieties.  But it allows them to live the life they want to lead in a very expensive city.  They can support family members, and most of all make a good life for their daughter.  As the mother says at one point, without a hint of snobbery but with a sincerity you can’t but feel for when you think of the state of many public schools, she doesn’t want to take their daughter out of private school.   Their daughter is clearly the apple of both their eyes, and on Christmas Eve, unwilling to let the holiday pass without getting that Party Girl doll for their daughter, they make a trip to an outer borough to get the doll from a guy who sells them on the black market.  While the mother is at the guy’s warehouse getting the toy, her husband leaves the car to take care of some unnamed business, and it’s here that we learn there are other forces watching them who have their own nasty holiday agenda.  That agenda entails extortion, or what you might call forcing “gifts” from them.  Tis the season for taking as much as it is the season for giving.

Christmas songs and Christmas imagery – trees, lights, crosses, decorations – permeate ‘R Xmas.  The soundtrack, done by Schooly D, twists seasonal songs like “Silent Night” into menacing background music.  The urgency behind the parents getting the Party Doll to their daughter and the mother getting the demanded money to the weird extortionist (Ice-T) are almost, if not quite, the same.  And is the daughter any different than most young children who just hope to get what they wish for on Christmas?  She’s oblivious to the difficulties her parents endure on the job just as another child would be of a parent in a more conventional, but still stress-inducing, profession.  On Christmas morning, unwrapping her gifts, the girl says, “This is the best Christmas ever”.  She means it, and for her it’s true, but it’s a line that contains an irony she couldn’t begin to fathom.

At 85 minutes, ‘R Xmas is a fast, easy watch.  But there’s a lot going on in that short running time.  Everyone gives committed performances – Drea de Matteo, in particular, shines – and Abel Ferrara directs with his usual rigor.  Has the man ever made a sloppy film?  I don’t think so.  Some of his movies work better than others, but Ferrara is never slack.  You’ll find Christmas films more famous than this one, more celebrated and on a larger scale, but ‘R Xmas ranks among the most trenchant. 

           

It's a Good Thing the Crooks Are Not Very Smart in The Christmas Thief

by
Scott D. Parker

Gather ‘round kids and let me tell about something we had back in the day. Here in Houston, there was a store that let you rent audiobooks just like Blockbuster. T’was a great store, especially in the days before digital audiobooks are everywhere.

One of the books I listened to decades ago was The Christmas Thief by Mary Higgins Clark and her daughter, Carol Higgins Clark. What I didn’t know then was that this was the second Christmas novel that Mary and Carol wrote together. What made these books special—other than the mother/daughter relationship—was the crossover aspect of the stories.

One of Mary’s series featured lottery winner, Alvirah Meehan, and her husband Willy. She cleaned houses in New York while Willy was a plumber. They starred in four standalone novels before the four Christmas novels.

On Carol’s side, there was Reagan Reilly, a private investigator. In the first book, Deck the Halls, Reagan meets Alvirah at a dentist’s office and quickly get wrapped up in the kidnapping of Reagan’s dad and his driver.

Here in The Christmas Thief, all the characters are friends now, and they are planning a trip to Stowe, Vermont. Alvirah and Willy want to see the maple tree their lawyers bought for them—what do you buy lottery winners for Christmas—and they bring along Opal. She’s a fellow lottery winner who ran into some bad luck. Twelve years ago, Opal invested her lottery winnings with Packy Noonan, a guy who swindled Opal and other senior citizens out of their money.

Packy’s done his time and now he’s getting out of prison with a single-minded goal: travel up to Stowe and retrieve a flask full of uncut diamonds worth over $70 million and escape to Brazil.

Here’s the catch: unbeknownst to Packy, “his” tree has actually been selected to be used as the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. Now, the con has to figure out how to get his diamonds without anybody the wiser. That proves harder than he bargained for when all the characters show up in Stowe.

Carol Higgins Clark narrates the audiobook which I was able to find after extensive searching. She does a good job with the different New England accents. The story itself would make a fun TV movie. There’s not a lot of peril and some of Packy’s cohorts are just not that smart. I have to admit that I “cast” a certain actor as Packy as I listened to this book. He’s one of the Wet Bandits from Home Alone, and having this actor in mind made the story even better.

I’m always on the lookout for Christmas stories and now I’ve read two of the four books by Mary and Carol. I love crossovers and now I think I’ll try some of the non-Christmas books by these two gifted storytellers.