Happy Feast of St. Stephen!

As Seen In the classic Christmas carol “Good King Wenceslas”:

The children’s cartoon Phineas and Ferb is surprisingly traditional (and educational!) on the subject:

Merry Christmas!

http://athriftyhomemaker.blogspot.ca/2015/12/finnish-christmas.html

‘God is not dead, nor doth He sleep’

Merry Christmas!

Arts & Letters Saturday: ‘Brick’

This week’s work is the song “Brick” (1997), by Ben Folds Five.

Arts & Letters Saturday: Will Vinton’s Claymation Christmas

This week’s work is Will Vinton’s Claymation Christmas (IMDB, Wikipedia, Amazon).  Will Vinton (official site, current projects, IMDB) apparently invented the term “claymation”, created the California Raisins, and was a producer of the television series The PJs.

Chrismahanukwanzakah

I just heard a radio ad use the term “holiday elves”.  People have been arguing for years about whether it’s OK reflexively to substitute “happy holidays” for “merry Christmas” everywhere out of some concern for “political correctness”, but when retailers or other big companies do that, at least I think I can understand where they’re coming from.  If they go further and say “holiday elves”, it almost seems to me like unthinking self-parody at that point—what other holiday has any tradition of elves, or what elves are associated with “holidays” generically, outside of the Christmas traditions?