Do they know it's Christmas?

'Tis the season when we scramble to get our Christmas cards out by mail. Those of us who still do anyway. I was surprised that the first US postage stamp to commemorate Christmas wasn't issued until 1962. It was a pretty simple stamp. Christmas stamps have tended to be pious even though many persons seem to believe the federal government has abandoned the meaning of Christmas all together.

There have also been playful stamps issued, as well as ones marking Hannukah and Kwanzaa. There have even been stamps commemorating Muslim holidays, simply referred to as EID stamps, which have generated a fair amount of controversy since the first such stamp was issued in 2001. We live in a pluralist society, like it or not, and stamps are a way of commemorating the diversity of this nation.

Nevertheless, there remain those ardent religious conservatives who believe the true spirit of Christmas is in danger and are determined to save it through such films as Saving Christmas, soon to come to a theater near you. Sarah Palin had similarly issued a call to arms last year with her book, Good Tidings and Great Joy, against those nasty Christmas deniers, which was soundly debunked.

Every year, Fox news can be counted on to rekindle the faux "War on Christmas." Last year was a real doozy, as a Festivus Pole in Tallahassee, Florida, became the whipping post of Fox pundits. For those of you who don't know what a "Festivus pole" is, here is a clip from the Seinfeld episode in which it was first presented. The pole in question was put up in response to Governor Scott wanting to have a nativity scene in the state capitol, but in order to do so he had to allow persons to express themselves on this holiday, so one enterprising man erected his aluminum pole. Apparently someone had already seized on the joke with his own commemorative US postage stamp in 2009.

We need to be reminded of all the hunger and great sorrow in the world as well. A new British pop dream team has rekindled that old favorite song, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" for Ebola victims in West Africa. But, that's nothing like Mariah Carey struggling through an a cappella version of "All I Want For Christmas" to open Rockefeller Center for the holidays.

It is unfortunate that Christmas inspires such anxiety and overwrought performances, but then it has never been a particularly easy time for anyone. Bringing the family together again under one roof often brings with it many tensions, sometimes long suppressed, which have a nasty way of rising to the surface. That is why it may be better to just send a nice card with a commemorative stamp to mark the occasion.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

TripplerDecember 6, 2014 at 7:10 AM
I was just reading through ''The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire'' discussion we had here in 2011. Sure miss those great exchanges!
James FergusonDecember 6, 2014 at 11:22 AM
It would be nice to get another book discussion going if we could get a quorum. Any suggested titles?
TripplerDecember 7, 2014 at 5:53 AM
Will work on finding a good book that is brief. I'm getting old and sickly and it takes me a long time to read. At the moment I'm reading a bio of baseball legend Vernon "Lefty" Gomez - in the past I would have finished it in two days. I've been working on it for over a month and still have 70 pages to go.

It's tough to get old.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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