What I Want For Next Christmas

On the Saturday before Christmas, 2024, I tested positive for COVID-19. This is my second confirmed bout of the disease (I also believe I had a third, unconfirmed case). I'm spending the holiday alone, forced to deny myself the one thing I wanted for Christmas: time with the family and friends I love.

Within my generation, I've watched the world change, mostly for the worse. Anti-science woo-woo practitioners, a fringe subculture thirty years ago, have organized online on an unprecedented scale. While COVID-19 has become the malaria of our time, deadly but banal, antivax forces seemingly conspire to resurrect polio, measles, and tuberculosis. Pro-science rationalists can't counter this because they're fatigued from arguing against Flat Earthers and Seven-Day Creationists.

Nor are anti-science nuts alone. Historian Kathleen Belew writes that White Power insurrectionists organized online back in the 1980s. The January 6th, 2021, Capitol invasion was the culmination of years of preparation, for which progressives remain unready. We believers in civil rights for the downtrodden are stuck in the era of Mother Jones and Woody Guthrie, believing that marching will bring liberation. The bigots are organized, prepared to bring the high-tech hammer of empire down, hard.

Jesus Christ was born into similar circumstances, in an occupied nation in a globalized empire. While ordinary Jews sought leadership to resist, their actual leaders squabbled about what to do. Fight back (Zealots)? Comply in advance (Sadducees)? Focus on individual righteousness (Pharisees)? Flee the world (Essenes)? No option, taken alone, seems sufficient.

When Christ uses the term “The Kingdom of God” throughout his ministry, he means it literally. The Kingdom isn't a poetic metaphor, it's a nation we live in right now. When Jews lived as a conquered state with a puppet monarch, Jesus offered an alternate citizenship. Caesar’s terrestrial government of grandeur, gold, and military parades, isn't our homeland. We dwell in another Kingdom, right now.

How do we exercise this alternate citizenship? Keep the commandments. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the lost foreigner. Set the prisoners free.

The older I get, the further I grow from belief in an anthropomorphic God among the clouds. Yet paradoxically, this draws me closer to Christ's message. If this world's systems encourage distrust and bigotry, Christ offers alternate systems of love, mission, and mutuality. Christ's systems lift one another up, sustain a wounded earth, and restore justice to an unjust world.

And we call those systems “God.”

Remember, back during lockdown, when churches were reported as the largest vectors of infection? I believe this happened because people lost track of why church exists. Too many churchgoers saw worship as a moral goal in itself. Therefore, having sung and clapped and hugged and sat through the homily, they saw the process as complete. Then they went home, relaxed, and coughed on one another.

Instead, church should be the place we go to recommit ourselves to the systems Christ initiated. Singing the songs while ignoring the message is exactly what Jesus meant, in Matthew, in saying: “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of My Father who is in heaven.”

Equally important, church should be the place we organize. Because, as stated, the forces of ignorance and empire are organized, prepared to crush the already weak and kill the already marginalized. Our hymns should be protest marching songs, our sermons should be plans of action, and our prayers should be motivations to act. Church shouldn't be our refuge from the world, it should be where we find strength to face the world and say no.

People who know me might counter by pointing out how bad I am at fronting the resistance. That's true. When working alone, I'm easily discouraged by the workload and cowed by confrontation. But that's the point. I shouldn't have to work alone; supported by the systems of justice we call God, I should join arms with fellow believers and face the challenges together. When we bolster one another, that's when we become the church.

Monday, upon learning that I'd be quarantined on Christmas, a local friend and his wife offered to reserve part of their Christmas dinner and bring it to me. At that moment, I felt like part of the community. I realized that I wanted to feel that in the church. Earthly powers want us to feel alone, desperate, and in competition for scraps. The Kingdom reminds us we're never alone, we face all challenges together.

Rudolph the Dog-Earred Stereotype (Part Two)

Santa and Rudolph in Videocraft International's 1964 stop-motion Christmas special

Three years ago today, I wrote an essay entitled Rudolph the Dog-Earred Stereotype, claiming that the Christmas classic “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was a call to action against Hitler. It went largely unnoticed at the time. Last week, I linked that essay on a popular meme-sharing group on Facebook, and it exploded. In under eighteen hours, it received three times as many hits as it received in the previous three years.

It also received several comments, many of them hostile. Nothing energizes Netizens more than having their opinions challenged, and apparently that’s what I did. The objections fall into three basic categories, which I will address in no particular order. Here goes.

• “Santa isn't enabling ablism, he's enabling antisemitism isn't the defense I think it was meant to be”

I never said Santa was enabling antisemitism, I said America in 1939 was enabling antisemitism, and Robert L. May, Rudolph’s creator, was calling on America to take a stand. Moreover, America definitely enabled antisemitism; the same year May wrote the first Rudolph coloring book on contract for Montgomery Ward, America turned away a shipful of German Jewish refugees, most of whom eventually wound up in Germany’s Holocaust camps.

It bears emphasizing that bigotry seldom begins at ground level. Scholars of race, history, and law, like Ibram X. Kendi and Michelle Alexander have demonstrated that bigotry doesn’t cause discriminatory policies, but rather, discriminatory policies cause bigotry. If “all of the other reindeer” were mocking and excluding Rudolph, it was because Santa, atop the North Pole power pyramid, created that environment. Thus it was on Santa to change it.

If audiences limit ourselves to reading art on the surface, we always miss the meaning. Yes, superficially, Santa encouraged bigotry against Rudolph. But Santa isn’t just Santa, he stands for powerful people everywhere: heads of state, religious leaders, media figures deciding which stories deserve reporting. Storyteller Robert L. May wanted these powerful people to change their harmful policies, hopefully before that catastrophic “foggy Christmas Eve.”

• “This is fuckin [sic] dumb. Why not write a book for adults who might actually get the point (if that was actually the case)”

I dunno, man, why do any authors ever write about important topics for children? Why did Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time address spiritual malaise in a technological age? Why did Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain deal with World War II issues in a medieval Welsh setting? Why did Suzanne Collins deal with economic inequality, climate change, and resistance to unjust authority in The Hunger Games?

Perhaps because children, from an early age, demonstrate a strong sense of morality and fairness. If we’ve learned nothing from the last two years, we surely agree that adults perform elaborate moral contortions in order to defend selfish interests while still thinking of themselves as good people. We’ve watched grown-ups use religion, pseudoscience, and a truncated form of history to justify racism, closed-door nationalism, and spreading a plague unchecked.

Children, historically, have used their innate sense of justice to goad adults into right actions. As Elizabeth Hinton writes, many acts of resistance to institutional racism during the peak Civil Rights Movement began in high schools and colleges. Media pundits and defenders of the status quo still use the stereotypical college liberal as their catch-all demon, because youth have strong moral codes, undistorted by economic pressures and adult cynicism.

This doesn’t mean children always know, or do, the right thing. On the small scale, grade-school students already show hostility to people groups whom adults around them shun or belittle. On the large scale, historian Jill Lepore records how some late hippie-era college activism crossed the line into light-beer Stalinism. That’s why children should read literature with a strong moral backbone, to help steer and modulate their instinct toward fairness.

• “tl;dr”

That’s on you, dude. Most of my blog essays run 750 words, which anyone with a healthy attention span should be able to read in about three minutes. I keep things brief because screen reading attenuates people’s willingness to stick with long or detailed content. As the above arguments indicate, I didn’t explain important points in enough detail; believe me, I could go much, much longer than I usually do.

In conclusion, I don’t expect my essays to change people’s deeply entrenched beliefs. Readers will often respond to challenged beliefs much like they’d respond to someone attempting to chop off their arm. But I do expect mature audiences to read what I said, not what they wish I said.

The Power of Guns and Christmas

Click to enlarge (source)

Remember the fun, energetic folderol last week when Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) and family posed in front of the Christmas tree flexing their guns? Wasn’t that fun? Watching online leftists lose their collective marbles because the Congressman pulled a clickbait stunt on Twitter. Then for an encore, Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO), probably disappointed she didn’t plan the extravaganza first, recreated the image with her four minor sons.

Initial criticism targeted the Representatives for posing with guns just days after the Oxford, Michigan, school shooting. More interesting for me than the rifles, though, is the other two props these photos share: children and Christmas trees. Both Representatives are professing Christians; Massie is Methodist, and Boebert describes herself as born-again. Why would they conflate military-grade firearms with the birth of the Prince of Peace?

I’m certainly not the first Christian to complain that Christmas has come unmoored from its liturgical roots. Long before Republicans embraced the “War on Christmas,” the expression “Keep Christ in Christmas” meant resisting the holiday’s creeping commercialization. It’s too late for that, though. Like Halloween before it, Christmas has become a secular marketing phenomenon, unrelated to a religion to which America overall has a fairly lukewarm relationship.

Once associated with childlike wonder as kids discover exactly how “naughty or nice” Santa deems their year, Christmas has become a holiday of adult self-indulgence. From relatively innocent traditions like spiked eggnog and ugly sweater parties, to competitive light displays and Elf on a Shelf, Christmas has become a commercial spectacular. Again like Halloween, Christmas is no longer for children; it’s become a massive, culture-wide bender, verging on suicidal.

This transition of childhood holidays into adult extravaganzas hasn’t happened coincidentally. It’s part of a pattern where citizens of the industrialized world see the season of childlike dependence extended well into adulthood. My parents’ generation could get married, buy a house, and start a family on a job secured with a high school diploma. Today, people with multiple college credentials are deferring home ownership and parenthood into their forties because they’re broke.

Children love displays of supposed adulthood. Feeling their social, economic, and sexual maturity thwarted by the constraints of industrial modernism, they find ways to display the grown-up identity they’ve been denied. Remembering my high school years, I recall minor girls finding inventive ways to display their breasts and butts, while boys displayed images of military-adjacent machismo. Carrying gun aficionado magazines to school sure seemed grown-up to us teenagers.

Click to enlarge (source)

Representative Boebert in particular matters here. A high-school dropout, Boebert never underwent commencement, one of the few adulthood rites remaining in American society. She later redeemed herself through entrepreneurship and a knack for PR, certainly. But in many ways, Boebert has become a public face of an American generation denied any passage to adulthood. Even her allies frequently comment on her youthful good looks, innately infantilizing her.

Consider the difference between the two photographs. Representative Massie’s family is well-groomed and posed, and look comfortable holding their firearms. (I’m unclear whether the small girl on the couch is Massie’s youngest child, or a grandchild.) By contrast, Representative Boebert’s kids look disorganized and are pointing their rifles randomly. Their facial expressions run the gamut from numb to hysterically terrified, less a family photo than a hostage situation.

Yet it’s Massie whose caption specifically invokes Santa. (The NRA posted a similar Santa-themed tweet days earlier, to similar umbrage.) This entreaty to childhood innocence, while desperately trying to look grown-up with military-grade weapons, reflects the conundrum almost every American born after 1970 has felt: we’re expected to act adult and responsible long before our society and economy trust us with more than the most rudimentary adult responsibility.

These demented family photographs make perfect sense in context. And that context is that of parents, even grandparents, trapped in a permanent cycle of adolescent dependence. We’re expected to demonstrate unquestioning loyalty to our economy, our government, our church, our nation—the wide-eyed loyalty of a child for a mother. A loyalty which anyone who’s ever worked for an hourly wage knows we’ll never see reciprocated in this lifetime.

I admit having an adverse relationship with guns. When American lawmakers display their weapons as literally children’s Christmas toys, my immediate reaction is hostility. But when I distance myself from that history, and consider the situation from the Representatives’ perspective, I realize: they’re a lot like me. They feel powerless and estranged in a culture they don’t understand. They handle it differently, but fundamentally, they’re not that different from me.

Rudolph the Dog-Earred Stereotype

It’s Rudolph Meme season again! You know the one I mean (above), a cheap pseudo-Marxist reading of the song that suggests your value, if you’re different, derives from your instrumental utility. I remember figuring that reading out fifteen years ago, as a sophomore-level English major excessively proud of having discovered inequality in classic literature. And like undergrads everywhere, I had to share my discovery with everyone.

I was wrong. And dumb.

I've suggested recently that it does songs a disservice to hear them without their context. Words received at the surface level as pretty awful these days come from a time where those words meant something very different. Songs have unique problems, since we listen passively, often while doing other things. But that makes it more important, not less, that we understand the historical milieu from which music originates.

In Rudolph’s case, that milieu is the Great Depression, and its kissing cousin, World War II. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” began life as a coloring booklet published as a supplement to the 1939 Montgomery Ward catalog. For readers younger than me, the catalogs published by the Sears & Roebuck or Montgomery Ward companies were the Amazon.com of their day, making luxury shopping and top-of-the-range goods available to Americans living outside major cities.

“Monkey Ward,” as people called it, published the first Rudolph story, written and illustrated by poorly-paid copywriter Robert L. May. Here’s where we get the first glimmerings of Rudolph’s backstory: according to one source, Robert May grew up in a relatively wealthy family that lost everything in the 1929 stock market crash. May took the Monkey Ward job because he needed the money, a problem compounded by needing to cover his wife’s very expensive cancer treatments.

So May was Jewish, at a time when anti-Semitism was still commonplace and socially acceptable in America. He was poor, and not only poor, but newly poor. And he had cancer in his family, at a time when Americans said “cancer” the way we now say “HIV.” Safe to say, this guy had firsthand experience with outsidership in a closed society.

Yes, the other reindeer mock Rudolph for being different. But if we recontextualize Rudolph’s difference from mere physical freakishness, we get a completely different reading. If we read Rudolph’s red nose as symbolic of Jewishness, poverty, or both, we see something completely different. Rudolph isn’t a nonconformist, as the popular meme above implies. He’s a member of an oppressed minority, whether oppressed by White people or by capitalism.

Take it further. We don’t know much about Robert May’s personal life and knowledge, but it’s conceivable he saw the connection between the red nose, a highly visible symbol of difference, and the yellow stars forced on his fellow Jews in Europe. The song doesn’t specify what “reindeer games” Rudolph couldn’t join. But European Jews couldn’t hold certain trades, own their own houses, or save money past fixed limits.

The parallels start getting chilling.

Like you, I grew up watching the 1964 stop-motion Rudolph special, one of the oldest programs that still regularly runs on network TV. That depicts Rudolph as the victim of routine schoolyard bullying, a rebel against postwar America’s White suburban mediocrity. In some ways this makes him almost a proto-hippie. It’s no coincidence that this special hit American airwaves just as the first Baby Boomers began reaching adulthood.

But both this adaptation, and the song we sang (written by May’s brother-in-law Johnny Marks), came along later. The song didn’t appear until 1949, ten years after May’s coloring book. The TV special didn’t debut for a full quarter-century after May’s story. They’re both distorted by America’s involvement in World War II, and the national realignment that happened afterward. Our understanding of Rudolph comes from second-generation stories with their own agenda.

Robert May’s original story, read in light of the impoverished Jewish experience in 1939, feels completely different. Rudolph becomes somebody not just mocked and belittled, but actively oppressed, because a tyrannical majority believes the power structure they’ve created is foreordained. Rudolph needs rescue by the North Pole’s national leader. But that leader won’t buck the system unless imminent emergency forces his hand.

So yeah, Rudolph isn’t a Marxist finger exercise. He’s a plea for leaders to stand against systemic injustice—coupled with an acknowledgement that they won’t unless they’re forced to. In that way, when we look at increases in racism, poverty, and war-mongering in Earth’s wealthiest nations today, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is arguably as relevant now as he’s ever been.

Follow-up: Rudolph the Dog-Earred Stereotype Part Two

Do We Really Hang the Christmas Decorations Too Early?

“They’re putting the Christmas decorations up before Halloween!” I remember my father’s Mall Saturday complaints like they were yesterday. “Remember when they usedta wait until at least Thanksgiving? Now it’s like they can’t wait for the year to be over!” Mom would nod along, sometimes interjecting something like, “They don’t respect the value of Advent anymore.” As a young, impressionable kid, I believed every word they said.

In recent years, I heard the same words dribbling off my lips. “Remember,” I told my then-girlfriend while cruising the local mall, “when they usedta wait until at least Thanksgiving?” Because in my head, I did remember it, even though the memory was implanted by my parents’ retellings, not personal experience. Complaining about early Christmas decorations in commercial settings has become a seasonal tradition as established as the tree.

This struck me recently while reading acclaimed religious historian Mircea Eliade. In a term guaranteed to tweak Doctor Who fans everywhere, Eliade speaks of “The Regeneration of Time,” an important function of early literate religion. Important year-end festivals, generally associated with fall harvest or spring planting, featured ritual reenactment of the Creation of the World. These were generally acted out, the beginning of Theatre.

After early Christians purged Theatre from Europe in an attempt to exorcise pagan influences, the art form re-emerged about a millennium ago, as part of Latin Easter ceremonies, which concluded the liturgical year. The faithful would reenact, not the Creation, but the Redemption of the World, in Gregorian chant. As in Babylon and Egypt, the old year ended with the dead emerging to walk the earth, though for benevolent purposes.

When European Christians moved the commencement of the New Year from April to January, perhaps to offset the influence of pre-Christian Saturnalia rituals, the dramatic emphasis moved onto Christmas. Now not the end, but the beginning of the liturgical year gained prominence. Some churches today practice Easter dramas, but nearly every mainline denomination performs the Birth and Annunciation of Jesus, usually (but not always) in child drama form.

Think about that. For one evening, our children ritually become the Holy Family, the angels and shepherds, the magi. Not perform these roles, ritually become them. These long-dead saints become alive during religious ritual. The New Year, which usually marks a pass-through point between the living and the dead (consider the Celtic Samhain traditions), is embodied when some of Christianity’s holiest saints walt among the congregants for an hour.

In Euro-American tradition, the temporary reemergence of the dead on living soil has largely died out. Besides the Scandinavian ghost story tradition or Krampus parades, little of the New Year’s frequently terrifying supernatural tradition survives. Yet fundamentally, we still have some vestige of this awareness. Whether eggnog toasts for the loved departed, or New Year’s resolutions solemnly written and tossed into the Yule fire, we still bury our dead at midwinter.

How does this relate to mall Christmas decorations? Consider a moment Michel Foucault’s famous question: “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” Add malls to that question: huge, block-shaped buildings with few windows and controlled, antiseptic interiors. They all promise salvation, but not outside, not in nature; only by surrendering yourself to the shiny yet dark, crowded yet impersonal space.

Today’s modern world, with its ahistorical architecture, quantity-based work attitudes, and commercialism, goes against human desires. Dr. Stephen Ilardi, of the University of Kansas, asserts that depression is so widespread in America partly because we spend much of our lives indoors, seated, alone.Our bodies and brains aren’t built for such environments. From factories and cube farms, to airless schools, to mausoleum-like malls, we already feel partly dead.

Therefore we welcome Christmas, and reward merchants with our money for decorating their trees and playing carols before the Equinox, because we want to die. We want to pass through the New Year’s tomb and emerge beyond, hoping next year will seem truly real. This flesh, conditioned as it is to a noisy, inhumane, materialistic world, longs for death, because we believe Heaven, Nirvana, or whatever, waits beyond the river.

We usually don’t consider Christmas a morbid holiday. But it inevitably involves burying Last Year’s painful, mortifying baggage, and the liturgical recreation of humanity with the New Year. Yes, malls cynically want to make money selling cheap plastic crap, but they don’t do it alone. We give them power to hasten Christmas because we want Last Year, with its pains, to die. So we can be reborn.

The Politics of Christmas

In the days preceding Christmas this year, my Facebook feed has been cluttered with remarkably repetitive stories: promises to explain the political implications of “I Saw Three Ships,” “Do You Hear What I Hear,” “Good King Wenceslas,” and other Yuletide standards. Every Christmas seems characterized by some overwhelming theme. This year, apparently, it’s that Christmas traditions have political significance. Somehow, despite the weight of history, this always surprises people.

At the risk of sounding like my dad, we’ve arguably forgotten the meaning of Christmas. I don’t mean that Santa risks displacing Baby Jesus from our attention; we’ve fought that battle relentlessly already. Rather, the strident complaints about the War on Christmas have forced liturgically conservative Christians to cede all political implications of Christmas to people whose interests couldn’t coincide less with the message contained within the Gospels.

Northrop Frye writes that Jesus’ life, as we know it, remains inseparable from prophecy. True that, but it clearly also remains inseparable from politics. From its opening passages, Jesus’ biography ballyhoos its political implications. The two birth narratives, often melded into one in twee Protestant Christmas Eve services, actually have different takes on then-contemporary politics. They agree, however, on one important point: Jesus’ birth explicitly repudiates worldly power and influence.

Luke, the better-known birth narrative, begins with Joseph and Mary displaced from their home for tax purposes. It explicitly establishes Christ’s birth amid the upheaval of a conquered people, whose lives are periodically suspended to subsidize a government that rules the land, without ever working it. Re-imagine it thus: if America required every Native American back onto The Rez for BIA bureaucratic purposes, Modern Jesus might appear in such circumstances.

Matthew, by contrast, pits Jesus’ birth against Herod the Great. A puppet king established by Rome, history records Herod’s reign as a triumph of secular splendor paid for by the impoverishment of Judea’s people. Josephus records that Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem was more spectacular than any Roman religious house. And Matthew records Herod demanding an entire generation put to sword to forestall any challenge to his worldly authority.

One could continue. Luke records pre-teen Jesus disputing the religious authorities in their temple—religious authorities whom Obery Hendricks recounts weren’t spiritual shopkeepers, but an explicitly political order established to govern a conquered people. (“Priests” are, historically, lawkeepers, not shepherds.) Matthew describes Jesus’ family exiled to Egypt, an explicit allusion to Israel’s two periods of national exile in foreign lands. Both Evangelists record differing, but explicitly political, early Messianic childhoods.

This thread continues into Jesus’ ministry. Traditional liturgy loves emphasizing how Jesus called His apostles from among fishers, farmers, and other uneducated poor. The apostles’ lack of theological training is certainly significant. But equally important, Jesus called His apostles from Galilee, from people nominally Jewish, but who, through geographical inconvenience, couldn’t participate in standard Temple ritual. Jesus’ apostles weren’t merely unschooled and penniless; they were impious, despised, and possibly apostates.

Jesus seldom spoke against Roman occupation. He demanded believers “render unto Caesar” (itself a loaded story), and even healed a Centurion’s beloved servant. However, Jesus reserved His greatest wrath for Pharisees and Sadducees. Not because He opposed religious authority, as some suppose—He engaged modest, curious religious like Nicodemus in Socratic give-and-take eagerly. Rather, He opposed religious leaders because they derived their power from maintaining the status quo like Quislings.

Even His death has political implications. Douglas Adams famously claimed Jesus “had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change.” But be serious: empires don’t nail hairy provincial preachers to timbers and stake them up to die in the municipal landfill for telling people to pray more. Temple authorities demanded Jesus’ death, and Pilate capitulated, because He threatened their dominion.

Though theologians across time have debated exactly why Jesus needed to die, one thread remains constant: human authority found Him dangerous. He preached against wealth, dominance, and power. He forgave sinful women while condemning lustful men. He healed and redeemed Samaritans, while chasing Jews from their Temple. He literally hugged lepers. He established power relationships exactly opposite those this world favors. Jesus’ life was wholly, explicitly political.

Catholic author (and sometime conservative mouthpiece) Garry Wills writes that “Jesus did not come to bring any form of politics.” True enough, if by “politics” we mean partisan alignments. Jesus doesn’t endorse any political party, notwithstanding both American parties’ recent eagerness to enlist His membership. But Jesus clearly had strong positions on human relationship to power. Christians need to examine this closely. Human governments can’t get us into Heaven.

Yuletide Gifts To Suit the Senses

Vision

I don't understand the science behind the Verilux Happylight. However, I understand how diminished access to sunlight can have an effect on people's psychology. The manufacturer markets this powerful, focused light for Seasonal Affective Disorder, but as a graveyard shift worker, I get limited sunlight year-round. And I've learned there's a concrete reason why shift workers often shuffle around like the undead.

And I also know that, if I sit for one hour bathing in this light, I have more energy going into the shift, emerge feeling much less depleted, and have sufficient wherewithal to keep accomplishing things rather than going straight to bed. I don't even have to stare into the light like I feared; I get the benefit if I have the light on while I reading or cooking. (Don't use it with anything that generates contradictory light, like watching TV of noodling on the computer.)

The light produced by this device is much whiter and warmer than that produced by supposed full-spectrum lights you can buy at the store. I've gone to the kitchen with this light on, looked back, and thought I'd left the drapes open. It really looks like sunlight. And it has the lingering effects you'd get from a picnic in the park, especially handy when your work schedule, or the season, limit your available sunlight.

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Hearing

When I pulled the Turtle Shell 2.0 Wireless Bluetooth Speaker from its package and noted how small it was, my heart sank. How could something so tiny have decent sound? But I gamely paired it to my smartphone and fired up Pandora, and it filled my living room with warm, full sound. Compared to my phone's onboard speakers, which sound like someone playing 78s through a cardboard tube, this arrangement sounds like an actual home stereo system.

Besides its complete, rich sound and compact size, this speaker has a durable outdoorsy construction, hardy yet flexible, which makes it great for yard work, cycling, or just chilling on the porch. Its rubberized base makes it shock resistant, and the speaker grille has holes small enough to resist accumulating grit. And by attaching it to a compatible bike mount (sold separately), it travels well. Take your streaming players, YouTube, or other media with you.

Most laptops, smartphones, and other streaming devices these days have lousy speakers. The first time you tried to play your favorite web radio station on your laptop, you hated the sound, right?. But not only does this speaker improve the sound of prerecorded media, its integrated microphone lets you get more life from live media, like Skype. Though it can't access your media, it brings new richness and depth to the media you already have.

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Taste

Who woulda thunk the shape of the ice in your drink matters? Surely ice spheres are just plain frivolous. But when I popped the first ice ball from my DeluxIce Premium Ice Ball Mold, it was only slightly narrower than a standard drink tumbler, meaning that even if I pour water, juice, or liquor into my glass warm, I’m still guaranteed a nice cool sip when it hits my lips.

Not to disparage the novelty value. Spherical ice makes for added value in swirling your cocktail, adding debonair points to your next party. (Dear Santa: I prefer Wild Turkey.) And because spheres have less surface area by volume than cubes, your ice will melt slower and last longer. One ice ball lasted me through two big glasses of water and three fingers of whiskey.

These molds come in pairs, so make ahead before your party, or order multiple sets. Their flexible structure absorbs ice’s natural expansion, and their two-part design snaps together snugly for easy use. They’re made of food-quality silicone, used in making pans, oven mitts, and spatulas, so you probably already have this material in your kitchen.

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And finally, your fashion sense

If you're anything like me, your collar stays have an annoying tendency to curl with age, crack, and finally die quietly when you forget to take them out before tossing your shirt in the dryer. Because typical plastic or cardboard stays age badly, your shirts often look old and cheap despite your best efforts to keep them fresh. I really appreciate NeoStays’ durable, age-resistant, and economical stays for multiple shirt sizes.

NeoStays Magnetic Metal Collar Stays are made of metal, so they won't curl or split with time. They weigh no more than typical store-bought collar stays, yet resist age and deterioration and continue lying flat, even if you accidentally run them through a wash cycle. I can wear them to work, church, or out on a date, and my collars look as crisp and businesslike at the end of the day as they did when I got dressed in the morning.

For most purposes where you have occasion to wear a collared shirt, this simple addition will keep you looking good throughout the day, with a precise, businesslike edge that won't wear off just because your stays aren't new. If your appearance matters, and you want to keep that crisp, fresh-ironed look through a long day, these are the fashion accessory you've looked for.

A Fun New Take on Christmas Music

Robin Harper & Marvin Goldstein, Simply Christmas

I admit it: I don’t like Christmas music. Many artists tear off Christmas albums to get something in under deadline, and apparently hope to score a crossover hit, so the music doesn’t get as much care as it deserves. Between the bland secular gruel and the pious pomp, I turn my radio off more at Christmas than any other time of the year. Which is why I like Robin Harper’s Christmas album, misleadingly entitled Simply Christmas.

Harper sings a selection of Christmas standards, including old hymns, recent chart toppers, and classics you probably heard on your uncle’s old 45’s. Though none of these songs are original compositions (the most recent is from 1993), Harper puts her own spin on them. She sings in a classic Broadway jazz-fusion style, backed by pianist Marvin Goldstein, whose playing recalls Richard Carpenter, or a more laid-back Vince Guaraldi.

The “Simple” part of Harper and Goldstein’s title refers to their stripped-down style. With no overdubbing or ornate orchestration, they play with remarkable intimacy, like the star musicians at a wine-and-cheese party. You can imagine these two at your favorite fern bar, an impression amplified by the audible smile in Harper’s voice, and the playful embellishments Goldstein throws on his piano. Their music eschews hip studio trickery.

But do not assume this music is “Simple” because it lacks sophistication. Harper’s vocals recall the heyday of jazz pop, and while she doesn’t growl like Shirley Bassey, she could hold her own with the likes of Connie Francis or Dinah Shore. And when she takes on songs associated with particular artists (Eartha Kitt on “Santa Baby,” Kathy Mattea on “Mary Did You Know?”), she avoids the trap of merely mimicking the famous renditions.

Harper and Goldstein are not satisfied merely playing lounge classics; this is not somebody’s bland karaoke album. Interesting flourishes, like Harper’s accelerated take on “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem,” or her unexpectedly brisk “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” keep listeners guessing what she’ll do next. Behind her, Goldstein throws ornaments on his playing that keep his piano spirited, without overwhelming his vocalist.

Nor is Harper afraid to vary her tone. Her take on “Mary Did You Know?” captures the minor-key energy of Mattea’s classic recording, but in an urbane jazz style that deflects Mattea’s country original. Harper captures the fear Mary must have felt, knowing she’d birthed the Son of God. This remarkable detour into sonic darkness sustains the poignant edge that she begins with the almost political “Grown-Up Christmas List” and carries into her bold yet wistful “Silent Night.”

I especially appreciate that Harper’s repertoire is specifically Christmas-oriented. Between her use of religious songs, and secular tunes that specify Christmas, she maintains a thread that her music stands for something. No “Happy Holidays” here, thank you very much. Of her eleven tracks, only one, the jazz standard “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm,” doesn’t mention Christ or Christmas specifically.

Even “White Christmas” and “The Man With the Bag,” artifacts of seasonal sentimentality that usually bore me, have remarkable spirit in Harper’s renditions. Perhaps that’s because, instead of rendering them in the blandly inoffensive stylings of lounge singers everywhere, Harper sings them like they mean something to her personally. This results in tracks that feel like she’s sharing something intimate with us, like she’s invested a piece of herself in the product.

Harper bookends the album with two takes on Mel Tormé and Bob Wells’ “The Christmas Song,” which, in its combination of religious and secular images, sums up her album well. Of her many covers, this is probably the closest Harper comes to recreating the original, and she does a great job capturing Nat King Cole’s barely detectable syncopation. This track clearly situates Harper as part of an ongoing jazz Christmas tradition.

My only complaint with this album is its brevity: it runs just under thirty-five minutes, merely LP length, which by current standards is unusually short. Harper and Goldstein could have taken on many more tracks from the great Christmas tradition without losing the energy that makes this album so listenable. Maybe she figured less is more. But it ends much sooner than I would have liked.

This album probably won’t change my opinion of all Christmas music. As long as artists see the season as a chance to be insipidly sentimental, I’ll probably dodge Christmas songs. But Harper and Goldstein do well in an area where better-known artists fall flat, and craft a listenable album for the season.