For the next few months, things are going to be a bit mad. So to keep up my writing and this site, I'm going to do in blogging what Radiolab occasionally does in podcasts and affectionately call 'shorts'. No, not the abbreviated pants, but abbreviated posts.

So today, let's catalogue my family's odd Christmas traditions:

• - a empty space where a tree should be 
• More accurately, a bunch of boxes and a treadmill. My parents are constantly reshuffling the house, and I think they hate the to-do associated with setting up and taking down the tree. Christmas, unlike nature, apparently doesn't abhor a vacuum, but I do! - the sight of a pretty, lighted Christmas tree is sorely missed.
• - poorly wrapped presents
• My parents are the worst gift givers. As noted in a previous post, if they could just give me a plain, unvarnished stack of dollar bills they would. But they know that their daughter finds the idea of money gifts thoughtless and rather insulting, and so they try (I'm a spoiled only child, I know). 
• But the idea of wrapping gifts in beautiful bows and carefully coordinated, pleated paper: that's completely beyond them. If something is stuffed in a paper grocery bag or still in its original shipping box, in their minds, that is gift-wrapping enough. So in the process of opening presents, I've had the pleasure of using box cutters and scissors to hack them open, the adventure of wading through pools of packing peanuts and endless bubble wrap to reveal the prizes inside. 
• (Though, at one point in time, they somehow obtained a roll of Dragon Ball wrapping paper, and all my presents, birthday or holiday, for the next few years were surrounded by truly embarrassing reams of Gokus and Gohans. Embarrasing, but kind of sweet.)
• - Chinese food
• I'm slowly transitioning them to traditional dinners of some sort of roasted meat and side dishes - what can I say? I'm a twinkie. But inevitably, we will, over the course of the holiday, consume something harking back to our Asian heritage: stir-fries and lamb casserole at the local hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant where my parents know every waiters' name; an incongruent plate of steamed bok choy with oyster sauce placed next to the centerpiece of a tender, burnished prime rib roast; dim sum for Boxing Day breakfast. I used to hate it, but I've learned to compromise: this year, we're making dumplings for Boxing Day.
• - movies on Christmas Day
• Basically, we'd be Jewish, if we weren't Christian.
• - watching a Doctor Who marathon in preparation for the Christmas special
• Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm a nerd, and I'm one of those. It's a fairly new tradition, given that I just got sucked up into the Time Vortex that is Doctor Who, but now during some holiday in the year, I sit my parents on the couch and force them to watch the most recent season. In fact, last year during Thanksgiving, while I cooked, I made them watch a crash course of the best episodes from various seasons with various Doctors in an attempt to help them make some sense of the 50th anniversary special, which I made them watch with dessert. And then last Christmas, I proceeded to make them watch the Christmas special (also known as Matt Smith's last episode), where they have to put up with my teary eyes and stifled sobs as I mourned the loss of Chinboy. 
• (I won over my dad, at least - my mom, not so much). 
• - singing Christmas songs on Christmas Eve
• When I was really young, my parents used to make me preach a little message on Christmas Eve; I made a truly fiery and compelling preacher, with my Precious Moments peach colored bible, my school-ruled paper and penciled notes, and high-pitched voice. Needless to say, we don't do that any more (Thank God), but every year on Christmas Eve, we will gather around the piano and sing through the liturgy of traditional Christmas hymns before opening presents. It's rather lovely, touching, and a true tradition for us in every sense of the word.
• 
  
• Throughout the rest of the holidays, though, you'll hear a strain of one holiday song or another drifting through the house. I can hear my mom singing "Winter Wonderland," as I type, except that she doesn't know any of the words besides "snowman," and is humming everything else in between. We define Christmas songs very loosely, so currently, besides the traditional and contemporary classics, our repertoire consists of:
• - all the songs from Les Miserables ('In My Life' is a particular favorite of mine, with classic holiday lines like, "Every word that he says/is like a dagger in me.")
• - all songs from Frozen, which my parents watched yesterday for the first time (my dad: "I really liked the music. I could understand every word they were saying without the subtitles.")
• - the Canadian national anthem (you know, winter? cold?)
• - the soundtrack from the Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (truly underrated, fantastic instrumentals)
• - this one, which I heard IRL for the first time this year as a cover by a Southern boy with a twang at a local Philadelphia bar, and heard about on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour in a great holiday episode (don't miss the epic rant about Heat Miser and Snow Miser)
• - since we're watching Into The Woods on Christmas Day, I'm thinking that'll be added to the playlist next year as well...
• - I'd like to submit this as a new holiday favorite, soon to be a classic. And this (yay The Killers!):

• - overnight french toast, easily made the night before in preparation for Christmas morning. Even better when made from pannettone (yum.)

Do you have any crazy family traditions of your own?

Merry Christmas Eve, Happy last day of Chanukah, happy holidays, and may you have many more new and wacky traditions in the years to come!

/c

Welcome to my yearly rant on Christmas songs - and my yearly blog post, I guess.  Is a blog really a blog when one only posts once a year?  Does this count as persevering in my attempts to be a writer/cultural commentator (and maybe some day work for NYMag/Slate/NYT/New Yorker, in ascending fantastical order)?  What is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything?   

All unanswerable questions, that.  

What is answerable is what particular Christmas songs elicit from the depths of my soul an inexplicable, disproportionate rage, which manifests itself in that pained half-sneer endemic to all New Yorkers, a clenching of the chest, a rapid means of escape (through the skip button or the door), and headache that sounds like a continuous scream of “WHHHYYYYY?!?”

(Since residency, I’ve had a lot of anger issues.)  

Being composed of 80% music instead of water, I could probably talk endlessly about songs I dislike and like, even holiday ones.  But evidently I have to save this material for a yearly blog post.  So let’s discuss “Last Christmas.”

I can’t even type that without an involuntary grimace.

The hate probably boils down to five things:  1)  it’s typical 80s music fare, 2)  the band name is ridiculous, 3)  the lyrics are even worse, 4)  it’s pure camp, and 5)  it’s not really a Christmas song at all.

Despite being born in the (late) eighties, I developed no love for 80s music.  I don’t know why.  Maybe it’s the heavy use of synth.  Maybe it’s the straight beat.  Maybe it’s the complete lack of cynicism when the singer looks into the camera with big teased hair, and earnestly croons, “If you’re lost you can look and you will find me/time after time.”  NO. So clearly Wham! already has that not going for them.  

And this video.  The hair.  The color-mismatched eyebrows.  The breezy, open, button-down shirt.  The gross misuse of overlays and fade-ins.  You can’t look away, can ya?

Also, the band is called Wham!.  Why?(!)  Did they get slapped so hard for making horrible, cheesy music that they had to add some random exclamation point to the end of their name?  The only reason they get any sort of pardon is because this band gave rise to running joke that is George-Michael Bluth on Arrested Development. 

But probably the most infuriating part is the lyrics, the meat of any song.  Well yes, George Michael, if you just randomly give your heart away at Christmas, and then revenge-give it to someone else the following year, you will be playing this song on the world’s smallest violin EVERY SINGLE YEAR.  I’m sure you thought that last year’s girl was “someone special” too.  Another unanswerable question:  how much of a dunce can one person be?  (At least he admits to “what a fool [he’s] been.”)

I’m also pretty sure we can banish “fire in his heart,” “soul of ice,” and “once bitten, twice shy” from the song lyric compendium for now and forevermore.  

Also, if anyone can explain what “A face on a lover with a fire in his heart/A man under cover but you tore me apart,” means, you're a better man than I.  Even my extraordinary talent for BS-ing my merry way through classes involving poetry and prose analysis have failed me.  My guesses:  he’s wearing a mask or attempting a scene from Faceoff?  the woman he’s in love with acts heartless like a man or is a transvestite? 

    

I don’t think there is a single arrangement of this song where someone is not singing this without eighties’ style melodrama.  There’s sentimental, and there’s saccharine.  It’s not a surprise, then, that most people who choose to cover this song are of an overly dramatic bent (Savage Garden, Taylor Swift, Lea Michele - though it’s a given that if she sings anything, it’s automatically going to be on histrionic overdrive), but it is seemingly impossible for even serious singers not to act like total hams while singing this.  Every singer will inevitably develop that baby whine of a catch in his or her voice during the course of this song, usually during “gave it awwa-ay“ or “someone spe-shul” 

Florence maybe gets away with it simply because she is Florence, and this is just how she sings: awesomely.  

Not even dub step is going to save this, Ariana Grande, although I guess bastardizing the verses might temper it slightly.  

The xx are not a band I would associate with wallowing drama, and honestly, I don’t even know what is going on with this cover.  

Christmas songs should meet at least one of these (personal and arbitrary) criteria:  the lyrics should be actually about Christmas, and the song should “be merry and bright.”  If the word “Christmas” was not in this song, it would be just a typical eighties’ song about heartbreak.  This is just blatant holiday profiteering.  Just think of all the royalties they get every year from this festering turd of a record.  

  

And if you’re going borrow on the Christmas spirit to make some change, shouldn’t it be at least a little uplifting?  Sure, I’m melancholic, but even I don’t think regret, jealousy, and revenge should be part of the Christmas liturgy.  Granted, there are sad Christmas songs (you can’t get much more depressing than the original lyrics to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”) but at least these songs fulfill the first criteria:  they’re actually about Christmas.  

To close on a less negative note, in keeping with the spirit of the season, here’s a collection of Christmas-related good reads, interesting song renditions, and a Millennial classic that will never grow old, because

...all I want for Christmas, is you!

Snow Patrol - Just Like Christmas

Death Cab for Cutie - Christmas (Please Come Home)

Sugar & The Hi-Lows - Jingle Bells

The Civil Wars - I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day

Chris Klimek:  All I Want For Christmas Is A New Song - Why the Last Great New Christmas Song Was Written 19 Years Ago

Jonathan Fischer:  Our Best Chance for a New Christmas Standard  

Max Blau:  The Worst Original Christmas Songs of the Last 10 Years : some amazing stuff in here - I didn't even know R Kelly had a Christmas song.  

Merry Christmas, and see ya at New Years!

It is nearly impossible to buy gifts for my parents.

Part 1:  For my parents, cash is a gift.  For me, it is not.

Background:  I am, despite my inclination towards the sarcastic, actually kind of a romantic idealist.  The evidence:

• The spines of my Jane Austen books are broken from multiple reads, and yes, I have watched all the BBC adaptations AND love them.  
• Christmas, to me, involves powdery snow and toboggans in an icy chill outside, while Christmas trees with lights and fireplaces and hot cider beckon warmly within.  
• There is that perfect man--"the ONE"--out there for me somewhere, a carefully concocted mixture of Mr. Darcy, Aragorn, and Michael-Fassbender-as-Mr-Rochester, and, yes, he will profess his love for me in a rainstorm, dammit!           
• OBGYN, as I waxed oh so eloquently in my application essay, was a perfect field in its combination of involvement in clinic and surgery and medicine.  And what could be more satisfying than delivering a baby and being part of such an intimate, special moment in a woman's life?
• As far as presents, they should be wrapped, and it's the thought that counts.

Clearly, when these lofty ambitions I have for life are incompatible with actual reality, it hits me quite hard.

• Christmases in the last few years have been disappointing not only for the fact that I have been working through them, but thanks to global warming and a dearth of floor space and energy, grossly lacking in cold, green and red decorations, lights, and pines.
• If there does live some mutant Darcy/Aragorn/Fassbender, he clearly doesn't exist outside of books, movie screen, or TV set.
• Never in my imagination did medicine involve so much disorderly ER and clinic rooms, unreasonably screaming patients, disgruntled nurses, massive fights with the laboratory, and useless paperwork, and so little actual surgery and helping of patients. 

• I find it completely incompatible with my very identity to give my parents something as thoughtless as cash as a Christmas gift.

The concept of giving cash or gift cards to my parents twists my mind in a Mobius tangle.  Is it just me, or don't cash/gift cards just scream, "THIS IS LAST MINUTE! I DON'T KNOW OR CARE FOR YOU AT ALL!"  At the minimum, it seems like a lack of effort.  If you know someone likes a certain store, couldn't you get something they might like (based on your knowledge of their personality and needs) and give them a gift receipt in case you thought wrong?  But then, if it's the thought that counts, and despite asking multiple times, all your parents say they want is cash moneys, then does cash show thoughtfulness and respect towards their request?  

The second problem I have with giving my parents cash is that they are Chinese, and they are frugal, and for all I know, they are spending the money on groceries or something completely practical and unromantic.  Am I a horrible daughter for wanting to treat them to something they probably would not buy for themselves, because it costs more than 15 dollars?  I kid, but for Asian parents who have worked hard and made major sacrifices to help their children succeed, is it not also respect to treat them to something lovely and extravagant that they may not have considered otherwise?  

The other problem to the "treat yo'self" gifts I try to press upon my wonderful, decent, but thrifty Asian parents:  their first comment is to question the price, and their second, to immediately dislike it for its cost, even if they liked it before knowing.  This is also known as Chinese restaurant syndrome:

Me:  How do you like [insert some non Chinese restaurant name here]?
Mom:  Well, it tasted good...but for the price of one of the entrees, we could have ordered three plates AND we could have taken  leftovers at Ruby Palace!

 Now is she right?  A tad bit exaggerated, but essentially, yes.  But it wasn't the point.  It was to share something I enjoyed, to enjoy a new experience together, to treat them to something nice.
(Until they scaled this back recently, it nearly ruined restaurants for me.  When they came to visit, I would only take them out to Chinese restaurants [and the rare Japanese one] so that I wouldn't be chastised at the end of the meal.)    

And really, is there a classy way to give cash?  Clearly making dollar bills rain is out of the question, and handing over a random wad of cash from your back pocket just looks like you're some low-level thug in a New Jersey mob, just trying to make it from day to day without anything that could possibly identify you, like credit cards.  Don't kid yourself:  tucking bills into paper cards or envelopes or 3D plastic mazes doesn't disguise the fact that you must be a distant relative sending in your vaguely cliched congratulations.






No, I've come to believe that the only truly classy way to give money is in fine Italian leather, like this:

Unfortunately, it'll be a long time before I have enough money to fill one of those babies.  Mom, Dad, you're going to have to wait.

interesting link on briefcases and money:  "Thank you, Fat Tony. However, in the future I would prefer a nondescript briefcase to the sack with a dollar sign on it." — Mayor "Diamond" Joe Quimby, The Simpsons

Coming soon:  Part 2:  What to Get Your Parents When They Have No Hobbies