Month: December 2002

Tomorrow night — Saturday the 21st — is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year for those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere. What better way to celebrate a day that’s mostly darkness than with a Festival of Lights?

The Festival, now in its 14th year, is a parade with a twist. The people watching the parade walk through the streets while many of the performers are on the sidewalk, street corners and rooftops on the parade route. The procession will be accompanioed by the more mobile performers: lantern-bearers, jugglers, clowns, stilt walkers and Samba Squad (a percussion band of at least a dozen samba drummers) and wind their way through streets to the Kensington Market neighbourhood. Along the way, parade-goers will see a musical Nativity scene, a torch-lit Chanukah choir, a Kwaanza celebration, the legend of the White Buffalo Calf Woman, Raven Steals the Sun, La Befana (an Italian legend about the Winter Witch, a sort of Santa Claus-like figure), a Solstice story told through giant puppets, a giant fire-sculptue, a traditional Mummers’ play and much more.

The parade will depart from St.-Stephens-in-the-Fields Church (365 College Street West, 3 blocks west of Spadina) at 5:45 p.m. and work its way to its final destination, the park in Kensington Market near the south end of Augusta Street (the one at the corner of Augusta and Denison). I’ll probably join the parade and add a little accordion noise to the fun.

On Tuesday, I wrote a little rant about people who get offended at the mention of Christmas, and super A-list blogger James Lileks goes and writes something along the same lines.

Anyhow, Lileks is — as one would expect — in fine form. Here’s the opener to his piece:

There’s a new staple in modern newspapers: the tale of the Holiday Crank. In the past these people would be ignored, but nowadays no coverage of the season is complete without a dissenting voice. You don’t lose any points in a modern Western newsroom suggesting that the paper run profiles on people who hate Christmas. Float the notion of profiling lapsed Muslims who hold Ramadan in bemused contempt, and I suspect people would react as though you had pushed a ball of tinfoil into one of their dental fillings.

Next thing you know, he’s going to start playing the accordion and programming computers, and then where will I be?

News item:

GERMAN TWP., Ohio — A petite 17-year-old, irate after seeing three men running from her home in the wee morning hours Tuesday, sprinted outdoors barefoot, clad in pajamas, outran one of the trespassers, tackled and straddled him, then hog-tied him with a rope until police arrived minutes later.

The story also says that she gets lots of exercise being on the track and field team, the softball team and handling the family’s horses, but athleticism doesn’t always mean “ready for action”. I’ve been in scraps where out-of-shape ol’ me was playing hero while the jar-headed football-playin’ weight-liftin’ lugs who could’ve helped stood there dumbfounded.

Personally, I agree with Brian May’s assessment: I think the girl watched a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

“Give a Little” takes place tonight at the Cadillac Lounge (1296 Queen Street West, just west of Dufferin). This night of funk, deep house and dub jazz is a fund-raiser for the Womens Habitat shelter and the Toronto Food Bank. DJ Slowhand will spin the deep house, Dr. J. Booty will stun us with his mad turntablism and the improv dub jazz outfit Chameleon Project will perform live. The cover is $7, but it drops to a mere $5 if you bring a non-perishable food item. You’ll have fun, and some truly deserving causes will also benefit.

Joe and Bridget came to town over the weekend and I took them around on Saturday night. Here’s a photo of them enjoying the dark gothic sounds on the dancefloor at Savage Garden.

Jish was in town on Monday and held a little gathering at Pauper’s Pub with the GTABloggers. I was too busy conversing to take many pictures — in fact, I got only this one shot. Good thing it’s a good one:

I’ve been spending my days chasing down work for the new year and sharpening my MAD PROGAMMING SKILLZ. Here’s what my work environment looks like.

One of the cool things about Toronto is the fact that the city sets up bike racks all over the place. You can even send requests to city planning fi you feel that a certain block doesn’t have enough.

The downside of bike racks is that they can scratch your bike’s paint job. Fortunately for those people who have to park their bikes on the north side of Queen Street West just west of Soho (in front of the Lush store), someone’s knitted wool cosys for three of the racks.

Here’s the Christmas song that Spinal Tap should’ve written: Mistress for Christmas, by AC/DC, from their 1990 album, The Razor’s Edge (you know, the one with the hit single Thunderstruck):

Mistress For Christmas

Jingle bells, jingle bells

Jingle all the day

I just can’t wait till Christmas time

When I can grope you in the hay

Easy come, easy go

Have a good time with lots of dough

Slippin’ up high, slippin’ down low

Love’m and leave’m on with the show

Listen, I like female form in minimal dress

Money to spend with a capital ‘S’

Get a date with the woman in red

Wanna be in heaven with three in a bed

He got it, I want it

They got it, I can’t have it

But I want it, it don’t matter

She got it, but I can’t get it

I want a mistress for Christmas

Easy come, easy go

Slippin’ high, slippin’ low

He got it, I want it

They got it, I can’t have it

I want it, don’t matter

She got it, and I can’t get a –

Mistress for Christmas

You know what I’m talkin’ about

I want the woman in red with bow in my bed

I can hear you coming down my smoke stack

I wanna ride on your raindeer honey and ring the bells

While I do believe that some traditions should be put to rest, I also believe that a lot of tradition-bashers are poor-impulse-control cases with no actual tradition or culture of their own, save for a couple of Utne Reader platitudes, a mild revulsion for anything even vaguely Christian even if it aligns with their beliefs, a pro-pot slant and a half-formed belief in karmic payback. Standing for almost nothing, they tend to fall for just about anything.

(Sometimes it’s hard to believe I’m a liberal, isn’t it?)

Chris Baldwin’s summed it up pretty handily — and perhaps unintentionally — in today’s Bruno:

To borrow the line about Klansmen and Martin Luther King Day: C’mon, Bruno, how hardcore a secularist must you be to not want a day off?

Of course, those of us who celebrate Christmas would argue the exact opposite: here we took a beautiful Christian holdiay and destroyed it in usual corporate-like/well-intentioned-white-liberal fashion.

(There’s a Randroid who would take another tack and say “here we took a beautiful commerical holiday and destroyed it in usual religious fashion.” Haven’t we developed some kind of Ayn Rand repellent yet?)

In the end, I believe that intent counts. I’m certain there is no malice, no implicit “convert or die” message and no forcing of one’s beliefs on others when someone wishes someone else a happy Chanukah, Ramadan, Diwali, Kwanzaa, Saturnalia, Tet or even Festivus, the actions of certain vicious zealots notwithstanding. Balanced minds do not see any implied Hitler overtones at Oktoberfest, nor Hirohito/Tojo insinuations at the sushi house, and neither do they see the Crusades in Christmas. When people say “Merry Christmas”, most of them are really saying “Happy Holidays, and I’m celebrating them Christmas-style. You do your thing, and I’ll do mine. Come by for drinks.”

Merry Christmas, everyone.