Feel good Xmas movies

The S.O. and I are not much for watching holiday movies, especially the typical saccharine Lifetime or Hallmark ones, but we made an exception for Christmas film fare last night.

I happened across this movie being offered via Prime several months ago. I saved it to our Watch list because it's from Finland. Anything that's filmed in Finland with a big chunk of the dialogue in Finnish goes on the list. It gives the S.O. a chance to listen to actual Finnish and to realize again just how incredibly helpless he'd probably be if we ever went to Finland and had to count on his linguistic skills. Finn may be his first language (he learned to speak English -- sort of -- in kindergarten) but he doesn't have many opportunities to speak it. (I can read a fair amount of simple Finn, and I recognize quite a bit when I hear it spoken but I gave up trying to speak it years ago.)

Anyway, so I found a Finnish holiday movie, Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. Saved it with a vague plan of watching it once it got closer to the holidays. It has cute little kids, reindeer, lots of snow -- definitely all the ingredients for something sweet. Especially when it emerges that centuries ago the Sami people interred the original Santa Claus in a mountain in Lapland. A rich American decides to dig him up.

That's when things get interesting.

It turns out the truth about Santa Claus comes a lot closer to the stories about Krampus than to the ones about Saint Nicholas.

This being a Finnish movie, the fact there are subtitles shouldn't deter anyone. No one is going to get stuck trying to read super long sentences while characters blather on and on. Actually, the biggest problem with subtitles when a person understands (sort of) the language being spoken is subtitles tend to clean things up. A character says something bluntly vulgar and it appears on the screen as "disgusting" instead of "shit."

Rare Exports isn't exactly Cannes Film Festival material, but it was fun. I mean, how much better can it get than the image of a little boy sitting up holding a long gun bigger than he is waiting to blow away Santa Claus if he tries coming through the window? I'm not sure what type of weaponry it is, but it's definitely not a Red Ryder bb gun. Or his father freaking out when he tries to get a fire going in the fireplace and triggers the ginormous bear trap the kid set there?

How long before Patriot Day turns into an excuse for a sale?

Today is Patriot Day, the annual remembrance of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The S.O. and I were having lunch at the Cue Master in Baraga the other day when the subject of 9/11 came up in conversation. Two of the televisions were tuned to ESPN's "Outside the Lines." Topic of discussion on OTL was how Colin Kaepernick's decision not to stand for the national anthem has led to other athletes showing their support by also not standing. A number of people were saying that because game day, Sunday, was also Patriot Day the athletes should skip the protest. After all, it's a solemn day and everyone must show respect.

This led we folk in the bar to ask the question if it's such an important solemn day why are there still going to be football games? It's okay for the teams to play and fans to get drunk and rowdy, but it's not okay to protest? If it's a national day of remembrance amd/or mourning, shouldn't some effort be made at not having it be just another Sunday game day? Good question, and obviously not answerable. Conversation moved on to how it's now been enough years that there are getting to be more and more young people for whom September 11 is just another date on the calendar. For them it's not real, it's just something old people talk about.

Which in turn led to speculation as to when the commercialization of 9/11 would begin. When will we start seeing sales flyers that include lines like "prices are falling just like the towers?" Okay, so maybe that one is far enough over the line into outrageously bad taste that it'll never happen, but a Walmart in Florida recently got into public relations trouble for stacking Coke products into a model of the World Trade Center. The store may have claimed it was a tribute, but the public saw it for what it was: a remarkably tacky effort at peddling Coca Cola. Whoever designed the display made the mistake of being a few years too early with the exploitation. Ten years from now odds are no one would bat an eye. Stores advertise Memorial Day and Veterans Day sales, why not Patriot Day?

Well, maybe not. It does fall really close to the start of the school year and Labor Day, two occasions that already generate a lot of consumer hype. What's more likely to happen with Patriot Day is that it fades into obscurity as times passes and memories fade. It'll become like Flag Day, one of those dates that's noted on a calendar but almost no one remembers still exists -- or why.

Bring on the torches and pitchforks?

I'm trying to think of what would be the equivalent today in the U.S. of storming the Bastille. Granted, even back in 1789 in France it was primarily a symbolic gesture -- there were only 7 political prisoners in the prison at the time -- but even so. . . just where we would go if we wanted to do the equivalent today? Storm the prison where Leonard Peltier is held, whichever one that might be? Try to tear down the headquarters of the National Security Administration (they do seem to be spying on everyone)? Attack the White House? Riot at the Capitol? Is there any one place in this country that would be sufficiently symbolic to merit having a mob armed with the proverbial torches and pitchforks attack it? Even the most hated of government agencies (e.g., the Internal Revenue Service) are sufficiently amorphous that no one building really seems to capture the flavor necessary for a good symbolic act. Granted, the occasional lone nut will plot an attack on a federal building, but they don't seem to have much popular support. If they did, they wouldn't qualify as the occasional lone nut; they'd be leading a crowd of like-minded persons.

In any case, nothing is likely to be stormed by anyone any time soon. With a few exceptions, Americans are too apathetic to be outraged by much of anything. If they weren't, Occupy Wall Street would still be protesting and there'd be a lot more Moral Mondays happening around the country.

More thoughts on holidays

A Christmas classic:

As a joke, my brother used to hang a pair of panty hose over his fireplace before Christmas. He said all he wanted was for Santa to fill them.

What they say about Santa checking the list twice must be true because every Christmas morning, although Jay's kids' stockings were overflowed,  his poor pantyhose hung sadly empty.

One year I decided to make his dream come true. I put on sunglasses and went in search of an inflatable love doll. They don't sell those things at Wal-Mart. I had to go to an adult bookstore downtown. If you've never been in a X-rated store, don't go. You'll only confuse yourself. I was there an hour saying things like, "What does this do?" "You're kidding me!" "Who would buy that?" Finally, I made it to the inflatable doll section. I wanted to buy a standard, uncomplicated doll that could also substitute as a passenger in my truck so I could use the car pool lane during rush hour.

Finding what I wanted was difficult. Love dolls come in many different models. The top of the line, according to the side of the box, could do things I'd only seen in a book on animal husbandry. I settled for "Lovable Louise." She was at the bottom of the price scale. To call Louise a "doll" took a huge leap of imagination.

On Christmas Eve, with the help of an old bicycle pump, Louise came to life. My sister-in-law was in on the plan and let me in during the wee morning hours. Long after Santa had come and gone, I filled the dangling pantyhose with Louise's pliant legs and bottom. I also ate some cookies and drank what remained of a glass of milk on a nearby tray. I went home, and giggled for a couple of hours.

The next morning my brother called to say that Santa had been to his house and left a present that had made him VERY happy but had left the dog confused. She would bark, start to walk away, then come back and bark some more. We all agreed that Louise should remain in her panty hose so the rest of the family could admire her when they came over for the traditional Christmas dinner.

My grandmother noticed Louise the moment she walked in the door. "What the hell is that?" she asked. My brother quickly explained, "It's a doll." "Who would play with something like that?" Granny snapped. I had several candidates in mind, but kept my mouth shut. "Where are her clothes?" Granny continued. "Boy, that turkey sure smells nice, Gran," Jay said, trying to steer her into the dining room. But Granny was relentless. "Why doesn't she have any teeth?" Again, I could have answered, but why would I? It was Christmas and no one wanted to ride in the back of the ambulance saying,  "Hang on Granny Hang on!"

My grandfather, a delightful old man with poor eyesight, sidled up to me and said, "Hey, who's the naked gal by the fireplace?" I told him she was Jay's friend. A few minutes later I noticed Grandpa by the mantel, talking to Louise. Not just talking, but actually flirting. It was then that we realized this might be Grandpa's last Christmas at home.

The dinner went well. We made the usual small talk about who had died, who  was dying, and who should be killed, when suddenly Louise made a noise that sounded a lot like my father in the bathroom in the morning. Then she lurched from the panty hose, flew around the room twice, and fell in a heap in front of the sofa. The cat screamed. I passed cranberry sauce through my nose, and Grandpa ran across the room, fell to his knees, and began administering mouth to mouth resuscitation. My brother fell back over his chair and wet his pants and Granny threw down her napkin, stomped out of the room, and sat in the car.

It was indeed a Christmas to treasure and remember. Later in my brother's garage, we conducted a thorough examination to decide the cause of Louise's collapse. We discovered that Louise had suffered from a hot ember to the back of her right thigh. Fortunately, thanks to a wonder drug called duct tape, we restored her to perfect health.

Louise went on to star in several bachelor party movies. I think Grandpa  still calls her whenever he can get out of the house.

Note: I tried to find the original source for this story, but had no luck. It probably goes back a decade or two because the first time I saw it it was a paper photocopy, which suggests it's pre-Internet.

After Christmas sales

Think it's arriving this week

Summer's over

The 2010-11 snowplowing bill for the Retirement Bunker was in the mailbox yesterday.

Enclosed with the bill was an announcement of a new state holiday:  Shake Your Mailbox Day is October 23.  Michigan residents are encouraged to go out to the side of the road and give their mailboxes a good shake to see if they're sturdy enough to survive being buried in snowbanks.  "If you can shake your mailbox, it probably needs maintenance."