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It’s the summer of 2023 and I find myself writing a Christmas story. Why I do not know, but I swear on my mother-in-laws grave that it is all true.

While in grad school there was little money for anything including Christmas. Judy and I would earn a little extra money by ringing the bell for the Salvation Army. In those days you could get a permit from the Forest Service to cut your own tree in specified areas.  The cost was a dollar and a bit of gas, which was within our budget. I know what many of you are thinking.

“How wonderful! A family hike in a beautiful Oregon forest. What a memory to share with your wife and kids!”

BULLSHIT!!! Ok, the forest is beautiful, but then you have to get out of the car and hike in the mud and rain and cold for hours to find the “perfect” tree. You-cut Forest Service Christmas trees were not exactly prime grade. They are skinny and lop sided. They look nothing like the ones in a tree lot. After a couple of hours, being soaking wet with a 3-year-old Wes crying to go home, Judy finally gives up on perfection and we cut down an 8-footer with a base too big to fit in the tree stand.

After about three weeks on display, the tree has dried to near spontaneous combustion status. This means that the day after Christmas it has to come down or it will kill us. On Christmas that year, Judy was ringing the bell with a bundled-up Wes outside of Payless in Corvallis. The store manager took a liking to her and especially to Wes who at that age was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed cutie.  The manager knew we did not have any money and set aside some toys for Wes that he sold to her at after Christmas prices.  He asked her if we had a Christmas tree to which she responded to him with our abbreviated you-cut tree story.  As the store was closing on Christmas eve, he told Judy to drive to the back of the store as he was going to have to throw out the unsold Christmas trees and she might as well have one for free. It was the prefect tree. Seven foot, perfectly symmetrical, bushy and flocked like it had been in new fallen snow.

We waited to put it up till after Wes went to sleep, quietly undecorating the fire hazard, then redecorating the perfect one. Then we put out Wes’s extra presents under it next to the home-made ones Judy had made for him.  We finished about 2 AM, exhausted but in the glow of the belief that this was going to be the best Christmas day Wes had ever had.  

Wes woke us up before dawn and asked us how the tree got white. Here is where we made out big mistake. We lied and told him that an angel had come in the middle of the night and kissed our tree. Being three he accepted this and soon forgot it. Little did we anticipate the horror to come.

Next year, similar Forest Service POS tree, with the same fate the day after Christmas day. Wes however soon changed our Christmases for decades to come. A few days before Christmas he stood in the middle of our living room, hands behind his back, looking at the bedraggled tree and said, “On Christmas day an angle will come and kiss our tree and turn it purrrrrr white” As he said this he looked to the heavens, rolled his head in a circle then nodded it twice with his eyes closed.

OMG!  That was a year ago! He never said a thing about last year’s miracle till two days before Christmas! What are we going to do? Admit we lied? Destroy a child’s belief in Christmas miracles?

Then we came up with a plan. Tree lot Christmas tree are dirt cheep on Christmas eve. We could afford to buy a flocking gun that would attach to blow hole of the vacuum cleaner. Wait till Wes was asleep, flock the lot tree, wait for it to dry then sneak it into the house and repeat what we did last Christmas.  

So, what if we finished at 4 AM and the flock was not dry when we began redecorating. Sure, I was covered in snow flock overspray and probably would die from white lung in my old age. The plan worked. It was not perfect, but it worked. And Wes would keep this stupid belief for another year.

Once started down this road, we continued to kiss the tree for the next 30 years. The absolute worst year for this was 1983. My mother-in-law and Judy were inside with their backs being caressed by the radiant heat of a wood stove. Meanwhile I on the was outside in our car port trying to hold on to the tree with one hand while trying to shake the fucking flocking bag with the other during a violent windstorm. Did I mention that it required two hands to shake the bag? That proper technique proved difficult when the tree kept blowing over into the muddy dirt in my unpaved carport. Finally, I gave up trying to keep the tree upright and just flocked with the tree laying in the mud while cursing my fate. I finally finished, covered with flock, cold, wet, and not looking forward to spending the rest of night redecorating.  Then my mother-in-law commented that she had not heard many angelic words from the angel that kissed the tree.  Somehow, she lived a long life afterwards. And I discovered that flock sticks to mud even better than to wet fir needles.   

And this hideous tradition continued up until the time that all four of my children left the nest. Even when they all knew of the lie, we had told Wes those many years before, they still wanted it. Although technology had now replaced the vacuum cleaner flocking gun nightmare and the older kids helped, it was still an all-night process.

There is an old joke about a Catholic priest, methodist minister, and rabbi debating when life begins. The priest was for the moment of conception, the minister was advocating for the moment of birth. The rabbi gave the best answer…”when the kids leave home, and the dog dies. “ I would have to add having to no longer kissing the fucking Christmas tree. 

I love movies, just not all of them. 

The artsy fartsy ones generally turn me off.  Why would anyone watch “Out of Africa”?  It is bummer of story about a woman who moves to Africa to be with her philandering husband who neglects her, while she tries to run a failing coffee plantation. She falls in love with an ivory hunter, but that does not work out, so she eventually moves back to Europe with a raging case of syphilis. This is entertainment??  Only if you are into masochism or dead elephants.  This sad, oozing puss of a picture won 5 OSCARS including best picture.  How fucked is that! After that I made it a point to never pay for a movie that won an OCAR for anything. Obviously, Hollywood does not understand why I go to a movie.

Paying for a movie is analogous to going out to eat. I want sushi, spicy Mexican, some French dish that I can’t pronounce but order it anyway because its an adventure. I do not order meatloaf. I pay to watch a movie to escape from the daily grind that is normal life. I want to laugh, be scared, go on an adventure. I don’t want to learn about AIDS, gay love, drug addiction, and serial killers. I get enough of that on the news. If the director and actors take a few unrealistic liberties with the location, plot, or dialog, I don’t care as long as I have a good time.

Which brings me to the point of this my latest rant. Of late there has been a lot of crap on social meda about movie details the “ruined” the pictures. Here are just a few examples.

In “Django Unchained” Will Smith sported sunglasses that had not been invented in the era of the antebellum South. Really! A slave kills off white people including a plantation owner with the help of a German bounty hunter and the purist want him to be realistically attired! And Will Smith looked really cool in those shades.

In “Raiders of the lost Arc” Indiana Jones carefully removes a small volume of sand from a bag in an effort to match the weight of a golden idol on a bobby trapped pillar. So what if the figurine was pure gold that in reality would require Arnold Schwarzenegger to move it. The scene was dramatic and led to one the greatest foot chases of all time compete with rolling boulders, poison darts, and a pet snake named Reggie.  Would you really want the future governor of “cal-if-ornia” to play Indie over Herrison Ford for the sake of reality?

In Star Trek Into the Darkness, purest trekies complained when a gorgeous blond undresses but in the next scene she is wearing the exact same clothes. “It’s so dumb. Why did she get undressed? It definitely wasn’t to change.” For the sake of clarity let me repeat what I originally stated…A GORGEOUS BLONDE UNDRESSES! Do I care if she puts back on the same outfit? Oh hell no!

In gravity George Clooney saves Sandra Bullock by cutting the rope that is tying them together. This is a dramatic cliché that has been used in many mountain climbing movies and never fails to touch my sole. Ok, it was in space and Clooney falling away defied the laws of physics.  So, what.  It let Clooney behave like the hero he is and allowed Bullock to display the pathos she does so well.  I didn’t make me throw up my hands and walk out of the theater. 

In Iron Man 3, the villainous mandarin turns out to be an actor and not a real villain at all.  Apparently, this was not how he was portrayed in the comic books.  According to the purists, this “ruined the movie”.  I quit reading comic books in grade school. Grow the fuck up and move out of your mother’s basement loser.

Saving Private Ryan may have been the most realistic war movie of all time. It certainly was the best.  But the nit-picking bastards found 24 factual errors that ruined the movie for them. These included things like the tanks they were fighting were not Nazi Tigers, but Russian T-34’s, the tank traps on Omaha Beach were not in the proper orientation, when bullets hit a dead cow the blood that spurts out was the wrong color of blood in a decaying cow, in the typing pool scene one of the manual typewriters is too modern. How many of you under the age of 60 have ever used a manual typewriter, let alone could tell the make, model and year in a movie back drop that lasted five seconds. Give me a fucking break! You have heard the old expression that some people can’t see the forest for the trees.  These anal retentives can’t see the forest for the bark.

But the one that really get to me are the people who opine on things that were not rigorously explained in the film.  For some reason these people have to know the unspoken backstory.  For example, in Forest Gump, they are obsessed with Jenny’s death and what she died of. Was it AIDS due to her free love lifestyle, or hepatitis C or was she just pining for the Fjords? Why did she have to die at all? BECAUSE IT WAS IN THE FUCKING SCRIPT YOU MORONS.