The "Guess That Christmas Song" Game-- Answers!

Did you get a chance to play "Guess That Christmas Song" in yesterday's post? No???? Well, we all know you're just killing time until you can go warm those feet by an open fire, pour yourself a cup o' the nog and let the festivities begin. I mean, it's not like you're doing actual real work right now or anything, are you?

Are you????!!

So... head on over and check out the game here and then come back for the answers. I'll wait.

...

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Ah! There you are! Great to see you! Okay. So here are the answers to yesterday's game:

1. The seduction of Santa Claus by shameless gold-digger for high-end gifts. Answer: Santa Baby
2. Personage looking to trap potential significant other in remote, lengthy house-bound situation prays to weather gods for excess winter precipitation. Answer: Let It Snow
3. Repetitious ringing celebrates crisp winter excursion via quaint seasonal vehicle. Answer: Jingle Bells
4. Child receives relentlessly beating percussive toy for Christmas; convinces audience it's his gift to them. Answer: Little Drummer Boy
5. Doo-wop dancing around the indoor conifer, where participants remain oblivious to the pre-Christmas pagan traditions it draws on. Answer: Rockin Around the Christmas Tree
6. Public announcement that Jesus has made his first big entrance, and if you dig the kid, you should probably pop by his delivery room and say "hi." Answer: O Come All Ye Faithful
7. Medieval Nordic monarch gets unexpected houseguest post-Christmas-- shares a nosh and a few toddies. Answer: Good King Wenceslas
8. Santa shows true colors by demonstrating abusive working relationship with employee sleigh-transport driver over diversity issues. Answer: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
9. Bribery and threats abound, designed to keep locals in line, in anticipation of a Christmas kingpin paying a visit to his turf. Answer: Santa Claus is Coming to Town
10. Holiday depression and separation anxiety-- all wrapped in a garland of guilt-- color this song. Answer: Blue Christmas

Hope you all had fun guessing at the songs. You may now go back to trying to look productive.

Oh, and to all those who are celebrating-- Merry Christmas! And you-- get that lampshade off your head; it's not New Year's yet. Pace yourself.

The "Guess That Christmas Song" Game!

Hi, and welcome to "Guess That Christmas Song"-- the holiday game show entirely without prizes, where we describe one of the season's beloved and most overplayed Christmas tunes and you guess the title!

Answers will be given in tomorrow's exciting post. It's fun for the whole family!

(Except for, y'know, Great Aunt Myrna who says she can't read anything that isn't large print... And Step-Uncle Gordon who hasn't liked anything officially since 1937.... And...)

Let's get started!:

1. The seduction of Santa Claus by shameless gold-digger for high-end gifts.
2. Personage looking to trap potential significant other in remote, lengthy house-bound situation prays to weather gods for excess winter precipitation
3. Repetitious ringing celebrates crisp winter excursion via quaint seasonal vehicle
4. Child receives relentlessly beating percussive toy for Christmas; convinces audience it's his gift to them
5. Doo-wop dancing around the indoor conifer, where participants remain oblivious to the pre-Christmas pagan traditions it draws on
6. Public announcement that Jesus has made his first big entrance, and if you dig the kid, you should probably pop by his delivery room and say "hi."
7. Medieval Nordic monarch gets unexpected houseguest post-Christmas-- shares a nosh and a few toddies.
8. Santa shows true colors by demonstrating abusive working relationship with employee sleigh-transport driver over diversity issues
9. Bribery and threats abound, designed to keep locals in line, in anticipation of a Christmas kingpin paying a visit to his turf.
10. Holiday depression and separation anxiety-- all wrapped in a garland of guilt-- color this song.

Thanks for playing along! See you with the answers tomorrow! (Update: December 22-- Click here for the answers!!)

The Totally Non-Holiday Holiday Movie List

Somehow it became November, and the winter holiday season is creeping upon us. 

Which got me thinking about the rather strange array of movies I trot out during the next eight weeks in an attempt to be festive... while simultaneously not feeling the urge to drive an icepick through my ears because I'm hearing "White Christmas" for the 400th time in a day.

So for all of you folks who reach a point where if you hear about how "every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings" one more time, you're going to go on an eggnog-fueled rampage, this list just might be for you.

Thanksgiving

• Addams Family Values. Ah, nothing like the combination of dry Gothic wit and blue blood summer camp, culminating in a completely off-season Thanksgiving holiday pageant to say, "Pass the turkey... But please use the medieval catapult."
  

Christmas

• Die Hard. Terrorists. Walking through glass in bare feet. Being held hostage. Lengthy delays in airports... Sounds like a family holiday to me! Plus, it's chock full of Christmas music, peace on Earth, and goodwill toward men. Okay, so that's near the closing credits. But, still.

• The Ref. This is the Christmas movie you watch to feel really good about any of the petty conflicts, inconveniences and irritations you might encounter during your own holiday season. Or, perhaps, you'll be wishing Denis Leary will come and hold your own squabbling relatives hostage for holiday dinner-- y'know, just to liven things up a bit in a new, fresh and festive way.

• Ghostbusters II. The ultimate in Christmas feel-goodness as found in mood slime and Jackie Wilson piping "Your Love Keeps Lifting Me Higher" through the movin' groovin' "Harbor Chick," Lady Liberty. If you can make New Yorkers happy during rush hour with monumental traffic jams (literally, in this case), you've truly channeled some holiday spirits. Believe me, I know. I'm originally from New Jersey. I've seen the malls.

• Funny Farm. Watch Chevy Chase try to create the picture-perfect Norman Rockwell Christmas without Randy Quaid in a powder blue leisure suit and dickey. Challenge guests who've had an excess of mulled cider with rum to compete and see who can laugh most like the insane Redbud mailman.

• The Hogfather. Okay, so this really is a Christmas movie... If, y'know, you lived in an alternate universe where Santa was actually an anthropomorphic pig deity. And a wild-boar entourage pulled his sleigh. And where Death was basically a good guy but a little bit misunderstood. And he had a granddaughter who was a part-time nanny, part-time witch. But otherwise, totally Christmassy.

• Death Race. Jason Straitham demonstrates that Christmas is more than a season-- it's inexpensive background set decor while you eradicate the baddies. (Thanks to my friend Dave for this suggestion.)

So, folks-- any other films you'd like to add to this list? At Of Cabbages and Kings we always are glad for suggestions!

The Quest for the Holy Easy-Bake

"It's the thought that counts." That's what adults tell kids about gift-giving after they've unwrapped the seventh annual itchy, orange knit sweater with a kitten appliqued on it from Great Aunt Eunice.

Eventually, years of orange kitten pullovers, and pen sets, and copies of Dan Rather's biography (what kid should be without?) forge a sort of resigned appreciation for the gift-giver instead of the gift.

And by the time we reach our second decade, we step across the threshold into the adult world, with a certain deep wisdom. One which no longer focuses on the greedy materialism of youth-- as we now have our own cash and can buy whatever the heck we want for ourselves.

Which interestingly, rarely includes orange knit kitten sweaters.

In my own greedy, materialistic youth, I had wanted-- like I've discovered millions of girls of my generation had-- an Easy-Bake Oven.

Ah, yes-- the Easy-Bake Oven! The shining, light-bulb-powered tool of independent tea-party hostessing and tooth rot.

Now, I was not the sort of kid to ask for things for Christmas-- or any other time of the year, for that matter. This, like being Heard as well as Seen, was completely Illegal in my family.

I don't know how it happened, but I'm sure it was instilled in me in the very early hours of Kiddom. Much the way crying babies are left by some Native American tribes to howl alone in the woods until they get it out of their systems once and for all and stop embarrassing their parents in front of the neighbors fer cryin' out loud.

So my parents and I had a routine worked out. I would think about the things I'd like to get for Christmas and not tell anyone. They would then buy my Christmas gifts. After this, they would ask me what I wanted-- y'know, to see if it matched the things they already got me.

And I would say, whatever they got me was fine. They would go away smiling to have such a terrific kid who was not a problem whatsoever like all of those other kids who actually wanted stuff, the greedy little piglets.

And I would open up math flash cards and reading workbooks on Christmas morning and pretend to be excited.

I wrote the book Martyrdom for Munchkins, in case you were wondering. It was 30 pages and in Crayola marker, but still an introspective work for its size.

My one loophole in all of this was asking Santa. Now, unlike other kids, I didn't actually go talk to Santa because, again following the family ideals, he doesn't really want to hear about that sort of blather, he's a busy man with other kids to see, go read somewhere.

So I had developed my own canny theory about him.

I figured, if he knew when you were sleeping, he knew when you were awake, if he knew if you'd been bad or good...

Then he knew about the Easy-Bake.

Yes, my Santa had advanced mind-reading abilities-- sort of like Professor X of the X-Men but with less angst and more hair. And for several years, there was nothing in my mind but flash card sums and the throbbing desire for small cakes I could frost myself in my bedroom whenever I wanted.

By about year four of this-- with ne'er an Easy-Bake to be found reflecting in the glow of the Shiny-Brite ornaments on the tree-- I had to adjust my theory.

Oh, Santa was still a mind-reader, all right, I determined. But he just didn't give a flying fig whether I got my light-bulb-powered tool of baking delight or not. He had a world of other kids to attend to, and I was wasting my time.

So this one year, when my parents had already bought everything per normal and asked, "What do you want for Christmas?" I actually said it. It slipped out of my lips like smooth creamy icing.

"I want an Easy Bake Oven."

The words sounded so strange outside of my head. They bounced off the harvest-colored kitchen walls and echoed back at me.

Mom blinked, surprised I had veered so far off script. "Oh. Well. We'll see," she said, recovering nicely, I thought, from the curveball I'd thrown at her.

And with that, hope glowed in my heart like a tiny cake-baking lightbulb.

A week or two passed and the anticipation was building. I could almost taste those cakes melting in my mouth. So sweet,so slathered in pink icing and so loaded with jimmies and those little silvery edible ball-bearings.

This was going to be the best Christmas ever! It was getting so the anticipation was almost more than I could bear! And so when my parents went out one Saturday, leaving me to my own devices in the house, I verged violently from protocol once more.

I went searching for my Christmas gifts.

There was really no secret where Mom hid them. Nestled among her shoes and purses in the bottom of my parents' closet they were, naked and exposed, vulnerable to prying eyes and groping kid fingers.

What was this? A weaving loom with enough materials to make part of one whole potholder...

And here? A Little Professor math quiz calculator, marked with bright orange "As Is" stickers...

And under that? A new set of markers-- that was excellent, of course, as I tended to go through them like Kool-Aid. But they weren't the true Holy Grail I was after...

So what was this? At the very, very bottom of the bag?... Could it be?

It was a Betty Crocker Cake Mix, a muffin pan, and a couple of cookie cutters.

I sighed and wiped away a tear, slipping the mix... the pan... the cutters-- all that was NOT an Easy-Bake Oven-- back into the bag and buried it all once more under the shoes and purses and the Little Professor Math Quiz calculator, which never did work right unless you turned it on and off 20 times first.

I was nine and I had seen the future. And like Galahad, the only knight to have fleetingly set his peepers on that Holy Grail everyone was so hot on, I knew...

The lightbulb of hope flickered and winked out. The quest had ended.

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Today's question: So what was your Holy Grail of gifts as a kid? And did it live up to expectations?
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Holiday of the Triffids

Some holiday traditions involve receiving red lipstick prints from virtual strangers claiming to share some of your genetic structure.

Some involve enjoying liberal applications of liquid from the "nog" family. (The wild nog is native to the remote regions of Norway, I believe.)

And some involve going Over the River and Through the Woods to relieve the Christmas Tree farm of one otherwise-happy conifer.

But until last year, none of these traditions involved said pine tree being invited inside, only to act like a rude house guest deciding to explore the medicine cabinet and underwear drawers.

I don't know what brought it on, exactly. Maybe it was the excitement of its sudden, traumatic liberation from the ground...

Maybe, as in b-horror flicks, a mysterious meteor had crash-landed in the Christmas tree field that year, giving the spruces all-new, alien ambition through its pulsing red glow.

Maybe the tree had been reading Lord of the Rings and thought the Ents were pretty cool.

Or, okay, maybe I just didn't have one stabilizing nut tight enough in the tree stand. Maybe that.

But the tree spent its first day at home happy enough. Straight and tall and wearing more gaudy baubles than a Wayne Newton "Danke Shoen-a-rama" birthday blow-out at the MGM Grand.

Yet soon, I began to get the sense something was... amiss.

Was the tree leaning?... Had it been that far over from the wall this morning?...

Or was this just some kind of Timbaspruceaphobia, the neurotic, baseless fear that your Christmas tree actually wants to play lead prop in a Monty Python Lumberjack skit?

It was the pine tree equivalent of, "Was that mole there before? Does it look bigger? Was it always that dark?"

And you just have no idea because you never really looked at it until now. So you pick at it until you make it really dark and red and irritated. Because that, of course, makes everything so much better.

So, I climbed under the tree, tightened things up in the stand, and convinced myself that all was well again.

By evening, there was no question-- the tree was leaning a good foot to the left and seemed to be trying to peer out the bay window into the neighbors' house. It was reporting back things like what they were having for dinner, and laughing at their pajamas.

"This is not the spirit of Christmas," I told it. "Work with me here."

Explaining the situation, I enlisted the help of my housemate to hold the thing in place while I tightened it back into the stand. By morning, it still looked pretty good. I was feeling hopeful.

But by evening, it was back to wandering around the living room and spying on the neighbors like some elderly lady with Alzheimer's-- forgetting where it was supposed to be and even why it was there.

It did tell me I was out of milk, my sock drawer needed some serious organization, and I should consider buying a different brand of toothpaste.

Then it zoned out watching squirrels frolic in the backyard.

"There is nothing to see there!" I insisted. I started to wonder if maybe it was just homesick, longing for the Great Outdoors once more.

So, again with the straightening. Again with me, climbing under the tree and tightening things up.

A day passed. Another day and...

I returned from work to see one of my vintage ornaments-- an unusual Shiny Brite handed down to me from my dad, and from his mom to him-- cracked like an egg on the middle of the living room floor.

The tree was leaning...

And this time, it looked unspeakably guilty.

"Okay-- that's it, fir-boy! We're having a come-to-Jesus meeting right now."

So with the kind of painful maneuvering 70s action heroes use with batches of nitroglycerine, I took that tree, vintage ornaments and all, and carefully... carefully... angled it toward the wall.

Perfect Christmas Tree-- ha! I said-- it was the Leaning Pine of Pisa, and this was apparently as good as it would ever get.

"You know your tree is leaning," my dad observed helpfully on Christmas Day. "Do you want me to help you straighten it?"

I explained, no. It was put in the corner for a reason, and it needed to think about what it had done.

And for the remainder of the holiday season, that is where it stayed...

Slumped in the corner of the room like some drunk uncle who went over-heavy on the nog, sleeping it off until January 2.

This Saturday was once again Over the River and to the Tree Farm time. And I admit, I approached the spruce selection with just a bit of trepidation.

I eyed them all up carefully, one by one, looking for anything... anything.... that might betray the signs of A Roamer.

And to my surprise, upon its arrival home, the tree went merrily in the stand. Straight, happy, just the right amount of room. It was easy....

Now I'm starting to think possibly too easy.

I say, Folks-- if I come home tonight and see one more vintage Shiny Brite has bitten the dust?

I am so gonna chop my tree down from the Martha Stewart Christmas collection next year. Or else keep a nice big batch of salt water on hand to douse it with.

I hear Triffids hate that.

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So, folks, what holiday traditions have you had go awry over the years? Is there anything you can almost count on to not work out quite right or to be a nuisance?

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Brenda Got Run Over By A Reindeer

I don't consider myself a violent person, but Brenda Lee is on my last nerve.

Everywhere I've gone for the past three weeks, this woman has been "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" with relentless, repetitive pep. And I see absolutely no sign of reprieve until the 26th of this month.

I go into an antique store...

She's scooching around the Scotch pine...

I go into the supermarket...

She's bugging around the blue spruce.

I go into the bank? There's Brenda. Bopping around the vegetative symbol of winter solstice.

I'm not sure what she does the other 10 and a half months of the year. Possibly spends 'em recovering from pulled muscles and dehydration....

But for the six weeks this woman is musically cavorting around the holiday conifer with reckless abandon, I find myself growing increasingly Grinchly.

Oh, I've tried to block her out. I've compensated with Celtic Christmas in my car. I've jollied along with Jethro Tull's Jack Frost. I've hearkened to the holidays with Gary Hoey. I've even swung to the sounds of Brian Setzer's rockabilly sleigh.

But the moment I step from the Brenda-Lee-No-Christmas-Tree-Rocking-Around Zone? There she is again. Fandangoing around the freakin' fir.

So, I think the other musical artists need to get together and stage an intervention for equal play time. It clearly isn't fair. Brenda Lee is monopolizing our Muzak airwaves, and something should be done.

David Bowie and Bing Crosby should round up their Little Drummer Boy and have him do his best Neil Peart solo every time she starts to open her mouth.

The Chipmunks could keep her in one place by trapping her in that hula hoop Alvin wants so much.

The reindeer that did a fly-by whacking on Grandma? He could keep an eye on her and swoop in, if she starts getting out of hand.

All I want for Christmas is to stop hearing this song, as I'm totally good in the "two front teeth" department.

I wonder if earmuffs come in a festive Cone of Silence style?

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P.S.- Tell me, do you have a Christmas carol that you're sick of hearing? Knowing this might make my Grinchy heart grow three sizes bigger. Or at least make me not shriek in horror in the middle of the grocery store the next time I hear this song. (And oh, I will be hearing it. Oh yes.)

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