Posts tagged "Holidays"

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…And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead - All Saints Day

Getting into the holiday spirit.

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Music Holidays
Oct 31

My American Thanksgiving

It’s the early hours of Thanksgiving morning in the States, and to celebrate the occasion, I thought I’d give the politics a break for a moment and talk about the odd little piece of Americana known as Thanksgiving. Americans say of Thanksgiving that, along with Independence Day, it is the one holiday the entire country celebrates, and on my one time experience, Turkey Day did seem a bigger deal than, say, Christmas. It makes sense that a religiously pluralistic country like the States, one with the separation of church and state sewn into its Constitution, would have its genuinely unifying celebrations be the ones inspired by history and patriotism. (Thanksgiving, of course, does have a religious element, but it is not as specific about it in the way Christmas or Hanukkah is.) It can be a little disorienting for Australians to experience Thanksgiving, since there is no real analogue to it in our culture, and although it has the familiar holiday touchstones - family and food - it was, for me, an entirely new experience.

My American Thanksgiving was in 2004. I was studying in Washington State at the time, and in an act of immense kindness, my American friend Jessica invited me to accompany her back home to Kent, in the southern suburbs of Seattle, for the holiday. I was curious to see what the day was like, since after all, there didn’t seem to be much more to the celebration than turkey-eating. Other Americans I spoke to, in the weeks leading up to it, had told me, with a surprising amount of feeling, that it was their favourite holiday. They said Thanksgiving… [read more]

This Thanksgiving, I was indulgent and talked about my one American Thanksgiving at the USSC blog. Football, turkey, what I saw as a foreigner, stuff like that. Check it out.

America USSC Washington Holidays
Nov 28

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Slow Club - Christmas TV

I was going to do a Christmas song advent calendar for y’all, until last week I was told advent calendars have like 25 days or something, which will learn my heathen ass to go to church, I guess. So in lieu of that, maybe I’ll just talk about some Christmas music for the next week.

I was introduced to “Christmas TV” by my good friend Erin, and it’s one of the better things she’s put me on to (also in the list: Midlake, “Chuck,” Cloud Control). “Christmas TV” is a fey little English indie pop tune, one that approaches being too twee to function, but instead does exactly what a good twee composition should do, which is use its childish simplicity to unearth real emotional resonance.

The biggest twee red flag is the amateurish boy-girl duet that comprises the vocal here. I think it works though, because instead of being a post-Juno take on the rough-and-ready charms of young love, it captures with unnerving clarity the way a relationship is actually a melding of two people into one entity. Charles Watson and Rebecca Taylor’s voices don’t naturally fit together; instead they sound as if throughout the entire song they are making a conscious effort to bend to each other’s style. It’s an awkwardness that fits well with the track’s tentative emotional qualities.

Because unlike so many other Christmas songs, “Christmas TV” is a distinctly undemanding tune. It does not, like Mariah Carey, declare with vibrant affirmation “All I Want for Christmas is You.” It does not, like, Darlene Love, plead “Baby, Please Come Home.” Instead, its request is small, tentative and entirely unassuming, and because of that, it is curiously resonant.

This is a couple that cannot tell each other what they want, even though they understand and trust in their relationship enough to know anyway. “It’s OK that I pray that you will miss your flight, and have to stay with me another night,” they harmonize, Watson with his conversational lilt and Taylor her wispy, windswept plaint, both desperate for the other’s company over the holiday, but neither brave enough to enunciate it. They hope only for a force of nature to force them into a happily accidental, sitcom-style elevator plot. That this desire for contrivance is interrupted by the cold, unabashed honesty of, “You pulled me out of the dark and now it’s light” prevents the song from slipping into cutesiness.

The titular detail of sharing the numbing mundanity of “Christmas TV” is a little too precious for my liking, and I’m thankful they pass over it quickly. Far more compelling is the cozy and compelling assurance that “In the middle of the night, call if you want to talk/Because you know I’ll want to talk too.” It’s a big thing to be able to wake another person up and know they won’t mind the interruption too much.

But, for mine, the songs brittlest, most emotionally unsparing moment is a soft plea by Taylor made half way through: “And I’d like it if you made it to mine by Christmas Eve, so you can hold me.” How much exists in those words “I’d like it…”! It’s such a withdrawn and timid request; not “Stay!” or even a direct “Could you stay?” but instead a mere hope that she means as much to him as he means to her, and her faint wish he might act on that. This is a song that barely dares to hope, but that it dares to anyway is something terribly powerful indeed.

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Holidays Music Xmas
Dec 17

I think America invented Christmas.

Holidays
Dec 19

(via fuckyeahskinnybitch)

(via fuckyeahskinnybitch)

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Movies Holidays Xmas
Dec 21

rahmblr: A reminder that St. Patrick’s day is also the day we celebrate Rahm driving all the snakes out of the showers of the congressional gym.

rahmblr:

A reminder that St. Patrick’s day is also the day we celebrate Rahm driving all the snakes out of the showers of the congressional gym.

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America holidays
Mar 17

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The Hold Steady - How a Resurrection Really Feels

She crashed into the Easter mass, with her hair done up in broken glass,
She was limping left on broken heels, when she said, “Father,
Can I tell your congregation how a resurrection really feels?”

Probably the best Easter song of all time, and only partly because it is set on Easter, is based on the Easter story, and contains the lyric, “I’ve laid beneath my lovers, but I’ve never gotten laid.”

Happy Easter, fam.

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music holidays
Apr 03

Speaking of Sam Kekovich, here’s his 2010 Australia Day address. You know it makes sense.

Australia Australia Day holidays
Apr 17

When you’re far from home on a national holiday, you make good as best as you can. For me on ANZAC day, making good meant a long bus ride to the Kangaroo and Kiwi pub way up in north Seattle. The Kangaroo and Kiwi is a suburban bar situated alongside a stretch of highway dotted with gas stations, fast food outlets, and gun stores. Inside, the decor is outback shtick — bare timber rails, Fosters on tap, Men at Work on the stereo — mixed up with some genuine authenticity: the TVs show NRL and AFL games, apart from Wallabies and All-Blacks gear, the sporting paraphernalia on the walls represents teams only real Australians* would recognise or care about. Every now and then, a Powderfinger song would slip into the Oz Rock for Foreigners mix. The clientèle that evening leaned heavily Australian, and it gave me the opportunity to hear something I hadn’t encountered in quite a while: Australians shouting drunkenly across a bar in broad accents at each other.  While there I enjoyed an imported bottle of James Boags — this Tasmanian beer is a precious rarity in the U.S. — and an imported bottle of Coopers Pale Ale, a drop that is still hard to come by, but not quite as rare as the Boags. I was even able to order a meat pie, which was listed on the menu as a “steak pie,” but there was no way I was going to refer to it as such. It tasted like one of the frozen Four and Twenty ones you buy in a four pack from Woolies, but I didn’t mind. The bartender served it with a knife and fork (which I, of course, ignored) and a bottle of tomato sauce (which I, of course, did not ignore). When I left to catch the bus home, I waited outside the gun store with a man who introduced himself by asking if I had any black tar. “Heroin,” he clarified when I looked puzzled. I told him I did not, so instead he told me how he’d come west from Spokane to get a job in the computing industry. When I told him where I was from, he kept asking me if Australia was very Americanised, and though I told him that, no, I found the two countries were quite different, he seemed determined to accept it as a given that his country had made, as Randy Newman put it, “every city the whole world round into just another American town.” Then the bus came and I went home. —- *Technically this is an Australian and New Zealand themed pub, but I think the Kiwi aspect is there just so they don’t alienate the stray traveller from that part of the world who might stop by. For all intents and purposes, this is an Aussie pub.

When you’re far from home on a national holiday, you make good as best as you can. For me on ANZAC day, making good meant a long bus ride to the Kangaroo and Kiwi pub way up in north Seattle. The Kangaroo and Kiwi is a suburban bar situated alongside a stretch of highway dotted with gas stations, fast food outlets, and gun stores. Inside, the decor is outback shtick — bare timber rails, Fosters on tap, Men at Work on the stereo — mixed up with some genuine authenticity: the TVs show NRL and AFL games, apart from Wallabies and All-Blacks gear, the sporting paraphernalia on the walls represents teams only real Australians* would recognise or care about. Every now and then, a Powderfinger song would slip into the Oz Rock for Foreigners mix. The clientèle that evening leaned heavily Australian, and it gave me the opportunity to hear something I hadn’t encountered in quite a while: Australians shouting drunkenly across a bar in broad accents at each other. 

While there I enjoyed an imported bottle of James Boags — this Tasmanian beer is a precious rarity in the U.S. — and an imported bottle of Coopers Pale Ale, a drop that is still hard to come by, but not quite as rare as the Boags. I was even able to order a meat pie, which was listed on the menu as a “steak pie,” but there was no way I was going to refer to it as such. It tasted like one of the frozen Four and Twenty ones you buy in a four pack from Woolies, but I didn’t mind. The bartender served it with a knife and fork (which I, of course, ignored) and a bottle of tomato sauce (which I, of course, did not ignore).

When I left to catch the bus home, I waited outside the gun store with a man who introduced himself by asking if I had any black tar. “Heroin,” he clarified when I looked puzzled. I told him I did not, so instead he told me how he’d come west from Spokane to get a job in the computing industry. When I told him where I was from, he kept asking me if Australia was very Americanised, and though I told him that, no, I found the two countries were quite different, he seemed determined to accept it as a given that his country had made, as Randy Newman put it, “every city the whole world round into just another American town.”

Then the bus came and I went home.

—-

*Technically this is an Australian and New Zealand themed pub, but I think the Kiwi aspect is there just so they don’t alienate the stray traveller from that part of the world who might stop by. For all intents and purposes, this is an Aussie pub.

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America Australia holidays food
May 07

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. Creating a nation from nothing is something special, and the insistence that people should be ruled only by themselves is today still a proposition as laudable as it is too extraordinary. Even in contemporary democracies the idea that no individual should be considered better than another by birthright is a contentious one. It is easy to dismiss words like freedom and equality as mere boilerplate, many who speak them seem to encourage us to do so. But America has such an endless capacity for good because it remembers that those words come attached with ideas, and even when it fails to properly realize those ideas, it never loses sight of how important it is to keep pursuing them. It’s morning in America. It’s the Fourth of July. Happy Independence Day.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Creating a nation from nothing is something special, and the insistence that people should be ruled only by themselves is today still a proposition as laudable as it is too extraordinary. Even in contemporary democracies the idea that no individual should be considered better than another by birthright is a contentious one. It is easy to dismiss words like freedom and equality as mere boilerplate, many who speak them seem to encourage us to do so. But America has such an endless capacity for good because it remembers that those words come attached with ideas, and even when it fails to properly realize those ideas, it never loses sight of how important it is to keep pursuing them.

It’s morning in America. It’s the Fourth of July. Happy Independence Day.

America holidays
Jul 04


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