Loose Leaf Notes

1. The life-size cardboard Santa at the top of the stairs kept scaring everyone so I had to move it.

2. We had a visitor over the weekend who came to deer hunt with Joe. After a successful hunt, we all went out to Dogtown Roadhouse for pizza and dancing, and we had a Christmas Ale. “What makes it Christmas beer?” someone asked.  “It gets you lit,” someone else answered.

3. I know the character in the picture below is going to be mistaken for the Grinch, but it’s really the Geico Geiko, who is a much nicer guy.

4. Not funny: Watching Saturday Night Live live is one of my long-standing traditions. It was sad turning in to the SNL final season Christmas show, expecting to see host Paul Rudd, but seeing Tom Hanks instead and learning that because of the Covid spike in NYC, they show had no audience, no musical guest, barely any cast members and it wasn’t live. Watch HERE. 

5. “Take a sad song and make it better.”  – Hey Jude

6. Julian and Sean Lennon are giving peace a chance: The half-brothers are bonding on road trip through California… The half-brothers, aged 58 and 46 respectively, are on a road trip in California. Posting a snap on Instagram yesterday, Julian wrote: ‘A lil bit wind blown and tired after a few hours driving through the mountains to the sea but so worth it. A magical day.’ It is too, for their trip along the Pacific Coast Highway is a bit of rock history and a healing moment dubbed ‘life changing’ by Julian. For Julian is finally making peace with the partial estrangement from his father before his death. And it seems his friendship with Sean is going some way to provide the paternal relationship that both men have missed so deeply… From The Daily Mail

7. A friend who was at our house recently saw our replica figurines of the life size terra cotta soldiers and horses that were discovered buried in vaults in China in 1974 (brought home by our son as a gift from China in 2015). He asked, “Is it a nativity scene?”

8. “The emergence of blues billionaires- Bruce Springsteen’s big hit song about guys driving hot rods to escape from the hometown that’s a death trap, a suicide rap –– sorry to say this, Sony, but that song is history. Men don’t drive souped-up cars or dream of the hobo life, they worry about air pollution and they want to be good fathers. It’s only wealthy executives who think they’re “Born To Run,” the guys who can afford the $500 tickets to see Bruce on Broadway. The hitchhiker is a faded American legend. People are loyal to a town, not to a highway… What the Sony execs don’t realize is that by making Bruce a half-billionaire, they are destroying the lonely fugitive image that made him appealing in the first place. Bruce wrote about being born in a dead man’s town, beaten like a dog, in the shadow of the penitentiary, with nowhere to go, but when you sell your lamentations for a half-billion, you sort of destroy the authenticity. It’s like buying Emily Dickinson’s little house in Amherst so you can build a 22-story hotel and casino and shopping mall next to it…”  Garrison Keillor

9. Red Sox runs in our family.

10. A slew of Santas swap sleighs for gondolas in Venice Christmas regatta. What fun to SEE.

11. A Solstice Signature HERE. 

12. Santa could be HERE or HERE.

13. Christmas trees are like children. Everyone is my favorite.

___________Thirteen Thursday