Lazy Sunday CLXXVII: Review of A Christmas Carol (1951)

“You there!  Yes, you, boy, reading this post in your underwear before a long day of festivities.  What day is it?”

“Why, it’s Christmas Day, sir!”

“Here—take this blog post and go buy the biggest goose in town.”

“But it doesn’t work like th—”

“Never mind—-it’s Christmas!”

And—scene.

Yes, it’s Christmas, probably the one day a year no one is reading any blog posts.  But The Portly Politico marches on, Christmas or no.

To celebrate, I thought I’d look back at the three recent reviews from Ponty, Audre Myers, and myself about A Christmas Carol (1951).  They’re pretty good:

Well, time to get dressed—it’s Christmas Day!

Merry Christmas!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Christmas Mayhem

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It’s Christmastime, which means a mad dash of yuletide craziness for yours portly, followed by a stately glide into New Year’s.  Right now I’m riding the wave of insanity, hoping I don’t wipe out along the way to the crest.

Years ago, I worked for a municipal performing arts center as the Cultural Coordinator—a cool title for a stressful job.  The venue was a beautiful opera house of the kind that graced many mid-sized Southern towns in the late nineteenth century.  We did not host an opera company (as far as I can recall, not a single note of opera was performed in the venue while I was there), so the name is a bit of a misnomer, but we did feature a number of different performances, both those we booked ourselves through the city, and those put on by enterprising residents who rented out our facilities.

The month of December was brutal.  In addition to our own events, we were also slammed with rentals.  Friday and Saturday nights saw me splitting my time between an outdoor musical event and whoever happened to be in the opera house that weekend.  One Christmas, I was so stressed out I starting losing weight without even realizing it, leading to my 2011 weight loss odyssey.

Unfortunately, I was so busy and stressed, I started loathing Christmas—a holiday I love!

Fortunately, while I’m still pretty busy at the holidays, I no longer dread their approach.  That said, I have had quite a week, and have another major one ahead of me.

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Lazy Sunday CLXXIII: Thanksgiving Week Posts

Gobble, gobble, dear readers!  Thanksgiving Week is coming to an end, but we can still look back at the food and fun of the expired week.  Here’s one last, longing, wistful look back at the unlimited freedom of this glorious week:

  • Thanksgiving Week!” – The original post celebrating this week, I wrote about the slow erosion of any real work getting done during the week, and wondered if we might see the day when schools would get an entire week off for Thanksgiving.  That turned out to be a prophetic musing.
  • Memorable Monday: Thanksgiving Week!” – 2020 still saw a two-day work “week,” but it’s also the first year I embraced the spirit of gluttonous laziness that I now associate with the week of Thanksgiving, a time of merriment and frivolity.
  • Retro Tuesday: Thanksgiving Week!” – In 2021, it finally happened—the El Dorado of Thanksgiving Breaks was upon us, with an entire week off.  As I had predicted, families were taking advantage of the week off to skip town even earlier, with some students leaving out Wednesday—a full eight days before Thanksgiving itself.  Yikes!  Give a week, take a mile—or two.
  • Memorable Monday^2: Thanksgiving Week!” – Now in 2022, we’re all growing more accustomed to the novelty of a full week of Thanksgiving merriment.  I didn’t notice nearly as many early truants this year, so maybe folks are tempering their expectations and realizing that one full week is plenty of time to get to wherever you need to be on Thanksgiving.  I mean, with this much time, you can get to Australia and back!

Here’s hoping those food comas are wearing off and you’re ready to get back to the grind.

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

TBT^256: It’s a Thanksgiving Miracle!

I’m continuing the time-honored tradition of Thanksgivings past (2021, 202020192018, and 2017) with the annual reblogging of “It’s a Thanksgiving Miracle!”  I wrote the original post (on the old blog) back in 2017, just a few days after I fell from a ladder and broke my wrist.  It was my lowest point in a number of ways, but I was grateful to be alive.

I’m thankful this year, too, although I am similarly in a bit a slump personally.  No matter—I’ve got a good family, a good house, a good dog, and lots of private lessons to tide over my insatiable lust for frozen pizza and LEGO sets.

My pastor has been working painstakingly through Philippians for some time now, and has been hammering home the idea of finding joy amid our situations, no matter how difficult they might be.  If the Apostle Paul could rejoice in a Roman prison, we can rejoice in the far less trying times of our daily lives.

Good stuff, even if it’s hard to live out.  At least today I’ll get to eat some turkey.

With that, here is “TBT^16: It’s a Thanksgiving Miracle!“:

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Memorable Monday^2: Thanksgiving Week!

Ah, yes—the glorious freedom of Thanksgiving Break.  Those of us in the education biz are spoiled with constant holidays, workdays, days off, etc.  Sure, I work twelve-hour days several times per week, and I can’t go to the bathroom whenever I want to (I’ve taught for hours with an urgent need for relief—you just get used to it) during the school day, but all this bogus time off makes up for it.  I can hold in my urine for a few hours in exchange for a week of indolence.

Back in the old days, we just got Thursday and Friday off for Thanksgiving.  Ah, what benighted times!  Around the time I was in high school—the early 2000s—school districts realized that everyone was taking off the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to travel (not my family, but those bourgeois ones with—gasp!—family in other States), so they granted us Wednesday off.

Naturally, everyone then started taking off the Tuesday and even the Monday before Thanksgiving.  Last year, my little private school relented, and ever since we’ve enjoyed the entire week off.

So, what is a portly pudge like myself to do?  Go to the doctor and the dentist, of course!  ‘Tis the season for getting in all of those annoying but necessary appointments.  I also desperately need a haircut.  Yours portly is looking more and more like Bigfoot every day.

But I digress.  We’ll be back with Monday Morning Movie Reviews in December.  There will be some original posts this week, but also quite a few reblogs—it is a week for rest, after all.  But The Portly Politico will still be hitting your inboxes every morning ~6:30 AM EST (or whenever the WordPress Happiness Engineers decide to post them, as apparently a simple “schedule post” function is too difficult to implement flawlessly; posting at 6:45 AM is not 6:30 AM, WordPress!).

So, curl up with a good book, your favorite device, and some classic TPP leftovers—the best part of Thanksgiving!

With that, here is 23 November 2021’s “Memorable Monday: Thanksgiving Week!“:

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Memorable Monday: Happy Halloween!

It’s Halloween!  Sure, it’s also Monday, probably the lamest possible day for such a mirthful holiday, but let’s hope that just improves Monday, rather than drags down Halloween.

For newer readers, Memorable Monday posts are the equivalent of the weekly TBT posts, in which I republish an old post, adding on an additional layer of commentary.  The key difference is that Memorable Mondays are far rarer than TBTs, as the former only pop up on special occasions or holidays (like today!), while TBTs are every Thursday.

That brought up a bit of a mild conundrum:  this post has been reblogged twice as “TBT: Happy Halloween!” and, last year, as “TBT^2: Happy Halloween!.”  I didn’t want to copy-paste those posts and the original and make them part of Memorable Monday, because it would throw off the exponent (in 2023, it’d be “TBT^4” if I reblog these posts on a Thursday).  I also wanted to avoid some unwieldy future title like, “TBT^4: Memorable Monday: TBT^2: Happy Halloween!”

Of course, that’s all tedious, mildly autistic, inside baseball.  I’m sure some of you can relate to this desire to maintain an excessive sense of order to everything, but others are probably wondering, “What does this have to do with Halloween?”

Well, not very much.  Let’s just say I’m excited to spend the evening watching spooky movies and handing out candy with my dog.

With that, here is 31 October 2019’s “Happy Halloween!“:

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Lazy Sunday CLXIX: Even More Halloween Hijinks: The Musical

Happy All Hallows’ Eve Eve!  It’s the day before Halloween, one of my favorite holidays of the year.

Naturally, I needed to highlight some spooky posts, but I did many of those back in “Lazy Sunday LXXXIV – Halloween Hijinks” and “Lazy Sunday CXXXVII – More Halloween Hijinks.”  So I decided to go with some Halloween posts with a more musical flair:

Happy Halloween!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

TBT^4: The Joy of Autumn

Today is the first day of autumn.  It’s about dang time!

Granted, I realize that autumn shows up on the calendar the same time every year.  Whether (weather?) or not it makes a meteorological appearance or not, however, is a bit dicey in South Carolina.  It’s very likely to be quite warm today—in the mid-nineties as of the time of this writing.  We’re enjoying some cooler, crisper mornings, with a bit lower humidity, but it’s still very much summer here in South Carolina.

Nevertheless, pumpkin spiced-everything is already in stores, so even if it feels like we’re about to attend a pool party, we can enjoy the tastes of autumn here.

Autumn is my favorite season, even though it is fleeting.  The period from Labor Day through Christmas is a blur of activity, with nary a weekend free for all the fall activities we see on television and in the movies.  Apple picking looks fun, but who has the time?

On the plus side, Halloween will be here soon.  It seems that folks have started decorating much earlier this year than usual—or have I missed something?  Some people had decorations up in August, which seems as blasphemous as hanging Christmas lights before Thanksgiving.

But I digress.  With that, here is 23 September 2022’s “TBT^2: The Joy of Autumn“:

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Memorable Monday: Happy Labor Day [2022]!

Ah, yes—Labor Day.  The last day off (for yours portly, anyway) until the glory that is Thanksgiving Break.

I’ve been writing a brief, annual Labor Day post since 2019, and it’s interesting to see what has changed (and what hasn’t) in that time.  I don’t play video games nearly as much as I used to (or as much I’d like to), and my life has gotten much more interesting (read: busier) and better since 2019.  Even if Western civilization is collapsing all around us and we’re living in a banana republic, I can at least enjoy and appreciate God’s Blessings as the ship goes down.  And, hey, it could be worse!

Speaking of cautiously optimistic declinism, Labor Day seems to be a day immune to progressive chicanery.  It’s the product of radical labor unionism and the socialistic tendencies thereof, so it should be safe.  Of course, we’ve always been at war with Eurasia, so if labor suddenly falls out of favor for being too “white” or not “woke” enough, then I suppose we could end up changing it to “BIPOC Exploitation Memorial Day” or some such nonsense.  Columbus Day sure isn’t safe.

Well, whatever.  I’m not worried about the Leftist whiners today.  I’ve spent the weekend (presumably) in sunny Florida, enjoying getting to know my girlfriend’s family better and living it up.

With that, here’s “Memorable Monday: Happy Labor Day [2021]!“:

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