T w e n t y S i d e d
I’m about halfway through the Freddy Krueger/A Nightmare on Elm Street article, but got overwhelmed by circumstances. As an example, we were gonna have a birthday dinner last night with my father. Since making Thanksgiving (United States) plans last week went so well, my Mother agreed to let my Dad’s surviving siblings have a get-together at their house earlier in the day. There’s a whole history here that makes this challenging and problematic, mostly centered around all of them being in their 80’s and dealing with a variety of physical needs and debilitation. THEN there’s the mental and emotional side, which has a lot more to do with my Dad’s family being extremely opinionated and sharing some kind of religio-social-family-centered narcissism. Basically as long as you can keep the air out of their tires (don’t let them all get together at once, keep the circumstances tightly controlled, distract them constantly, etc.) it can be managed. But right after my Mother decided to let this happen, people started coming out of the woodwork wanting to come as well. My Mom had to explain several times this was a limited, short gathering because THEY HAD TO LEAVE THE HOUSE only a few hours later.
So I ended up driving over and spending several hours distracting people. Once everyone made it past “let’s all go eat lunch together at a restaurant (they can’t because of naps, dietary needs)” and someone brought up that one of the family members had to be back at her assisted living facility pretty quick I took my leave and came home. I was still running behind chores at home because of sudden changes in work schedules, but I didn’t really get to catch up at that point. I had a handful of remnants of a work-related pot-luck Thanksgiving Meal to clean up, but the large portable roaster was involved and that takes multiple steps to clean properly before it can be put away. We also had turkey broth to finish off and put away, so the stock pot was out, etc. You get tired of washing every cooking pot in the house every day, sometimes.
AND I just now remembered that laundry is ready to switch over to the dryer and start another load. So I’m working on a backlog of chores from the last several days and will finish the Freddy Krueger piece ASAP. Central theme: What *IS* Freddy Krueger? Considering Freddy starts out the closest to supernatural (or paranormal, befitting the overall theme), I think you could argue he changes the most of the big three slashers within the series.
Patreon!
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
Mass Effect Retrospective
A novel-sized analysis of the Mass Effect series that explains where it all went wrong. Spoiler: It was long before the ending.
Spider-Man
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
Artless in Alderaan
People were so worried about the boring gameplay of The Old Republic they overlooked just how boring and amateur the art is.
Chainmail Bikini
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
… you know, if we’re pausing the main series anyway, and with Thanksgiving right around the corner, it feels like the perfect time to take a break and talk instead about Poultrygeist. So, here goes. Ahem…
I’ve never seen Poultrygeist.
I’ve seen one version: https://ghostbusters.fandom.com/wiki/Poultrygeist
I have never watched the entire movie, but I have seen clips. I’m not a Troma expert, but I know their films and culture pretty well from the 1970’s and about to 2000. But honestly, that’s the primary context I’ve seen the clips through: what they have to do with the ongoing Troma universe and culture, rather than how it stands on it’s own as a movie. Like so many movies, including one of the franchises I’ve been talking about, it’s always struck me as “Someone thought of the title (maybe Lloyd, maybe someone else) then put together a movie around the title.” Any given film snob can dismiss that process, but I think an awful lot of movies begin that way. A good title.
I mean, not to say Poultrygeist is a *good title* overall…but it is very much in keeping with something that not only Troma would produce, but SOMEONE SOMETIME would have said “Hey, that gives me an idea!”
Thanksgiving always just sounds like you guys do xmas twice. It was many a year before I realised that Planes Trains and Automobiles is not a Christmas film. Does the “holiday season” include Hallowe’en and everything beyond it? I’d assumed it was just Xmas and Hannukah (and Kwanza when I heard about that), didn’t occur to me until now that it might indeed include Thanksgiving and Hallowe’en. Most likely because our own “Festive Season” (although goodness knows with the internet mulitplying US cultural influence tenfold even beyond TV and music, I’ve seen it being referring to it as “the holidays” here too) I always considered to just be the time around xmas, basically just another word for christmas and New Years, to differentiate from xmas being a speific day, as well as a period of time that covers anything from xmas to NY, to most of December, to whenever people start thinking about xmas, but certainly not including Hallowe’en and Bonfire Night themselves as events (never mind the fact that mince pies were on sale at the start of September, and our xmas market and lights were turned on / started the day after Hallowe’en, and 4 days before Bonfire Night). I went into town for a meal I’d booked on the 7th November and was thrown for a loop to see the the xmas market on. Could have just had some food there.
The Holiday Season is pretty much all of October through December. Halloween gets a whole month of buildup, Thanksgiving is mostly a food holiday so non-food stores keep injecting Christmas in front of it, and then Black Friday comes right after Thanksgiving and Christmas is officially off to the races.
And just like that, November is over and it’s gone from “it’s way too early” to “oh god it’s already time to bring out the decorations”. Good opportunity to put away the hallowe’en decorations I’ve been too lazy to put into the loft.
Yep. We started talking about Christmas decorations a couple of days ago, because we need to do something a little different this year. But we’ve put everything on hold at least until later in the weekend.
I’ve been stopping myself from humming xmas songs, and was about to do so today then realised it’s December and I’m allowed. I almost wish I hadn’t gone up into the loft yesterday and discovered the wet bricks and dripping leak.
Regarding your first sentence, in a few ways you’re not wrong. A lot of people have even commented on how you do a lot of the same things for both holidays. It’s weird because as a kid it felt like months between the two days. As an adult, and someone able to do math and look at the entire calendar, I can see that they’ve always only been a few weeks apart.
There’s some overlap with Halloween, too; as that is still perceived in most areas as “mostly for kids.” And as a big part of Christmas, to many families, is centered around their children they kind of fit together as well. But yes, at least these days and for *most* of my life, the entire Fall season through early Winter is the Holiday Season. But it’s clear if you look at how that phrase was used up to about 50 years ago, the “Holiday Season” started with or right after Thanksgiving and really only referred to Christmas and maybe some referential “holidays,” like New Years, Advent, the Epiphany, Boxing Day, etc.
Very interesting – yes, I was surprised to see parallels of not only turkey but also cranberry sauce, stuffing etc. as the Thanksgiving mainstays. Maybe that’s only odd to me coming from a country where admittedly there are only really very slight differences between a(n allegedly weekly tradition of) Sunday Roast, and the xmas meal. In fact maybe that should make it seem less odd. There are probably in reality far more differences between Thanksgiving and Xmas meals than there is between a Sunday Roast and an Xmas dinner here. I guess I assumed it would be a different animal. Like an easter roast being a lamb. Actually maybe it’s because it doesn’t seem very specifically American in the first place to me (like a BBQ would, or some Tex Mex), rather more a themed British Victorian thing, the roast, it seems specifically like doing the same thing twice, in the same way as if in France they celebrated two different holidays with BBQ glazed ribs and sweet-potato mash.
It’s changed over time; I’ve read about it. There are regional distinctions, as well. Sometimes large ones. But *broadly*, Thanksgiving Meals are primarily Turkey, while Goose used to be more predominant. My understanding is Goose was a prime meal in Britain at one point, but in “stories” I usually see it associated with Christmas. Christmas meals in the U.S. have always seemed more diverse to me, although in my rural, “conservative” and traditional home-region Turkey still seemed *slightly* more common when I was young. But Christmas hams were not uncommon; in fact they were a frequent gift to well-regarded customers, at least in high-amount financial transaction businesses. But I’ve known a decent share of people who focus on some type of what-we-consider-Mexican food (apart from anyone that may be eating that type of food because IT IS traditional in their own culture). Starchy foods in general seem a bit more popular; potatoes, noodles, etc. Roasts are not uncommon, either; which actually coincides with another point you brought up: the traditional “sunday” meal of my childhood was a beef roast and vegetables. Beef was preferred, best I can tell, because it was a sign you were *not poor*. “Poor people” ate chicken, something that seems to have been very common in the first half of the 20th century in America. Great Depression, WWII, all that.
Easter meals were, when I was growing up, ALWAYS HAMS. Just a HAM. Very reminiscent of the scene from “A Christmas Story” with the turkey, except it was a HAM. A roast when you couldn’t afford a ham. BBQ meals are almost all associated with North American Summer holidays here. I have only recently started commonly questioning how traditions in the northern hemisphere are viewed in the southern hemisphere; as well.