Have you ever seen “Auntie Mame”? It’s not really a Christmas movie, but there’s a great Christmas scene at the beginning. Flamboyant, free-spirited Mame Dennis loses her shirt in the 1929 stock market crash, but she bounces back and gets a job in a department store. Coming home one night to her Manhattan apartment, where her orphaned nephew Patrick waits for her, she throws together a Christmas celebration out of practically nothing, singing “We Need a Little Christmas.” I just tried to find the clip on YouTube, and I think there’s some kind of Mame conspiracy. I can find various random 1958 “Mame” clips, and tons of “Need a LIttle Christmas” videos, including performances by Angela Lansbury (OK), Johnny Mathis (better), Pentatonix (no no no no no); and multiple copies of a clip from the 1974 movie that starred Lucille Ball. I yield to no one in my love for Lucille Ball, but I’m sorry to say that her cinematic Mame is trash.
That’s right. You heard me. I said what I said.
One day last week, I was on my third Teams call of the day, when I heard my son playing “Up on the Housetop” on his trumpet. Virtual band class is a real thing, I assure you, and it was nice to hear a little bit of what would have been part of the high school holiday band concert, taken away from us this year just like so many other things. I was grocery shopping later that night, grouchy and out of sorts, tired of the mask and tired of waiting in lines and just tired. “Need a Little Christmas,” a choral recording that I didn’t recognize, began to play on the store’s sound system. It was well-timed, because I happened to need a little Christmas at that moment.
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I just searched again, and found my so-far favorite “Need a Little Christmas,” a recording by The New Christy Minstrels. Can I just tell you, as a meandering side note (you have all day, don’t you?) that my mother had a copy of “The New Christy Minstrels: Live at the Troubadour.” I was probably five years old when I learned how to use the record player so that I could play that record over and over again. That seems young to be obsessed with The New Christy Minstrels, but I distinctly remember the record player sitting on a table in our house in Connecticut, and we moved away from there when I was six. So maybe I was six. I think I wore that record out. I can still smell it. Records had--still have, I suppose--a distinctive smell. I’m listening now to “The Preacher and the Bear.” I’m going to find recordings of “This Train,” and “Fire Down Below,” and “I Walk the Line.” And that might be the end of this post for now, as I'm likely to fall down a rabbit hole of early childhood memories.
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Would you think that four batches of cookies would produce ten times as much mess as one batch of cookies? I wouldn’t have thought so but that’s how it works. I discovered this in reverse today. I seldom ever make only one batch of cookies. I usually make a ton of cookies all at once and then freeze them, but maybe that’s the wrong approach. Because making one batch of cookies is so much easier and cleaner than making four batches.
It’s Christmas Even now, 2:45 PM, quiet and still. I’ve always loved this time of day on Christmas Eve, when everything winds down and the peace of Christmas settles over everything for 36 hours or so. I made the cookies this morning after a last-minute grocery run. I forgot something, but we’ll live without it. No more errands and no more planning and no more preparation. It’s December 24, and we need a little Christmas, right this very minute.
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