Christmas too commercialized? Please stop complaining and pass me the Zoloft
This was our non-commercialized Christmas haul in 1960, just before we left Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Miss., for Torrejon Air Base outside Madrid, Spain. Image by Del Stone Sr.
Some cynics believe that in these crassly commercialized times, it is impossible to remain faithful to the real meaning of Christmas.
Phooey! Have these Negative Nellies never seen an episode of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Part IV: Rudolph Takes Fallujah,” which I believe is traditionally sponsored by Smith & Wesson?
At Christmas, that joyous time of year stretching from mid-January to 12:01 Christmas morning when the stores begin stocking their shelves with Easter Peeps, our hearts are filled with hope and our driveways are filled with new Mustang GTs.
Crass commercialization? If you say so. But don’t ask me for a ride to Walmart to buy candy bunnies, you slackers.
Look, it’s simple: At Christmas:
A bright light in the sky signals the beginning of the season. No, it is not the light of a Verizon “Can you hear me now” tower. It is Rudolph, of course, and he is reconnoitering the world for his Christmas Eve mission (and doing a little job on the side for the Department of Homeland Security).
As the story goes, Rudolph spots a lonely green man with strange hair whose name is not Don King. It is the Grinch, with his dog, Snoopy. They are riding a giant Norelco electric shaver down the mountain where Busch beer is brewed – and the Grinch is NOT bringing a keg to the Whoville town square sing-along.
No, the spirit of Christmas has not taken possession of the Grinch’s heart in the sweet angina of the season. It has been replaced by the spirit of junk bonds and wardrobe malfunctions and getting fired by Donald Trump.
The Grinch’s heart has been tainted, like the heart of the one-armed zombie in “Dawn of the Dead.”
And he’s carrying a Red Ranger BB gun.
Anyway, Rudolph alerts Frosty the Snowman, who bears a suspicious resemblance to a scrubbed-down Michael Moore although much more angry and confrontational, and the hot-tempered snowman assembles a fire team of ninja elves and sleigh drivers from “Grand Theft Auto: NASCAR vs. Desperate Housewives,” and they move to take out the Grinch and win themselves fat action-figure contracts from Mattel.
But it is here we learn an important holiday lesson: In the spirit of the season, violence is not the solution.
Lawsuits are the solution.
So the fire team defers to Charlie Brown, who warms the Grinch’s heart, like a Thermoskin Arthritic Knew Wrap, with his scraggly, pathetic tree, which just happens to be decorated with a Faberge egg. Whoville is saved and the inhabitants gather for the annual Running of the Visa Cards, while Donder gets Blitzened on a keg of Busch Ice.
So this business of Christmas getting swallowed up by commercialization is all a matter of your perspective, which can be dramatically improved by the sight of a brand new GT parked in the driveway.
This column was originally published in the Saturday, Dec. 18, 2004 edition of the Northwest Florida Daily News and is used with permission.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .
Christmas means soon you will be feeling lower than dirt after reading the holiday newsletters of relatives and friends, the creeps.
These newsletters are filled with glowing accomplishments that exceed anything you can conceive, much less actually do.
But that doesn’t mean you are doomed to second-class newsletter citizenhood. You too can circulate a stunning holiday missive that will have your friends sucking for oxygen like a carp thrown ashore by a passing bass boat. How?
You lie.
For instance, check the following newsletter I will distribute in my Christmas cards this Yule season.
The year 2004 held glad tidings and large possibilities for the Stone family, and it is likely 2005 will only build on our ego-shattering accomplishments.
Let us begin with news of Muffy Squab Abercrombie, our youngest daughter, who won five gold medals at the Athens Olympics despite entering only four events. She took first-place victories in the categories of speed-crocheting, women’s synchronized shrieking, shopping and marksmanship with a potato gun. And that mysterious fifth gold medal? Well, the scamp used her potato gun to subdue a querulous South Korean weightlifter who felt he’d been robbed of the gold in the men’s snatch-and-hernia competition and grateful Olympic officials awarded her the medal in his stead.
Our other daughter, Roe-Versus-Wade, recently obtained simultaneous doctorates in anthropology, nuclear medicine, cosmology and semiotics from Harvard, Yale, Cambridge and the University of Phoenix Online. She plans to pursue a career translating IRS tax codes into a dead Teutonic tongue.
Our son, Throckmorton Smythe Uppington, was recently knighted by the Queen of Denmark for thwarting a sinister plot to use Olestra in the making of pommes frittes, disrupting toilet paper commodity prices. He plans to assume ownership of a villa on the palace grounds once he has accepted the Nobel Prize for isolating an anti-carcinogenic agent in a nearly extinct newt he discovered inhabiting the toilet of his dacha in Murmansk.
My wife, Janet Reno, who is secretly a woman, has also been busy in the prize-collecting department, having won the Oscar, the Pulitzer, the Publisher’s Clearinghouse, the CDC’s Friends of the Paramecium Award, and the NRA’s Hit Me With Your Best Shot Award for a pamphlet, video and children’s interactive nasal inhaler that tells the story of Waldo the Lonely Bacteriophage who has developed an immunity to antibiotics and must be put down lest he create a global pandemic.
As for moi, in 2004 I converted a certain notorious terrorist to Christianity, which will be announced on an upcoming reality television series titled “Bora-Borans in the City.”
And there you have it, my lessers. We hope you and yours achieve equally satisfying though less ambitious goals for the new year!
This was originally published in the Dec. 11, 2004 edition of the Northwest Florida Daily News and is used with permission.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .
Image courtesy of FreeRange Stock. CC license.
Maybe it’s old age catching up with me, but certain things don’t smell as good as they used to.
It’s not that the smells have faded. They’ve changed.
For instance, remember the smell of paper money? It was a lush, earthy scent that smelled the way you would expect money to smell.
Once, when I was a boy of about 10, I removed my life’s savings of $8 from my bank that was disguised as a book, held it to my nose, drew deeply of the rich scent and then tossed the money up in the air, letting it fall over me.
But today’s money doesn’t smell so nice. It has an odor of chemicals, and it doesn’t even look like money, what with the weird ribbons, holographs and odd colors threaded throughout the bills. You have to be a little suspicious of money like that, just as you’d be suspicious of month-old bread without a trace of mold on the crust.
Gasoline no longer smells as good as it once did. I used to love filling the tank on the lawnmower because that sharp, stinging scent of gasoline would rise from the opening and set the air to shimmering. You could almost feel the brain cells dying as you took in the powerful odor.
But now gasoline smells … like chemicals. Perhaps it’s because they’ve removed the lead, or added detergents, or otherwise emasculated it, but gasoline just doesn’t have that honest, powerful smell it once did.
Before the days of photocopiers and laser printers, we primitive folk relied on a gadget called a mimeograph machine to make copies. What a pain. You had to type your material on a stencil, then strap the stencil to a machine with a revolving drum filled with a fluid. The fluid transferred the characters on the stencil to blank pieces of paper stacked below the drum, creating copies in a bluish type that students throughout the ’60s and ’70s grew up on.
While mimeographs were a chore for teachers, they were terrific for students, because the smell was heavenly. The teacher would hand us a freshly minted test and we’d run our noses along the length of the paper, sucking up that intoxicating aroma … and I do mean “intoxicating” because the fluid probably gave us a minor buzz.
And then there were the mosquito foggers that wandered through the neighborhoods spouting huge clouds of white smoke laden with DDT.
We kids loved those foggers. The trucks were noisy and could be heard a couple of streets over; that was our cue to get on our bikes and chase down the fogger to ride in the smoke being spewed from its nozzle. Sometimes the driver would oblige and stop to give us an extra shot of smoke.
When you see the mosquito fogger today you duck inside because it smells so horrible, which I think is the county’s secret strategy – if you’re inside the mosquitoes wont’ bother you. Right?
So the good old days of sniffing all those cancer-causing are gone but not forgotten … at least until that brain cell dies from exposure to toxins.
This column was originally published in the Saturday, December 4, 2004 Northwest Florida Daily News and is used with permission.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .