Christmas Math

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat
Please put a penny in the old man's hat
If you haven't got a penny then a haypenny will do
If you haven't got a haypenny then God bless you!

We are readying the sleigh around here. It is seven days until Santa lays a finger the side of his nose, and down and up the chimney he goes. We have one or two more parties, one or two more white elephant gift exchanges, one or two more end of year recitals, but we are in the home stretch. Our tv has had a never ending stream of Christmas movies going in the background. I never fail to laugh at how pizzas in 1990 cost about what they do now – $12 (Home Alone), or how in 1946 an annual salary of $20,000 was almost enough to knock George Bailey off his white horse and into Potter’s clutches (It’s A Wonderful Life – and that’s about $315,000 in today’s money, so fair enough). Babies born in the year that Zooey Deschanel and Will Ferrel sang Baby It’s Cold Outside were in preschool when the controversy over the popular Christmas ditty first erupted on social media, and are now old enough to vote (Elf). I am now ten years older than Bruce Willis was in Die Hard (1988 – he was 33, Bonnie Bedelia was 40!), 5 years older than Bill Murray was in Scrooged (38), and 8 years older than Catherine O’Hara was in Home Alone (35), even though whenever I watch those movies I still think of them as way older than me. *Did you know Bonnie Bedelia (aka Holly Genarro) is the real life aunt of Macauley and Kieran Culkin?* Chevy Chase’s Clark Griswold is still older (at 45 in 1989) than current me (43 in 2021), but I lapped Ellen Griswold years ago (Beverly D’Angelo was 38 when Christmas Vacation came out). We watched White Christmas too, but I couldn’t think of any fun math for that one except how everybody is just clearly the wrong age – Vera-Ellen is CLEARLY far older than “older sister” played by Rosemary Clooney, the age gap between Clooney and Bing Crosby is CLEARLY huge and enough to undermine the romance storyline, and the decrepit old Vermont-inn-owning-former-general is CLEARLY neither very old nor very decrepit (and in fact was younger than Crosby). I always thought it would have made more sense for them to pair off opposite, although then you’d have a singer-dancer/singer-dancer set of couples which would make the singing duets and dancing pairs pretty awkward. And I suppose Bing Crosby back in the day had the same romantic pull on the collective attention that George Clooney does today, although I still think 60 year old GC is way sexier than 51 year old BC.

Still on the list to watch are A Christmas Story, Jingle Jangle, the original Grinch (we watched the Benedict Cumberbatch one already), A Christmas Story, Prancer, Miracle on 34th Street (the original with Natalie Wood), the Christmas Carol with Patrick Stewart as Scrooge, the Muppet Christmas Carol, and perhaps Santa Claus: The Movie and the sort of terrible but nostalgic claymation classics. I . . . clearly have a packed schedule over the next week, nobody bother me.