Baby it's cold outside: glib alcoholic sexually harassing a woman.
Oh come all ye faithful: a dirge, maybe someone died.
One of the rare joys of the season is when a radio station programmer decides that Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah is suitable for Christmas.
Because "hallelujah" sounds so religious!
With which I would agree. Brutal passions, ruined lives.
A sampling of the lyrics:
She tied you to her kitchen chair
And she broke your throne and she cut your hair ...
[--- ]
... love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah!
[--- ]
... all I've ever learned from love
Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya
And it's not a cry that you hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen the light
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah!
End sampling.
The only way this could possibly be improved is by having a chorus of tinkly children's voices singing this song on a shopping mall sound system.
The real meaning of Christmas in the modern era is to send the smokers in your family out to the compost heap at the far end of the yard to freeze their donkeys off before the exiled Vegans who are already there slaughter them and burn their bodies for warmth.
Other than that, there's the family togetherness thing. Let us all object to Uncle Bertie and his pipe, and make him feel like a pariah. Out to the compost heap with him forthwith! Now we can feel good about ourselves, because we've united as a family and been on the same page!
Roast goose, figgy pudding, hot chocolate, booze nog.
A toasty fireplace, pumpkin spice candles.
Ringing bells, warm scarves.
What's that? There is moaning from the outer depths beyond the compost heap? Ignore it, it's just the irredeemable boomers freezing and alone, who offend our tender modern age sensibilities! They deserve to die!
Meanwhile, little Johnnie and Melissa have found the stash of medicinal pot that was hidden in the bedroom closet, and what they haven't huffed in their vape-pens will go into the therapeutic brownies they're baking for everyone.
You've suddenly discovered a naked man tied to a chair in the kitchen?
Just carry him out to the compost heap and dump him.
It's at the very back of the yard.
In cold weather my legs seize up, and I walk with difficulty when outside. Slowly, and laboriously. That's why I haven't festively decorated the compost heap or the nearby trees, which are leafless and bare of life, or the rigid corpses of the Vegans who have been there since Thanksgiving.
I shan't even mention Raynaud's phenomenon, which makes my hands nearly useless if I've been outside too long. Bloodless and blue.
But it would all look so much better with glittery balls.
Still freezing and dark, but very cheery.
AFTERWORD
The most suitable pipe tobacco for this period is probably a good Virginia mixture with a proportion of dark aged leaf and a touch of the condimentals. A very old-fashioned fragrance, comforting and toasty. Goes well with a cup of strong tea, with a little milk and sugar. I'll be wearing my double lined winter coat a lot, as well as my little black grannie gloves, and sheltering from the wintry blasts as best I can. Right around tea-time, the downtown gets to be an arctic windtunnel, but fortunately nobody in Chinatown will furiously object to my smoking on the public street; they aren't like the snooty entitled suburbanites in the Financial District who want to commit murder because of the merest wisp of tobacco from half a block away, and the term "compost heap" is not part of their daily vocabulary.
In Cantonese, that would probably be 混合肥堆 ('wan hap fei deui') or 垃圾混合堆 ('laap saap wan hap deui'). Not a part of the urban landscape in their world, except where bourgeois millenials congregate.
I might even smoke some Erinmore Flake.
Or Doblone D'Oro.
Hallelujah.
TOBACCO INDEX
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