#175 - Seasonal Bevs & Spliff Walks send forth: The Twelve Days of Smokemas Day 5 | Light Walks and Christmas Playlists

It's Christmas light season!

The best part of the holiday, in my opinion!

Homes that look like little gingerbread houses temporarily, seeing what everyone's taste in decor is, finding out that maybe you actually do prefer the netted bushes over the single up-and-down strands this year.

We do seem to be smack in the middle of mixing the glowing lovely yellowy lights with the garish horrid but better for the environment LED lights, but you know what, whatever. I still love a dripping icicle effect!

(The inflatable decorations haven't grown on me much over the years, mostly because they feel big and low-effort, but I do appreciate the one neighbor who has collected enough for each season and proudly puts out a dapper 12' Turkey that wears a Pilgrim hat for most of autumn.)

Light Drives were thee thing we did as a family on Christmas Eve. Pile in the car and go honk for the good lights. In Connecticut I remember everything being somewhat stoic. Ireland is hard because so many houses are tucked away behind gates (and the lights thing hadn't taken off so much – when we were really young the country barely had christmas trees and lanterns were like the #1 fave ornament ohhhh how times have changed). Vermont has pockets. Out by the airport has a concentration of bungalows, and I think neighbors get the lighting bug and when everyone joins in, the effect is that much better.

In Portland there was a street where homeowners basically had to sign a contract agreeing to go ALL out every single year. Crowd control was an issue by the time I tried to go, but we did manage to kind of sneak-drive through really late one night when half the houses were dark. It added a fun ~mystery element to the whole endeavour but I never bothered to stand in line for hours the following years as it grew ever more popular on social media. I get that the world is just bigger now, but it does feel like there's no whisper network of cool things to discover.

New York City is known for Christmas. But the lights in Manhattan are mostly relegated to midtown, and while I go out of my way every year to enjoy them, it does require crowd crushes and throngs of tourists stopping dead in the middle of the sidewalk.

My current neighborhood is adorable. There's a street near me that gets decorated for the full run, they wind lights all around the front gate area, and walking through it feels like a lightshow. This year though someone has put up a weird electronic caroling device which does sound like a Nokia phone and would drive me absolutely banunu's if I lived within earshot.

So today, I met up with my best friend and got a latte and bought a new wreath (to replace the wreath that has hung in my home since last Christmas) (it only browned a little bit!) (my final form, Liz Lemon s3, grows closer everyday) and then we got a little stoned and went for a light walk around Ridgewood and it was SO FUN.

I think traditions are important, because life is what you make it. The holidays can often feel hollow when there's nothing to them. Ever since I stopped working in retail, I have gone out of my way to put on a Christmas playlist every once in a while. I don't want the holiday to be relegated to just shopping–but I also love giving gifts to people and I'm not ashamed to find that aspect fun. Oh to carry a giant bag brimming with tissue paper through SoHo and hop on the Q at Canal and be whisked slightly uptown to duck inside The Strand and climb a ladder to get to the Vonnegut books have you ever heard of anything chicer in your whole life??

And traditions are so easy to create: you really do just have to do the same thing around the same time as many years in a row as is feasible.

By high school, my siblings and I were doing the lights drives on our own. The first time we couldn't get the radio to work or something, so we ended up only having Michael Bublé's Christmas album as an option as it was the only CD in the 6-CD Changer which was literally never touched because it was located in the boot of the car.

The next year we had more options, but we queued up the worst cover of all time, Santa Buddy, instead. It just felt right. And a little funny.

I do think the best traditions are a little nonsensical. It's what keeps them special!

Having a dish you always make (baked goods count! might I suggest these gochujang caramel cookies) or jam or fun drink really can make all the difference. Going ice skating, making an ornament even though you're not in second grade anymore, getting a hot chocolate and sitting in the park and picking out who has the best scarf that walks by, anything can be a tradition if you do it more than once!

My New York traditions now include meeting a friend at the og midtown Bloomingdale's after her family santa portraits and walking around to look at all the shop windows. It's so fun! We have a blast even though the Magnolia Bakery is often a mess to deal with! Who cares we can in fact wait for the next elevator yes it's been ten minutes already but we're not in a rush and we don't have a stroller!

I used to get into the Hallmark Christmas Movie of it all but in recent years they've become insincere parodies of themselves in order to reach Peak Meme and it's lost the fire that makes a great bad movie.

Like, for instance, Showgirls. A movie shot gorgeously filled with actors giving it their ALL only to have the result be so confusing we're still untangling the masterpiece of Nomi Malone. While it's not about Christmas, it is a Christmas movie. Every frame has Netflix levels of Christmas trees packed in there!

A movie that has a lot of Christmas in it despite not being About Christmas is my favorite Spielberg, Catch Me If You Can.

Perfect Leo performance! Hanks is having FUN with that Boston accent! Two mice fall into a bucket of cream!!!!

And, of course, my #1 beloved Bridget Jones's Diary. A movie that hit different this year because uh well I am 32 so we're in theeee Bridget Jones year babey! I gotta make my own dreams come true! Time to choose Chaka Khan!

(I also do always end up watching The Holiday (a good but not great Nancy Meyer's film) and Love Actually (a movie I detest and love in equal measure that feels horridly mean and entirely sincere because it's too british for it's own good but Hugh Grant stuns in performance of Prime Minister who has a crush on a woman over a size 2) and the first third of It's A Wonderful Life. The animated Grinch gets a whirl every few years but mostly You're A Mean One ends up on some playlists.)

And sometimes things stop being traditions because it turns out a bunch of your favorite British comedians are transphobic shitheads so The Big Fat Quiz is no longer on rotation.

(Begging America to figure out panel shows!!! Dropout is getting closer I think they're our best bet and I'm really enjoying the new cooking show they're doing!)

There's no rules. We're making all of it up. And this is the one precious life we get, so why not spend it making sure we're happy and accessing joy and fun on purpose every once in a while?

For all that The Holiday's don't mean to me what they mean to others, they mean something and it's whatever I make the season into. Which some years has been a lot and others, very little. The actual holiday itself is relegated to one day (1.5 because Christmas Eve feels like it has a good ramp-up vibe) but it's really a morning holiday and then by the afternoon everyone is at the movies or shopping or going snowshoeing or whatever they do in warm places that's the outdoor equivalent (Tim Minchin's White Wine In The Sun is the majority of my exposure to the concept of spending Christmas in summer mode). If you're not observing it, it slips right by.

I think what this season reminds me most is that we choose to take down the lights. We've relegated it to a seasonal thing for arbitrary reasons (and maybe it's nice because we miss it when its gone and pay attention when it's here and everything in life is ephemeral etc) but all of the "rules" are things we made up.

Norms are there to mostly make people feel better about their choices and feeling like they're doing the "right" thing without necessarily having to interogate what that means day-to-day.

But you can just start doing shit and then it becomes the new norm. And you really can just invent traditions. Like yeah they won't be ancient, like say the pagans bringing in fir trees to represent life during the death of winter, but things only have as much meaning as we imbue them with so like...light a candle and dim the lights and create your own rituals babe!

However you're spending the holidays (with family, with friends, flying solo) I hope they're wonderful and you get to eat your favorite foods and watch movies that make you feel fuzzy inside and hear songs that don't immediately remind you of being 16 and awkwardly navigating your 50something coworkers power-struggle with your manager. (For that and many other reasons, The Christmas Shoes is a banned song 4ever&ever.)

Mariah has never wavered for me despite hearing that song 100+ times a day when I was on a dance team that performed at Christmas shows (also the reason I know Thriller though so, every experience gifts us something to take) but the covers of All I Want For Christmas are almost all uniformly terrible except the one at the end of Love Actually, which is so good it makes the audience forget that the rest of the movie is bad.

Kelly Clarkson's album continues to age well! Enjoying Sabs getting her little blonde wig in the mix this year again! Love most songs that include a big band/brassy section! Wham forever it's one of the only songs that I enjoy more and more with age. I wish George Harrisons song Ding Dong, Ding Dong was more popular and made the classic airwaves more song because I don't like Paul or John's (sorry John, I know yours has a bit more meaning than Paul's) even though it might be technically a new years song I don't care it's cute and he trips in the music video and they kept it in oh, dear ol' George!!!

Justin Bieber should record an updated Christmas album but tbh I've come full circle on his Little Drummer Boy rap breakdown. Yeah he's on that drum, he's on that snare drum!

Okay that's it, more tomorrow because I've trapped us all here and the only way out is by sending seven more emails! Wheeeeee!!!