The False Ducks Blahg

      Well, it’s about nine days until Christmas and I’m going to try and toss in a quick blahg. Today is December 16th and my daughter Abbie’s 20th Birthday so Happy Birthday to Abbie!  I will mention her later on in this blahg but  I really want to dash this off while I’m still in my pyjamas and to post some of my Christmas stories…both real and fictional. 

     First up is my 2018 Christmas Light Display.  Last year, my wife Jeanette gave me a new inflatable Santa which is good because my giant inflatable Christmas Tree started smoking after being plugged in and then the motor died.  Every year it’s the same thing:  some of the things from last year don’t work this year.  Click on any of the pictures below to get a larger close up in a new tab. 

     The sad thing about the above Light Display is that all the snow in those pictures was from about 4 days ago and now the snow  is all melted.  Also, the large stump visible in the front yard is all that’s left of our 125 year old maple tree that had to be cut down.  It developed a large split down the trunk earlier this year and Ontario Hydro had to cut it down before it took down the power lines.  Fun fact, a limb from the tree did snap off in a wind storm over my Birthday weekend in September and took down the hydro line…twice that night.  I think the Hydro crew were cursing me or cursing the tree that night.  Below, is a picture of the front of my house in 2016 showing my light display and where the tree once proudly stood: 

     So what about those Christmas Stories?  First, I have to give a prelude or prologue to my first story in the form of a list.  The following list of movies are some lesser known Christmas movies that I like to watch around this time of year: 

1. “Remember The Night” (Barbara Stanwyck & Fred MacMurray) 1940

2. “Beyond Tomorrow”” (aka Beyond Christmas) 1940

3. It Happened On Fifth Avenue” 1947

4. “Miracle of the Bells” (Fred MacMurray, Valli, & Frank Sinatra) 1948

5. “Holiday Affair” (Robert Mitchum & Janet Leigh) 1949

6. “The Great Rupert” (Jimmy Durante) 1950 aka The Christmas Wish

7. “The Holly and the Ivy” (Ralph Richardson) 1952

8. “Room For One More” (Cary Grant & Betsy Drake) 1952

9. “Young At Heart” (Frank Sinatra & Doris Day) 1954

10. “Fitzwilly” (Dick Van Dyke & Barbara Feldon) 1967

11. “The Christmas Tree” (William Holden) 1969

12. “The Gathering” (Ed Asner & Maureen Stapleton) 1977

13. “An American Christmas Carol” (Henry Winkler) 1979

14. “The Man In The Santa Claus Suit” (Fred Astaire) 1979

15. “Ebenezer” (Jack Palance & Ricky Shcroder) 1998

16. “Nativity” (Martin Freeman) 2009

17. “Arthur Christmas” 2011

     Of the above list, only “The Christmas Tree” 1969, and “The Man In The Santa Claus Suit” 1979 have yet to have DVD releases.  “The Holly and the Ivy” 1952 has only had a DVD release in the UK but if you have a region free DVD player or a DVD player or Blu-Ray player that you have hacked to make region free, like I have, then you can order it and watch it.  Great film about a family gathering and happy dysfunction.  I’ve held onto my copies of The Christmas Tree” 1969, and “The Man In The Santa Claus Suit” 1979 because I still have a VCR and it’s the only way to watch these movies.  I have a bin of old Christmas Cartoon specials that were issued on VHS and never issued on DVD but some I have converted to digital format unless there was some copyright protection that prevented me from converting them. 

     Now, my copy of “The Christmas Tree” is one that I picked up at a Library yard sale some years ago.  You can see from the image at the right that it’s a library discard.  The thing about this movie is that it’s not a happy movie.  Here’s a quote from the back jacket:  “Learning that his son has only six months left to live after being exposed to a nuclear explosion, William Holden is determined to make them the happiest of his life.  He meets his son’s every wish including buying him a blue tractor and stealing a pair of wolves from the zoo.  The boy’s gentleness tames the savage wolves and they become his pets.”  Spoiler:  The Kid Dies In The End!  I told you it wasn’t a happy Christmas movie. 

     I like this movie.  I think William Holden does some phenomenal acting in this film and Brook Fuller who plays his son, Pascal, does a decent job.  But remember, this is not a happy film.  I showed it to my two oldest children, Emily and Noah, probably more than ten years ago and they hated it.  In fact, every year they are adamant that I never show it to them again.  I either have to watch it myself or find a new viewing partner.  This year, my daughter Abbie, who turned 20 today, had heard all the previous lamenting from her siblings but committed to watching it with me.  It took me several days to find the VHS because it wasn’t in the normal bin and I had practically given up when I finally found it hidden behind some other old VHS tapes at the bottom of a cabinet.  Abbie and I stayed up until 1:30am last night watching it.  It still holds up but now I have to add Abbie to the list of people who won’t watch it again with me. 

     “The Christmas Tree” is not available for viewing anywhere online but I did find this ten minute video on YouTube that summarizes pretty well with scenes from the movie: 

     Okay, so onto the stories.  First, I want to present a new inspirational holiday message for this Christmas.  I used to have a radio sketch comedy show from 1993 to 1995 under the title of “Dead From The Neck Up” with my friends Stephen Dafoe and Bryan Dawkins.  Dafoe and I created two characters known as Stan The Welcome Mat Man and his sidekick Teddy The Topless Dancer.  I was Stan and Dafoe was Teddy.  Stan would welcome new people to the neighbourhood but would also rail against ethnicities and other types he didn’t like.  I know he’s not politically correct but he’s evolved over the years.  Evolved being that our radio show went off the air in 1995 and there was no new Stan until 2014 and then again this year when I recorded a new message.  I’m going to present the four Stan The Welcome Mat Man Holiday Inspirational messages.  The first is from Stan in 1994 or 1995: 

Next up is Teddy’s message from around the same time: 

I revisited Stan in 2014 and recorded a new Inspirational Holiday Message:

And just yesterday, I recorded a new Stan The Welcome Mat Man Inspirational Holiday Message with a 12 Days of Christmas Theme:

     So, I know what you’re wondering is where’s the story in that?  I wrote the new message so that counts for something.  If that’s not enough, I’m going to post a couple of Christmas stories that I have written in the past.  First up is a reflection piece I wrote around 2006 called “Pinheads”: 

Pinheads

          Once upon a time, which is not how this story should start but is how all good stories used to start and as I would like this to turn out to be a good story, there were three girls.  I of course am remembering this and find fault in having not remembered it until recently seeing those three girls again long after I had matured and had children of my own.  But for all intents and purposes this story is about those three girls and that once upon a time.

          These girls were pinheads.  Well, now they’re pinheads but that long ago they were three little girls to three little boys and I was one of those boys and was eight or nine which is not really all that little.

          My brother, my cousin, and I were the boys and the girls were the same age as us respectively.  They were friends of my grandmother or that is to say they were daughters of friends of my grandmother.  At that time my cousin lived next door to my grandmother and we spent a lot of time visiting between the two houses as we were but aren’t now a close-knit family.

          Anyway the girls were friends of ours.  And their father stank.  At least I think he stank.  It might have been those overalls he always wore when he came to visit.  “Ma, it’s time to go a-visiting so I better put them overalls on and go wade about in the manure up to my waste.”  I bet that’s how it went.  All I know is he stank and as much as we liked seeing the girls we hated smelling the father.  For a long time afterwards I didn’t readily associate relationships with the opposite sex with a pleasant aroma.

          What I remember about these girls mostly other than the pungent perfume of their father was that they were very friendly.  I also remember one of ’em kissed me.  I’m sure it was the one who was my age but I might want to admit I probably said it was one of the older ones so the retelling of this event made me seem more mature.  This of course means I lied to my friends about my first encounter with a girl.  It probably was the younger of the set as I was the younger.  And I think there were more kisses than just that one.  That was probably why we liked those girls so much, because anyone who’d have kissed us boys back then couldn’t have been all bad.

          Now here’s where I skip ahead and tell you I never saw those girls again.  Oh I heard about them from time to time and I recall their father dying and the family having some financial difficulties and having to sell off the farm but I never saw them again.  Well, maybe that’s not really true.  I saw them again today and when I looked at them they were still girls except they were pinheads.

          I suppose at this point I should describe a pinhead.  I am by no means being chauvinistic or derogatory.  I’m just trying to describe them using a term I heard once in a movie.  Pinheads, is a circus freak term to describe not so tall people with pointy heads and little intelligence.  I remember reading a book once about a circus pinhead who turned out to be rather intelligent but never spoke as he really never had anything intelligent to say.  This might be a good thing as I’ve known people who have not had an intelligent thing to say but who proceeded with saying it anyhow.  These girls had become pinheads.

          It was in a department store when I saw the pinheads again.  I was killing time with my two-year-old son by amusing him with brightly coloured children’s Christmas video jackets.  I’m attuned to the pander of small children and so I didn’t immediately take notice of other cooings over those animated cases.  It might also have been that the smell that I had associated with these girls wasn’t there.  But they were there.  Oh, they were older, and their mother who was chaperoning them was older, but it was them.  I looked cautiously as it had been many years and I wondered after these many years if they’d recognize me and categorize me as I had done them as pinheads.  The recognition never dawned on them.

          I think I was upset.  Here was a lost part of my youth and what I had held as a beautiful memory was now sharply contrasted by their childlike gait and vocabulary.  I tried to deny it was them but when the mother called them by their names there was no mistaking their identity.

          I’m trying to remember if they’d always been pinheads.  They probably weren’t.  I’d like to think any girl who’d have kissed me back then knew what she was doing.  It might be that I remember this all now with a matured educated brain.  This tends to cloud the memory as I analyze everything I’ve ever done and rationalize why I was the way I was and why things were the way they were.  This means those girls may not have been all that smart back then but as a boy I didn’t notice.  Children can be blind that way.  Some say children can be cruel.  I think it can go the other way, too.  Children can overlook things like intelligence and handicaps and poverty lines when it comes to friendship or pre-pubescent kisses.

          I did not say hello to the girls.  I think maybe they would not have remembered me.  I might be uncaring in not giving them that credit; after all maybe their memory was intact.  What’s that about not judging books by covers?  That would be more than appropriate as my son and I had been judging Christmas video covers without viewing the production.

          I didn’t want to pigeon hole these girls as pinheads but I believe there was something in me that wanted to use the term as a defence.  As I said, I thought a girl who kissed me long ago had to know what she was doing and I didn’t want to admit that maybe she really didn’t know what she was doing.  It bruised my ego to think I might just have been an experience like swimming or falling or getting a haircut.  As you get older you lose that blindness of childhood for the all seeing all knowing perspective.  After all those years I was finally seeing the truth about myself.  I really could detect pinheads.  All I needed to do was look in the mirror.

The End

     I like that story.  It shows how much, like Stan, I’ve grown.  The last story, which I’ll end on is “Billy Built A Robot Christmas Morning.”  I wrote this around 2005 and the reason I’m posting this one is due to the fact that I’ve been thinking about writing a sequel Christmas story about Billy and what happened to him when he gets older.  I haven’t got it written yet but like visions of sugarplums, I’ve got snippets dancing around it my head: 

Billy Built A Robot Christmas Morning

The first thing Billy did was to build a robot.  Well, that wasn’t exactly true.  The first thing Billy did was to wake up Christmas morning, open all of his presents, and express his extreme dissatisfaction at not getting the Grim Reaper 4 video game.

“It’s too violent,” his parents said.  “You need something educational,” said his mother, “not something that’s all about killing and destroying stuff.”

So Billy built a robot.  At first it was difficult.  He didn’t grasp all of the principles of building the robot.  He didn’t understand how to connect certain elements or to build a self-contained renewable energy pack to power the robot.  And then there were the principles of motor control and incorporating a simulated brain with cognitive features allowing it to understand and carry out specified instructions.  What did Billy know about any of these things?  He was only ten.

So Billy used the Internet.  There were numerous websites explaining certain codes and how to enable certain features.  He even went to a chat room and talked for an hour with a guy in Canada who had managed to build a fleet of robots capable of recreating other robots in their own image.  “Robots who built robots,” Billy thought.  “That’s cool.”

It took quite some time for Billy to build his own Robot but when it was completed he was very pleased with himself.  This Robot would be better than any others he had researched.  It would obey only Billy and do his bidding.

So Billy set the Robot loose.  At first it fumbled around and crashed through a few walls.  It was bulky and its weight was considerable enough to cause extensive damage wherever it went.  “Cool,” Billy exclaimed.

Then Billy maneuvered the Robot down the street and had it smash a few cars.  People ran in terror when they saw the Robot.  Billy didn’t care about the people.  He could hurt them if he wanted too.  He had learned from the Internet how to bi-pass certain inhibitors that would normally prevent the Robot from causing harm or even damaging things like walls and cars.  But Billy would not allow his Robot to hurt any people.  His parents wouldn’t like that.  But eating cars and smashing buildings was cool and nobody got hurt.

Billy wasn’t sure what he should really do with his Robot.  After a while he got bored of just having the Robot walk around and destroy things.  He could try and build other robots like that guy in Canada but then what do you do with a bunch of robots other than having them destroy more stuff?

So Billy set his thoughts on world domination.  He didn’t think about his parents anymore and he hardly even thought about Grim Reaper 4.  This Robot thing was way cooler.

So time passed and Billy built more robots and appointed his first Robot as their leader.  But they all followed Billy’s commands.  At first they just all walked around destroying stuff but Billy soon commanded them to destroy only really important stuff so that the people would all be really scared of the robots.  Sometimes some people shot at the robots but Billy had learned the trick to making his robots invincible.  This just made the people angrier and they shot more stuff at the robots and there were explosions and things that made Billy more excited.

Eventually the robots destroyed all of the cities and the people followed the robots through the countryside.  Some of them still shot stuff at the robots but most just followed the robots because there was nothing else to do.

The Robot that Billy built first always walked in the front.  He was the biggest.  Billy had made some changes to him and had given him laser eyes so he could destroy buildings and stuff from a distance.  Some of the other robots looked just like the first Robot but they could do different things.  Some had saw blades for hands and others had cannons in their chests.  There was this one robot that Billy really thought was cool that had treads on the bottom of its feet so it could run through forests and destroy trees and stuff.

Eventually with all of the cities destroyed, there was nothing much left to do but to set up a post from where he could rule the world.  That was easy.  First he found a city that was all surrounded by water and he had the robots destroy all of the bridges.  Then Billy had the robots build a fortress.  That was cool.  The robots kept anybody from going in there that weren’t robots.

All of the people who were on this new island city ran around and screamed and stuff but Billy didn’t care.  He looked over this new island and thought this is probably the best spot where no one could hurt his robots.  He could hear the people all yelling and stuff but he didn’t care.

“Billy!”  Billy could hear one of the people calling his name.  Why would someone be shouting his name?

“Billy!”  Billy vaguely recognized the voice.  He hadn’t heard it in a while but he was sure it was his mother’s voice.

“Billy!”  Billy turned about looking for the source of the voice.

“Billy, shut off that robot video game.  You’ve been playing it all day.  Now shut it off and come to Christmas dinner.

The End

     Well, that’s it for now.  I don’t know if I’ll get the sequel story written or even if I’ll get another blahg written this month.  If I don’t then I’m sending you all my Christmas blessing and all the best for 2019.  Happy Holidays!

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