SOUNDTRACK: PEARL JAM-“Santa God” (1993).
On December 2, Pearl Jam announced that their fan club holiday singles will be released to streaming services. Their first holiday single was released back in 1991. It was “Let Me Sleep (Christmas Time).” They are rolling out the songs one at a time under the banner 12 Days of Pearl Jam.
These releases are coming out as a daily surprise.
The song opens with a quiet guitar melody and Eddie’s droning style of vocal until the bass comes in and the song starts really moving.
It’s a flashback to childhood
Now and then I remember when
Us Adults were little Kids
And our only worry was
What we get from Santa Claus
There’s a little synth melody in between verses as the song seems to grow more positive. The chorus is simple and reminds me in style of some of the later Nirvana songs (with the backing vocals especially).
It seems like it’s a sarcastic song, but indeed, it’s not
How I learned from right and wrong
Had to be good for Santa Claus
He made me, stop misbehaving
And once a year if I did my job
I’d be given my favorite toys
So simple, the principles
It’s a catchy enough song, but probably won’t run up the holiday music charts anytime soon.
[READ: December 7, 2019] “An Errand in the Country”
This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar. This is my fourth time reading the Calendar. I didn’t know about the first one until it was long out of print (sigh), but each year since has been very enjoyable. Here’s what they say this year
The Short Story Advent Calendar is back! And to celebrate its fifth anniversary, we’ve decided to make the festivities even more festive, with five different coloured editions to help you ring in the holiday season.
No matter which colour you choose, the insides are the same: it’s another collection of expertly curated, individually bound short stories from some of the best writers in North America and beyond.
(This is a collection of literary, non-religious short stories for adults. For more information, visit our Frequently Asked Questions page.)
As always, each story is a surprise, so you won’t know what you’re getting until you crack the seal every morning starting December 1. Once you’ve read that day’s story, check back here to read an exclusive interview with the author.
Want a copy? Order one here.
I’m pairing music this year with some Christmas songs that I have come across this year.
This is a short short story. It concern a Russian man who has been living in the United States for most of his life. Gregory has been a successful businessman in New York City. He was exacting and always on time. Actually, he’s rather a a jerk.
He returned to Moscow infrequently, and when he did, his visits were brief. He wanted to stay at the Ritz but his mother was always upset with him if he didn’t stay with her. So he agreed to stay in her run down place, where he knew he would not be able to get the smell of her apartment out of his clothes.
He was supposed to fly back to New York Monday morning for a business meeting. On Sunday night his mother had asked him to do an errand in the country–a routine insurance matter at his mother’s dacha:
he had agreed, mainly to avoid spending the entirety of that final day in her damp, mournful presence, but he did not relish the hassle of travelling to a decaying hovel in a godforsaken village two hours away from the city.
He had not been to the dacha in nearly a decade–since his fathers death. The place looked even more neglected and the business took longer than he expected. When he thought he was free to leave, he got stuck talking to the neighbors and members of the village. They couldn’t believe he was all grown up, etc.
By the time he made it back to the train station, with “a dirty sign that displayed two letters only, K and A–the orphaned ending of the village’s faded name,” he had missed the 6’o clock train.
Furious, he checked the timetable and saw that the next train wasn’t for four hours.
While he sat there a man appeared. The man was unflappably cheerful and, strangely, barefoot. The man raved about this depressed, nearly abandoned railway station as a place of calm and beauty in a hectic world. While the man was prattling on, Gregory realized that he forgot something.
His mother asked him to cut some roses from the dacha. These roses were planted the year he was born and they had special symbolic meaning to her. She wanted to bring the roses to his father’s grave.
He felt wretched–he hadn’t even returned for his father’s funeral because of a business meeting.
Then the man told him to cheer up–he had plenty of time. The next train wasn’t until the morning.
Gregory was stunned–he had been looking at the weekday schedule, not the Sunday schedule.
The ending of the story was a little confusing–I wasn’t sure how much of what happened actually happened. But it does leave Gregory with important decision to make.
Turns out that that ending was deliberately ambiguous, as Grushin explains in the interview (below), “It can be read as a lighthearted fantasy in the vein of Bulgakov, or a sad little tale of a family drifting apart.”
I have been reading a lot of Russian literature lately and this fits in very nicely with tat existential tradition.
The calendar says, It’s December 7. Olga Grushin, author of Forty Rooms, just noticed that her timetable is out of date.
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