Merry Christmas (Eve) from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I’m here with my wife visiting her parents during a largely normal COVID-free holiday season. I’ve been camped out in the basement getting caught up on some e-mails and other tasks when I’m not on the main floor Christmas-ing.

So, without further ado – let’s get to the Holiday Notes.

Holiday Note #1: AWOL in 2023

I’ve been absent here largely because I’ve been playing a year-long game of “Catch Up” since I got back to Chicago at the beginning of December last year and tested positive for COVID roughly a week after I got back.

As long-time readers know, Christmas (starting with Thanksgiving) is the one holiday that I typically go all-out for, which is why I’m still working on Christmas cards even though I won’t be able to mail them until the day after Christmas. I like to kick-off the holiday season with a solid Thanksgiving meal (2023: Mission Accomplished) after which point I’m free to start doing Christmas stuff like playing holiday music, watching films from the Christmas movie canon, building crackers (2023: Mission Failed), sending Christmas cards, and all of that. It’s intentionally a frantic rush that I like doing every year, much the same way an accomplished athlete will test themselves to see if they “still have it”.

Last year’s holiday season was largely a bust – since I was home-bound, I used it to tinker with a lot of old tech, including resurrecting some old analog TV equipment to digitize my wife’s VHS tapes, with some World of Warcraft intermissions. Given that failure, this year was the one when I would get back on my game, and Get All The Things Done.

It ended up being a mixed bag. The primary culprit is that the chaos and busy-ness of the past year bled into the holiday season more than it typically does. Since my business’s primary client base are research institutions with generous holiday schedules, things typically slow down for me in December as no one wants to start a scientific or medical trial around the holidays for obvious reasons. That usually buys me some breathing room to let Christmas Chris out to play.

Unfortunately, I started 2023 off behind on quite a few things and have been hustling to try and make up lost ground. I was doing well into the spring until I caught a nasty sinus infection and pneumonia, which compounded my work backlog. I didn’t get as much sailing done during the summer, and since mid-November, I’ve been frequently working long days (12 to 16 hours isn’t uncommon) while trying to not get as seriously burnt out as I have in the past. I’ve been operating in a state of low-grade exhaustion for weeks, and I’m thankful that the work I do is actually meaningful, or I’d have become a psychological mess months ago.

So, The Job has been a large contributor for my lack of writing here lately. The second contributor has been that I’ve been writing elsewhere for much of the past year.

I don’t think that I made a big deal or announcement here last year, but late last year, my friend Russell Smeaton invited me to contribute a piece of weird fiction to the new publication he was putting together – Weird Fiction Quarterly. I sent in a tongue-in-cheek story about space nerd breaking the local gravitational constant and that basically dooming humanity. (The theme of the anthology was “winter”.) When he invited me to contribute to the next installment (theme: “spring”), I followed up with a story about long-time space travelers, experiencing a spring and renewal of their own when they discovered a suitable planet for terraforming. (The twist: the planet was Earth, where a race of primitive bipeds were struggling to survive in the cold.)

By the time the Summer edition was set up come out, Russ had to make some more time for other things in his life, and he asked if I would help some folks put out the next edition he had already collected tales for, along with Sarah Walker and Nora Peevy. My initial role was to support Nora and Sarah with the technical aspects of the publication, but my role grew to handle business and legal matters, setting up the infrastructure to make the business of publishing a book more predictable and less difficult, and (voluntarily) financing a lot of the stuff behind the scenes: reviewer copies, Illinois LLC registration fees, web hosting, etc.

That project has been an intense learning process, but we’re in good shape now and put together a follow-up Fall & Halloween edition, and our volunteer editors are whipping the first edition of 2024 into shape. I’ve been happy to do this, as I think Russ stumbled on a really interesting idea that I would kick myself for not seeing through, and as a long-time weird fiction fan, I’m proud that Chicago is publishing weird fiction once more. I didn’t have “become a book publisher” on my 2023 Bingo card, but here we are.

In addition to precluding any consistent writing over here, the addition of making books absolutely devastated my annual odd-year tradition of reading one hundred books in a calendar year. I’ve been reading (and writing) a lot – it’s just been in the service of making old fashioned print books. As time allows, I look forward to writing more about this project and its process in upcoming Notes here.

So overall, while there’s a lot that I wish unfolded differently in 2023, there are not too many decision points where I can look back and point at a place where I wish I had made a different decision. This past year was just one where life threw a lot at me, and I dealt with the best that I could expect to.

In terms of Christmas 2023, as I mentioned above, I’m still working on Christmas cards this Christmas Eve. Part of the delay here is that I’ve been trying to do something different this year and compose some personal notes to go with a lot of them. After giving up on re-developing a legible handwriting style, I picked up a refurbished Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter that’s half a century old and I’ve been typing out small letters to accompany the holiday cards. In the age of over-active auto-correct and auto-suggest, it’s been refreshing to get back to physically direct manipulation device, where I arrive at my typing mistakes honestly, and I don’t have some nebbish AI silently fixing my mistakes with what it thought I meant to say. The typewriter is quite portable and it’s also refreshing to be able to sit down and start to write something without having to look for an outlet to plug into. I’m looking forward to spending some more quality time with the device in the year ahead.

This has also been the year where I’ve also been able to fully embrace my Uncle Drosselmeyer persona with my gift giving. I had a chance to spend some quality time with my nieces and nephews over the past year and finally feel like I know where they’re at personality-wise. While I don’t want to spoil what gifts they received, I feel like I was able to get them what they asked for, but with a twist. Maybe I’ll go into this in more detail later, once the Christmas embargo has lifted. Since I’m now officially the sole sibling without (and not expecting) any children, I figure that my role in the extended family is to emulate Drosselmeyer from “The Nutcracker” and be that figure in the extended family that can show the next generation just how much wider, weirder, and wonderful the world they live in can be. And if that is through a massive copyright infringement powered by Chinese handheld Linux computers, so be it. (More on this later.)

Holiday Note #2: 2023’s Best British Holiday Ads

When I started this newsletter/blog, one of the traditions I wanted to enact as part of my holiday OCD was putting together a list of the best British holiday ads of the year. My interest in this subject kicked off back in 2014 with Sainsbury’s re-enactment of the Christmas Truce of 1914:

This took me down a rabbit hole revealing that – like most other things Christmas-related – our cousins across the pond do better Christmas ads (“adverts”) than our tsunami of Toyotathons, Happy Honda Days, and similar knock-offs. I put together a solid list back in 2020 to kick off the tradition, and followed up in 2021. 2022 threw me for such a loop that I didn’t get around to it. (And to be completely honest, last year’s ads seemed noticeably weaker than the years before). So, in the interest of rescuing a struggling tradition, here’s my list of favorite ads from the British Isles for 2023.

Enjoy!

The first ad comes to us from John Lewis, a perennial contender that shows up every year. This season’s ad is a delightfully weird and a quirky take on the Christmas tree.

One of the ways that the British are superior to American ad-men (and ad-women) is that they don’t shy away from tough subjects, such as this story of a little girl with just one wish for Christmas.

I don’t know why Apple keeps their good ads of the air on North America (likely length considerations), but this one told an interesting holiday story about a young woman and her boss, with whom she doesn’t get along with too well.

I’m a sucker for the almighty Trash Panda, and this ad from Lidl did not disappoint. A solid entry into the canon of Solid British Christmas Adverts.

This ad about a girl and her mother playing Santas themselves on their way to the North Pole looks like it was as fun to make as it is to watch.

Morrison’s use of an iconic song and some creative oven mitt puppetry to show off their offerings hit a sweet spot for me.

Barbour has shown up in my lists before with their ads. This year was a fun Wallace and Gromit episode.

While not the strongest entry in the adventures of Aldi’s Kevin the Carrot (2020’s “Peel the Need for Speed” will never be forgotten), this year’s take on Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was good enough to make this year’s list.

Finally, we get to The Tank Museum in Bovington. While this ad on its own isn’t one of my favorites, it made the list for a few reasons:

• There is an actual place called The Tank Museum.
• The folks at The Tank Museum have been making new ads since 2021.
• They really seem into Christmas.

For their persistence, I salute The Tank Museum and will be including them as long as I’m compiling this list and they’re making Christmas adverts.

So, that’s it for me for the holidays, and likely for 2023 as well. I hope all of you are having a delightful and festive holiday season.

I’ll see you on the flip side of the New Year.