Week 460: Terminating The Tree With Extreme Prejudice and Welcome to the Holiday Rerun Fest

Well here we are, Christmas. Today I choose to remember it well. My family used to include a Dachshund-Chihuahua mix named “Fang” who joined the team when I was in sixth grade (named after Phyllis Diller’s fictional husband). Fang was a fairly peaceful little guy but he hated Christmas trees. Every year he would attack the damn thing late at night at least once. His partner in crime “Rags,” a tiny Rat Terrier, would encourage Fang with little barks, but feign innocence when the light came on.

The Fang and Rags era lasted about seventeen years. Towards the end Fang didn’t attack the tree with his teeth (most were gone by then), but he would take a whiz on it, or at least the suspicion existed. Due to Fang’s antipathy for trees and the fact Rags was a habitual chewer, we learned not to place anything under the tree until Christmas morning.

I like to think about the guys now and then, and I guess Christmas is a good time to remember them. I could get all sunset on you and tell more than they lived long happy lives, which ended within weeks of each other, quietly, in 1986. But that is hardly a friendly thing to do, even though I did it anyway. Still, I choose to remember being eleven, waking to a loud crash in the living room and my mother saying something like “Jesus H Christ! Not again!”

With that in mind, the next few days at LS will be devoted to reruns for the holiday season. Starting tomorrow and extending through New Year’s Eve, we will be running a story from our past (two on Christmas Day). Most are holiday themed; all are very good. And it just so happens that 2024 opens on a Monday this year, and we are well prepared to meet it with new stories.

The five debut tales that ran this week closed out the first run items of 2023. And as always the subjects and the writers themselves varied greatly.

I once owned a clock radio that I relied on from ages fifteen to twenty-something (actually acquired one Christmas during the Fang and Rags Dynasty), before it met a noble death in spilled beer sometime during the Clinton years; alas, there are harder ways to go. And it is in its memory that my Giant Clock Radio began the week.

Lenny Levine appeared on the site for the first time on Tuesday with Goomba Columbus. This is an excellent example of nailing an idiom and dialect perfectly. You feel as though you are hanging about in the shadows.

Rachel Sievers published her ninth with us on Wednesday with Tea For Two. Rachel excels at writing about lives and viewpoints not often explored in literature. Her talent as well as her canon continue to grow.

At first, It’s Never Too Late by the week’s second newcomer Tim Love looks like just another romance. But it is much more than that. Complete with an extremely complicated and tragic character at the center, this story flows effortlessly through time and is quite moving.

Ximena Escobar closed the week (and calendar year) with her second site appearance. Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress is a brilliant look at artist Frida Kahlo, who suffered a terrible accident, and an incredible history of physical and mental pain, but remained true to herself. This is extremely well done and insightful.

Merry Christmas to this week’s writers and happy holidays to all except those persons who keep sending me Medicare “information” in the mail because I will make the mistake of turning sixty-five next month. To those guys, whose job is similar to rolling drunks for money, I wish a slow, painful death, but to everyone else Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

And here, I leave room for my esteemed colleagues to take a bow. Plus I have included one of the few seasonal songs I approve of.

Leila

…

Hugh – Hi Leila, love the story of the wee dugs!

I think Christmas stories around our pets are better than those around toddlers who shit themselves!!

I wish you all a merry christmas and in the words of the late great Dave Allen, ‘May your god go with you’

Me on the other -hand will simply say – Manage christmas – Get as pissed as possible, as quickly as possible!

Oh, and this wonderful jewel Hugh discovered!

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/EtCD1D … tid=KsPBc6

And what would Christmas be without this?

Hello – thanks Leila and Hugh – even though you made me cry AGAIN watching the Pogues – Happy Christmas everyone and I hope the New Year brings you all you need and most of what you want. It’s been a good year for stories and we are already on the way with some belters for 2024. Keep reading, keep writing and please whenever you can keep commenting – it’s what gives life to the site

Diane