Before Jimmy Carter’s grave grows too much grass, I want to talk about his funeral a little more. It was, of course, interesting to see the seating of the first few rows, where the former presidents and other dignitaries were placed. There was a certain chatter, especially on the right-wing socials, about a shot of Obama smiling as Trump talked to him, which, depending on your degree of insanity, either means UNIPARTY or SEE THEY GET ALONG, SO PUT US BACK ON YOUR CHRISTMAS-CARD LIST. To me, it looked like polite cordiality, but that might be my own prejudice.

Melania looked utterly miserable. Karen Pence stared straight ahead and refused to look at Trump. Michelle Obama was said to have “a scheduling conflict” that could mean anything, but I’m choosing to think it meant no, I will not sit next to that racist piece of shit and you can’t make me. And I was struck by this photo:

The Quayles, Dan and Marilyn, of course. Now, we just watched “The Substance” this weekend, and I will never shame a woman for not going all-in on the insanity of cosmetic surgery, or even procedures. Part of me is glad she doesn’t give a shit about being anything other than properly presentable; I mean, she’s 75 now, and that’s a good thing, as anyone who’s checked out party pix from Mar-a-lago can attest. No one looks their best at a funeral, and it would be gross if anyone put in too much effort. It’s not about you. My only note, as we say in Hollywood, is that it’s time to rethink the hairstyle you’ve had since…at least 1984:

I haven’t thought about this woman in nearly that long. She will forever be fixed in my mind with the late ’80s, in Indiana, when she smiled sometimes but often had that who-farted look on her face. When I’m feeling empathetic, I think it must be terrible to be a smart woman who sailed through law school, and had the sort of steel-trap mind that drove her to choose induced labor for her first child, so that she could take the bar exam on schedule. (She was said to have sat on an inflatable donut.) She always seemed to be about 30 IQ points smarter than her husband, but she was imprisoned by her own politics, which called for her to be happy as a mommy and not ask for anything more. When I’m not feeling empathetic, I recall she was always kind of a bitch; I remember reading that she was distressed to learn the expensive D.C. private school she was enrolling her kids in also had the children of journalists in the student body, like our kids were common white trash who should have been happy in public schools.

It sounds like I’m saying I wish she was softer, but I’m not. I give her credit for her comment, when someone tried to imply her husband had screwed some woman he met at a golf tournament, something like: “Anyone who knows Dan Quayle knows he’d rather play golf than have sex.”

The world needs bitches, too, and this was before the modern political era, when an army of stylists would have descended upon her, dressed her in different clothes, cut and styled her hair and done their best to Stepford-ize her into something she wasn’t. People project whatever they want on you, anyway. Melania is a bitch, too, but there are millions of MAGA chuds who think she’s warm and elegant. Bottom line, Washington is a hard place to be anyone’s spouse, particularly at this level.

So yeah, we saw “The Substance.” An interesting movie overall, but very gory and, as so often is the case these days, about 15 minutes too long. Recommended for an inexpensive rental, but I’ll never watch it again. Demi Moore is naked for much of it, and Margaret Qualley ditto. Although one plays the used-up Older Woman and the other the super-hot Younger Woman, both look pretty ghastly rolling around in a white-tiled bathroom, but that is the point, I think. We rented “Conclave” on Saturday night, and it was way better than I expected.

The week ahead! Let’s enjoy it! We finally have some snow on the ground, so yay.

Maybe it was checking in and out of Jimmy Carter’s funeral Thursday, all that talk about decency and putting aside differences for the good of the country, the stuff that makes us proud to be Americans (if any of us still are), all washing like a tide over the head of the incoming president, and knowing all he’s thinking about is who he might want to fuck or fuck over next, or how much money he can shake out of X or Y, or some other shall we say less noble topic.

But once again I found myself thinking I can’t believe we’re going to do this again. I mean: Can’t. Believe.

Here’s a story from the New York Post this week:

Former and future first lady Melania Trump has inked an eye-popping $40 million deal with Amazon to license a documentary on her life — with cameos from her husband, Donald, and son, Barron.

The documentary, directed by “Rush Hour” auteur Brett Ratner, is set to be released later this year — with one source close to the agreement suggesting it could spawn multiple projects.

The hefty price tag was first reported by Puck News and covers the rights to projects involving Mrs. Trump over the next four years.

Page Six has learned that Disney was also in the running and bid $14 million, only to be swamped by the internet giant.

Forty million dollars. For a documentary about a vacant plastic-surgery addict, with “cameos” from her weird son and felon president. I wonder if she has to kick upstairs to the boss.

The next-closest bid was $14 million. That tells you something right there.

I was discussing this in a group text the other day, and someone said, “Remember when you could get put away for abusing a franking privilege?” Yes, I do. I bet all those guys bounced from office, or cut from the field, or publicly disgraced for things like throwing your Christmas cards into the outgoing mail, or saying yee-haw with a little too much enthusiasm, or otherwise stepping off the straight and narrow? Those guys are cursing that they weren’t born into this era of naked greed not only being OK, but celebrated. Go Melania! Not bad for a retired sex worker!

Today the editorial-page editor of The Detroit News, a conservative but generally one with enough sense to be a never-Trumper in 2016 and a despairing left-behind Republican ever since, wrote a column with this lead:

Time to focus, Mr. President-elect.

The stream-of-consciousness flow of ideas and promises that marked Donald Trump’s presidential campaign must now give way to deliberate, well-thought-out policymaking.

But Trump’s press conference Tuesday, his second since the election, suggests he hasn’t made the pivot from candidate to chief executive.

To quote Miranda Priestly: Did you fall down and hit your little head? Have you been asleep for eight years? Did you miss Infrastructure Week? “Deliberate, well-thought-out policymaking?” Making “the pivot from candidate to chief executive?” Are you insane? There’ll be none of the former and the latter will never happen. We’ve all seen this movie before. And now we’re going to see it again.

2024 was the last good year. And this is the first bad year.

Even the way apparently sane people discuss this stuff is crazy, all this talk of “annexing” Canada as the 51st state. Annex? Are you insane? “Buying” Greenland? I feel like I’m living in some weird alternate reality.

And California continues to burn.

OK, let’s enjoy the weekend and prepare for the rest of the first bad year.

Because I once clicked on a Facebook post about Secretariat’s win in the 1973 Belmont Stakes, I now get lots of Secretariat content shoveled at me on that platform. The other day a pic came up, allegedly of Secretariat racing in the Belmont, except that the markings on the horse were wrong, the tack was wrong and the horse was going the wrong way on the track. Many of these garbage postings are from groups with names like “We love secretariat,” no capitalization, or from accounts attached to individuals allegedly named “An Du” or “Moo Iu,” or suchlike. In other words, they’re AI crap.

The explosion of AI crap is not confined to a crap platform like Facebook. So-called pink slime journalism is everywhere, too. The other day a local lunatic posted a story from one of those sites, and it’s obvious — stories based on data scrapes about school testing, all with the same picture. Weird hiccups like opinion columns from 2021, themselves aggregations of crap published elsewhere, popping up on the home page. The parent company publishes dozens of these things in Michigan alone; their domain registry is anonymous, of course.

People sometimes ask if I miss journalism. I do not.

Facebook, or Meta, made news yesterday when Mark Zuckerberg announced he was bending the knee and shitcanning the platform’s fact-checking, in favor of “community notes,” the same as Xitter does. My first reaction: Facebook does fact-checking? I haven’t seen a checked fact on that shit-tastic platform in ages. Even the AI Secretariat got past.

I have a decent monthly stipend doing social-media work for one client. If I didn’t, I’d be outta there justlikethat.

In other news at this hour, Los Angeles is on fire. Hope LA Mary and any readers we might have out that way are staying safe. Kate and I just texted, and she wondered if the unpaid interns who succeeded her at her 2019 gig are stuffing the boss’ valuables into their own cars and fleeing in those cars, while the boss evacuates in some more dignified conveyance, maybe a golden helicopter or a flying limo. Not that she is bitter, but those four months turned her into a hard-core lefty.

Funny how there are some people who go through a rough period as a bottom-of-the-ladder underling and think, “I can’t wait until I’m a boss and can shit on people, too!” and others think, “When I become a boss, I will never shit on people the way I was shit on.” Proud to have raised the latter type, but I can’t take credit for it. Like all human beings, she basically emerged from the womb fully herself. I just fed her.

OK, work calls.

Kind of a mixed grill today. Life gets back to normal this week and I have a buncha things on my plate. So here goes:

** I have a few friends who tally their year’s reading — book reading, anyway. I’ve decided I should do the same, and made a note in the final page of my 2025 planner: #1: “Long Island Compromise.” It’s Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s new one, following “Fleishman is in Trouble” from a couple years back, and it’s…fantastic. It, too, will probably be turned into a prestige-streaming series down the road, and it richly deserves to be. It’s funny, tragic, empathetic, smart, “sharply observant” (as the critics say) of the wealthy people in its pages. I loved every one. (And OK, I started it in 2024, but I’m counting it as a ’25 book, because I finished it Sunday.)

I also read “James” over the holidays, Percival Everett’s reimagining of the life of Huck Finn’s enslaved companion, Jim. That, too, was great. It’ll win a bunch of prizes this year, but I liked “Long Island Compromise” better. But it’s like preferring one flavor of ice cream over another. They’re both delicious.

** Most of you will be reading this on Monday, i.e. January 6, a day that will truly live in infamy for those with brains, eyes and memories. Note: This does not include million of idiots:

What began as a strained attempt to absolve Mr. Trump of responsibility for Jan. 6 gradually took hold, as his allies in Congress and the media played down the attack and redirected blame to left-wing plants, Democrats and even the government. Violent rioters — prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned — somehow became patriotic martyrs.

This inverted interpretation defied what the country had watched unfold, but it neatly fit the persecution narrative that binds Mr. Trump to many of his faithful. Once he committed to running again for president, he doubled down on flipping the script about the riot and its blowback, including a congressional inquiry and two criminal indictments against him, as part of an orchestrated victimization.

** I’m writing this before the Lions play the Vikings here in Detroit, the winner of which will clinch the NFC North and move into the postseason, or at least that’s what I thought I read this morning. You know me, no sports fan here, but the Lions are reversing their years-long losing ways, and it’s got the whole region on fire. The team is making the charismatic head coach, Dan Campbell, available for profiles and so on, most of which are kinda boilerplate, but oh well it’s football. The one fact I find amusing about the Campbell household is that he and his wife have three dogs, two of which are teacup Yorkies named Thelma and Louise, and have shared this photo with the masses, and OMG SO CUTE:

That is Louise, for the record. She sleeps in his armpit, the stories say. I’ll bet it’s warm there.

OK, 2025 is now fully in progress. Smash it however you like.

Happy New Year to everyone, but especially you, my loyal readers, who have kept me maintaining this blog for, good lord, going on …24 years this month? It’s been that long? Amazing. We’ve lived through the Blog Craze, remained steadfast through social media, and who knows, maybe we’ll be popular again before cancer or random gunfire or a drunk/distracted driver takes me out. Not to be morbid, but I read the news yesterday oh boy, and I don’t see a lot to smile about.

That said, I’m still smiling. My 2024 one-word resolution, which I can’t remember, isn’t dong me much good, so I’m not making one this year. I have goals, of course, one being: Work less. Or rather, work less for others, more for me. The Biden stock market, decent luck and a lifetime of reasonably careful money management have left us reasonably comfortable, so I’d like to throttle back the freelance writing and write more for myself. Here, and elsewhere. So that’s the big one.

The others? The usual. Declutter. Death clean. Unfuck that which is fucked. Not to get too personal about our finances, but we’re investigating whether we can afford to bestow a chunk of cash on Kate to help her buy a house. Nothing fancy, but something that will allow her to start building equity on her own. As an all-1099 penniless artist (but a happy one!), she’ll never be able to do it on her own income, I fear, and it’s time for her to join the Sisterhood of Worrying About the Roof. As a boomer who benefited from an economic system that has since disintegrated, I have strong feelings about hoarding generational wealth. (I’m against it.) She’s our sole heir; might as well let her have some benefits now.

Entry level for a house in Metro Detroit that you don’t have to evict the raccoons from first: Roughly $200K. This is insane. But it’s the way we live today, so.

We’re taking the tree down today. I’m also pleased to report that yesterday’s ham-and-bean soup not only fulfilled the traditions of New Year’s dining, but it also used up the last of the Christmas ham, AND the accompanying Caesar salad did the same. As a Midwesterner, nothing makes me happier than using up leftovers. (Unless it’s buttoning up the house for winter.)

So, speaking of social media: A while back I joined a Facebook group about a concept called radical unschooling, just out of personal curiosity. I don’t radically unschool anyone, and am in fact a big believer in public education, but I’m also aware of how often it fails children who don’t fall into the mainstream, and while there are a fair number of utter crackpots in this group, there are many whose children struggle with structure. For the unaware, “radical unschooling” takes homeschool a step further, into basically trusting children will be led into learning by following their own instincts and interests. (Yeah, I know.) Kids stay home with a parent and, in the idealized version, go for a walk in a park and ask questions about plants and birds and wind and so forth, which the parent answers or, more often, directs the child to library books or YouTube videos or other resources that can answer them. But it’s pretty clear the idealized version doesn’t always pertain. One post asking for advice from the group was from a mother who went to a homeschooling fair and was scolded by a reading expert because her daughter was 8 years old and still illiterate.

“I thought she’d just naturally pick it up, and now I feel really bad, because this woman told me I’d missed a window!” she mourned. Whew.

A lot, and I mean a lot of the posts, suggest that someone’s child is neurodivergent, at least a little. And one topic comes up time and again: “Sensitivity issues.” One mother writes that her child won’t allow her to brush their curly hair, and now it’s matted. A child acts out in public, violently. Her kids have no self-control. The answer to many of these concerns seem to always be: The child has sensitivity issues. So my question for the group is: Who diagnoses sensitivity issues? I get the feeling lots of these parents aren’t into western medicine, so I doubt much of it is coming from doctors. Are sensitivity issues the new “oh I’m gluten-intolerant,” or is this just an extension of how we understand kids who are on the spectrum?

On to current events. :::opens newspaper page, slams it shut::: Ai-yi-yi, 2025. Let’s get through it in one piece.

The last two years of the Carter presidency coincided with the first two years of my career in newspapers, and one of my early tasks was to help edit the vast amounts of wire copy that went into the Sunday women’s section at the Columbus Dispatch. Fashion, advice, all that stuff, but today I’m thinking about Betty Beale, who covered Washington society. Her columns about parties at the French embassy seemed a little out of touch with central Ohio readers, but like I said, we had a lot of space to fill.

Beale, like most of permanent Washington, despised the Carters, considered them cornpone country white trash and never missed a chance to sneer at them. To be sure, the Carters were a very different first couple than we’d seen in previous administrations, and certainly did things differently than the Nixons, Fords, Kennedys and even the Johnsons. Rosalynn, you might remember, recycled the gown for the presidential inaugural that she wore to her husband’s gubernatorial inaugural celebration some years before. This was before stylists had coined the term “vintage” and “shopping your closet,” and Beale echoed the opinions that the First Lady has some responsibility to wear and promote American designers, and their current collections, not the old stuff. Jimmy preferred to carry his own bags, and she didn’t like that much, either. How trifling! How low-class! Doesn’t he know the American president should not humble himself to manual labor? When they elected to walk the inaugural parade route, rather than ride in a limo, why you could hear the tut-tutting all the way to Ohio.

It went on and on like this, and not just from Beale. The Carters, who voters elected in large part because they were so different from official Washington, were expected to just figure these things out. The country was in a weird, stressed-out place, having just survived Vietnam and Watergate, and I can’t really blame them for not going whole-hog for creature comforts, not when inflation was out of control and the OPEC oil crisis was still delivering shock waves to the economy. They were Democrats, after all.

Anyway, nothing Rosalynn could do would make bitches like Betty happy, and it seemed she knew that, and didn’t try very hard to please her. After Carter’s 1980 loss and the imperial Reagans’ arrival, Betty wallowed like a pig in slop. The Return of Glamour, etc. Nancy Reagan, an average-pretty former actress with no charisma to speak of, was hailed as the second coming of Jackie Kennedy. Her bedazzled dresses hung on her skinny shoulders, but they made the editors of fashion magazines fairly orgasmic with glee, simultaneously praising her “birdlike” size-2 figure and her choice of styles that would “showcase” it — whatever that means.

I also thought a lot in the last day about the extended Carter family, which was also looked down upon by official Washington. There was Billy Carter, the president’s brother, a classic good ol’ boy and drunk. There was Ruth Carter Stapleton, his sister and an evangelist, who converted pornographer Larry Flynt (it didn’t take). There were his children, four sons and a daughter, the latter, Amy, being a little girl when the family moved into the White House. She was criticized, too, because official Washington didn’t think children belonged at adult events. (These people fell silent when the Trumps would parade a 12-year-old Barron Trump, in black tie no less, into the Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve party. That was the last time I felt sorry for the little monster; imagine sitting with your parents, in a tuxedo, at a party where most of the guests are about 90 years old and all the women have strange, ruined, plastic-surgery faces. No wonder he never spoke a word aloud.)

And there was Miss Lillian, Jimmy’s mother, who had even hard-core city folk calling her “Miz Lill-yun” about 10 minutes after meeting her. Basically, the whole clan was the Waltons, at least for a while. Then they were Ma and Pa Kettle and their hillbilly fambly.

Soon we’ll say our official farewell. I really, really, really hope you-know-who doesn’t show up. I hope he has that much decency. (Ha ha! I know he doesn’t, the cunt.)

As longtime readers know, I go to the Eastern Market on Saturdays pretty much year-round. In season there’s the fresh local produce, and out of season there’s wholesale stuff from elsewhere, and in all seasons there are usually at least a few things I can’t get anywhere else, like…fresh eggs right off the farm. Local meats. Stuff like that.

My egg guy is a peach. He charges $6/dozen, but since I always buy two dozen and bring back my empty cartons, I give him $10 for two. This week, he said, “Man, can you believe what they’re asking down the way? Eight bucks!” I hadn’t noticed — I only have eyes for his eggs, with their vivid orange, pudding-like yolks — but I wasn’t surprised. Eggs have been all over the map, price-wise, in the last couple years, which I attribute to:

** Season. Hens lay less in winter, price goes up.
** Bird flu. When agriculture inspectors are taking out whole flocks to stop the spread, the price will go up.
** Cage-free mandates, a new one this year. As of January 1, all eggs sold in Michigan have to be from uncaged chickens. When I mentioned this, he said, “We’ve known that was coming for at least a year. Everyone’s already made the change, even the big outfits.”

However, this week the groceries have been stripping eggs from their shelves and hanging up apologetic signs about the new law, which has led to an uprising on right-wing Twitter — the only Twitter, these days — about CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS OUTRAGE and WHAT WILL THE DEMS INFLICT UPON US NEXT and so on. It fell to an unemployed young reporter to point out that the bill as introduced was sponsored by a Republican state senator, a farmer, way back in 2019, and passed by a GOP-controlled state legislature. Ha ha ha. However, the panic is real:

(This guy ⬆️ calls himself an “independent journalist” but does virtually no reporting I can see* other than tweeting, although he’s quite the aggregator of others’ work. *I don’t subscribe to his Substack; maybe it’s there.)

It seems to this egg-buyer that what’s being revealed here is the hollowness of the “we support local farmers” propaganda posters that hang in virtually every grocery I patronize. Granted, my part of Michigan isn’t that far from the Ohio border, and if all the eggs pulled from the shelves can’t be verified as being from cage-free hens, then that suggests they came from Ohio or someplace where poultry isn’t treated so well. I recall a widely loathed operation called Buckeye Egg from my time there.

Anyway, it’s fun to watch these wingnuts tearing one another up on Twitter. And no, I’m not telling anyone there about my egg guy at the market. He says he’ll keep the prices down until he can’t anymore, and I appreciate that as much as I do his brown eggs.

I have a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot of this in the coming months — persistently high prices and fights on Twitter between MAGA factions. I, for one, am bringing the popcorn.

Sunday with another holiday ahead of us this week. Enjoy it. Yesterday we hit 58 degrees and we did a bike loop of Belle Isle. Today? Sheets of cold, driving rain. The lesson: Take your pleasant moments where you can in the dark season. They’re rare enough.

The only thing I had on my calendar Thursday was a 9 a.m. appointment to give blood. Why do I still donate, knowing that the Red Cross emphasizes the “donor” part and never, ever talks about how they sell this donation? Eh, because people still need blood, and because I’m an adult enough to know that fresh blood is a commodity, and it would be foolish not to handle it as such. And the donation is at my gym, and the owner likes a good showing by members. People-pleasing is my business. Also, I’m HIV-negative and healthy, so: Shrug.

On the way over I drove past a few of the big trend in mid-level holiday decorations this year: The enormous inflatable. Regular inflatables have been around for a while, of course, but the enormous inflatable — big enough to approach the roofline on a two-story house — are new, the Christmas equivalent of the 12-foot skeleton. They’re sort of festively terrifying. I wonder what it must be like for a kid to look out the window and see a Rudolph or Frosty the size of a dinosaur swaying in the yard. But they’re catching on.

The problem, with it and all inflatables, is what to do in the daytime, the downtime for holiday decorations. Most people seem to turn the blowers off when the sun’s up, which leaves yards covered by what looks like holiday-colored parachutes, or maybe just dead snowmen and reindeer.

I got to the gym, spotted the blood crew on the basketball court, and started the routine. There’s always a lot of warnings and concerns about fainting, but I’ve never seen it happen. “So does anybody really faint?” I asked the phlebotomist.

“High-school kids. They go down all the time. And once one falls, they all do,” she said.

“But they’re young and healthy,” I said.

“And they never eat breakfast. Then they lie to us about how they ate breakfast. I asked one girl, ‘I thought you said you had a big breakfast. What did you eat?’ and she said, ‘Fruit snacks.’ I told her to eat a big lunch, and she came back and said she still felt sick. ‘What did you have for lunch?’ I asked. ‘A bag of apple slices.'” Damn, kids these days. I finished my bloodletting, drank a bottle of water, chose Cheez-its for my snack and headed out.

OK, Cheez-its AND mini Oreos. I wanted both salt and sweet.

It was a good Christmas hereabouts. I got many gifts, both thoughtful and practical, and Alan gave us a bike rack for our cars, one that slips into the trailer hitch and carries them on the outside, bus rack-style. That’ll be nice for exploring some car-free trails in the warm weather, maybe heading up north. I had a dream once of spending a big chunk of winter in a warm climate, taking both bikes and dog along, but after checking out seasonal rental rates for the Florida Keys (the only part of Florida I think I could tolerate), eh, maybe not.

Another thing I did over the last few days was watch a documentary — on Hulu, I believe — called “The Disappearance of Shere Hite.” Having remembered how “The Hite Report” on female sexuality rocked the usual suspects, it seemed worth a trot down memory lane. Hard to imagine her most newsworthy finding — the most women need more than PIV to reach orgasm — landed as hard as it did. But it did. And I came away thinking that younger women seem to have benefited from this. Far fewer men have Soprano-level opinions about oral sex, and thanks to Hite and many other people willing to talk about sex frankly, in general I think younger women might have an easier time of it than their grandmother’s generation did.

Then the Matt Gaetz report dropped, and: Nah.

Gaetz is a sleazebag of the first order, but we already knew that. I came away from it feeling for the girls who partied with him and his terrible friends. There’s always a lot of loose talk when something like this happens, that so-and-so “raped a child.” We can quibble over whether a 17-year-old is a child, and whether having consensual sex with a 17-year-old is rape. Personally, I don’t think it is, but I do think it’s fucking gross, and I wonder why there are so many girls that age willing to put themselves on websites like Seeking Arrangement and accept $400 to have sex with people like Gaetz and his friends at parties. They’ve been desensitized by porn, yes, but it takes more than that to turn a junior in high school into a prostitute. I suspect it takes lots of mom’s boyfriends, virtually no life of the mind beyond wondering what the Kardashians will be up to next, an obsession with social media and a few other poisons in the cultural stew to do it. (Although I also acknowledge there have always been girls like this, and likely always will.) Soon enough she’ll show up in porn loops with her hair in pigtails, pretending to be 15 again. She won’t fool anyone.

Gaetz, for his part, should be tarred and feathered. Failsons like him never are.

Don’t mean to bring you down this near-holiday weekend! It’s a unique liminal space, the only one of the year. Enjoy it.

For a few years, I would volunteer to work Christmas Day. For another few years, I was required to work Christmas Day. I never saw it as a big deal — when I was more connected to my birth family, we celebrated on the Eve, leaving the holiday itself as a yawning void, so might as well make some money and collect the chip to cash in later, for a holiday you really wanted off. The required-work years were all from home, so it was easy to keep my laptop open and check in every 15 minutes or so. Easy-peasy.

For a newspaper reporter, Christmas is either drudgery or tragedy. Go do a story on the B’nai B’rith volunteers who bring food to firehouses and hospitals — that’s drudgery, as is a bright on the slammed-for-hours Chinese restaurants, full of happy Jews enjoying their own Christmas tradition. Tragedy is the sort of thing that happens somewhere, every year: A fatal accident caused by bad weather or impaired driving. One year in Columbus a guy went to midnight Mass and while he was gone, his house caught fire and his entire family died. (Thanks, God!) Another year, an Alberta-clipper cold snap followed a snowstorm and broke water mains and other infrastructure all over the city. (You learn to carry a pencil at times like that, because pens freeze.) Yet another, a guy who’d robbed a bank and waited to be arrested, just to have a warm place to sleep, was bailed out by a softhearted man who didn’t think anyone should spend Christmas behind bars.

The underwear bomber — that was a Christmas story. As I recall, the editors of a certain Detroit paper couldn’t get a single reporter to answer the phone and roll to the airport to gather whatever fact-shards could be found there. (Damn caller ID!)

In…1979, I believe, unless it was 1978, J.C. and I went to a movie on Christmas Day, then headed to a local radio station, so he could record a review for a show he was contributing to. We got on the elevator with another station employee, who looked at us and said, “It’s a rule: The Jew works Christmas.”

Whatever your tradition, whatever your employment, I hope that if you have to work, someone brings you a nice warm plate of something good to eat, and it’s either as busy or as boring as you like. Maybe bring a book to read.

As for me, I’m reading about Matt Gaetz, who the incoming president of the United States thought qualified to be the top lawyer in the country. That person — incoming president, that is — also is going on again about buying Greenland.

The next four years are going to be long and miserable. But let’s enjoy the last good Christmas in the last good year. I’ll be back sometime after the holiday.

I’ve been doing this so long I can no longer remember if I’ve told a particular story before, but a quick search suggests maybe not*, so what the hell. Old women are allowed to repeat themselves.

I saw a Saturday Night Live sketch on office Christmas parties, which reminded me of the terrible ones we had in Fort Wayne, with one exception. You’d think a newsroom could throw a fun party, but we were cursed in some way. The job of organizing was usually given to the executive editor’s secretary, and her budget was limited. One year we had the worst chicken of my life — it seemed to have been boiled. The entertainment was a local elementary school choir, who didn’t sing Christmas songs but music that had been written for a non-denominational holiday play nobody knew, so the songs made no sense and weren’t very good, either.

She also invited a high-school girl who’d won a state speech championship to perform for us. She chose a dramatic dialogue where she played both parts, one an older, old-fashioned black woman and the other her younger, angrier daughter. The daughter was trying to convince the mother that white people never had her best interests at heart, but the mother was sweet and religious and believed it would all work out, praise Jesus. The climax, for me, came when the daughter exploded, “Mama, they call us n—–s behind our backs!” Ohhh-kay! That’s getting us in the holiday spirit!

The next year we, as in my colleague Adrianne and I, went to management in October and suggested we’d be willing to take over the job. We spent the paltry budget on deli platters and found a local bar with a private basement room. It was a little small for our purposes, but that only led to the convivial feeling. Open bar until the money ran out, then cash bar, mix tapes of bumpin’ holiday music, and we all had a great time. The night ended with a men’s room singalong of “The 12 Days of Christmas,” only with improvised lyrics. I remember “six urinals flushing!,” and a designer standing near one would do so. Some years later, we did something similar, with a karaoke machine. I recall an overnight sports guy, whom some privately called Boo Radley, wowing us with his interpretation of “Friends in Low Places.”

But the last one I endured there was pretty grim. It was held in the newsroom, over the lunch hour. Management kept finding new depths of cheapness, and I think they contributed a wan, unappetizing ham, not even Honeybaked. The rest was potluck, and the entertainment was a staffer with a keyboard and his own repertoire of Christian music.

All my employment after that was at small outfits, so the holidays could be observed in restaurants, at a couple pushed-together tables. They were fine. Lunch, a drink or two, and then home. At Deadline Detroit, we made it a dinner, at a Mexican restaurant with very good food that also allows guests to carry in their own booze, i.e. a perfect venue. The boss picked up the check. He probably spent more on six or seven of us than cheap-ass Knight Ridder, a major corporation, did on that stupid ham.

The parties in Columbus were much more in the traditional spirit of a holiday bacchanal — heavy-pouring bartenders and a quiet little library clerk throwing up in the hallway.

All this by way of saying we saw this movie, “Office Christmas Party,” on Christmas Day 2016, and it was very funny. Great cast.

* on a subsequent search, I see I did tell some of these stories, in 2005. Some details are different, but the gist is the same. Oh, well. It’s what old ladies do.

Tell us a Christmas/holiday office party story if you’ve got a good ‘un, eh?