(Boxing Day in London, 1836. Steel etching from The Spectator.)
Magnificent to irritating is how I would chalk up Christmas Day. The baroque feel of the celebration was fully conveyed with a traditional dinner of turkey and all the trimmings and sides down with Jiggs and Ludmilla, with a nog or two and some fine wine to go along with it.
Between the meal and the pumpkin pie was a viewing of a 1987 tribute concert to crooner Roy Orbison, held at the Ambassador Hotel’s famed Cocoanut Grove Lounge. It was called “A Black and White Night,” since that was the way it was photographed a quarter century ago.
(Roy and The Boss at the Black and White Concert at the Cocaonut Grove, 1987.)
The cast included s a mind boggling line-up of musicians, almost all of them still rocketing upward in their careers. The Boss, Bruce Springsteen, played lead guitar, backed by Elvis Presley’s TCB Band, with Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Jackson Browne and J.D. Souther rounding out the crew. Singing back-up vocals were Bonnie Raitt, Jennifer Warnes and k.d. lange. In the audience was Billy Idol, Patrick Swayze and Kris Kristofferson.
Hard to believe. It is one of Jiggs favorite music videos, and well worth a look just to see the back up players. Orbison died the year after the concert, and the Ambassador Hotel and the Lounge are gone now, too, along with the pantry off the hotel kitchen where RFK was shot. Amazing. It was long enough ago that tobacco smoke wafts through the spotlights like coastal fog.
So it wasn’t particularly seasonal, but by late afternoon I was about burned out on carols, and it was perfectly acceptable to close out the spiritual with the secular. And that pie.
Damn, that was good.
I wandered back up the hall after licking my plate and bidding my hosts a “Merry Christmas” and threw in the “Happy New Year” to get ready for the transition after midnight.
I looked around the unit again to see if my mobile phone had somehow miraculously re-appeared. It had not, and I was stuck with the real possibility that I had left it at Willow with the last of the pre-Christmas cheer.
I checked the police cruiser again to see if it had fallen under the driver’s seat. No dice. I sighed and walked back toward the unit and looked up at my strings of bright lights and those of the six other holiday celebrants on the pool side of Big Pink’s formidable ramparts.
Unit 205 had gone from magnificent to irritating. Apparently the Warrant Officer got orders to Arkansas from the National Guard Bureau and decamped in the brief period between my trip to the farm and return. Instead of holiday cheer, the bare interior of the place was bathed in harsh white from inside. The festive cascade of lights was still attached to the balcony, apparently forgotten in the move, and were as dark on the exterior as the interior was garishly bright, right through the night with no one around to turn them off.
Which naturally made me think of Boxing Day which would arrive in the morning. It is also known as the Feast of St. Stevens, for which I have held three contrary definitions in my life.
As a kid, I assumed it had something to do with fisticuffs, probably held, I surmised, in the wake of everyone being so nice to one another in the vane attempt to make Santa’s “Nice” list. Turns out that was not true, and I thought then it must be the phlegmatic British way of getting Christmas behind us and boxing up the decorations.
That definition survived until just this week, when I discovered that was not true, either. Apparently Boxing Day channels some of the traditions of the old Roman Saturnalia, in which gifts were presented from slave-owners to their chattel, and later, from employers to their servants and tradesmen. Since the “downstairs” crowd was busy serving their betters at table on Christmas, it became customary for the help to be permitted to spend the day after visiting their families. They would take along boxes of cash or presents as a sort of year-end bonus.
Swiftly incorporating the new information, I was relieved to discover that there is no requirement to spend the day putting Christmas back in the boxes for the next year. Having no direct employees, there are no other obligations in that regard.
It was still early, though, and there was no reason to go out. On the recommendation of a close friend, I decided to stream a movie and see if I could stay awake. The recommendation was about one of those Pixar computer animation features called “Despicable Me.” I have not watched an animated feature in some time, and mixed a whiskey to give it a try.
(Criminal mastermind, three adorable orphans and some Minions from Despicable Me, a film from Disney Pixar).
There are two films in the series now, and I was advised to watch them in sequence, or else the story would not make a great deal of sense, not that it did in any strict definition. I guess I would call it a tale of redemption, as an evil criminal mastermind is transformed into a doting father to three cute orphan girls across the two films.
I was pleasantly surprised to note the quality of the animation and the design of the film. There was nothing that links Despicable Me 1 & 2 to the season, but there isn’t anything about that in the other classic holiday movie “A Christmas Story,” which is a mash of several Jan Sheppard stories into a rollicking yarn about- I think- a Red Ryder BB gun.
I got sucked into the story, and actually made it through both films before I felt the tug of the eiderdown. It was still just before midnight when I got down, and the classical radio station was still broadcasting carols. They quit at midnight and got back to the secular stuff in good time, and now, it is Boxing Day.
Jasper wrote me on my Facebook page to say that my phone is safe behind the bar at Willow, and for the moment, all’s right with the world.
Happy New Year!
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303