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Dear friends,

Apologies to one and all.  (I am listening to Le Show right now, and as I typed the word “apologies,” Harry Shearer started reading the Apologies of the Week.  I love it when the universe decides to play along with me.) Having set the standard for long-winded bloviating on my first two weeks out of the blogging gate, I now find myself offering little more than interstitial crumbs.  Part of it, I’m sure, is that I’ll be offline for four days (Lloyd and I are headed to my parents’ house in Philadelphia on Christmas Eve and will be back on Sunday).  My brain has figured this out, and decided to start Christmas early.  I’m sure that after four days of reading the papers, playing Perquackey with my mom, sitting in the tv room eating cheese and drinking red wine and watching Lidia Bastianich’s show on PBS and wondering drunkenly if we can make that nice lasagne even though we don’t have any noodles or cheese or eggs or meat or spinach or sauce or parsley, I will be loaded for bear and ready to bludgeon my beloved friends with prose. 

I slept in an extra hour this morning, trying to recover from yesterday’s bake.  Packed up everything that had to be shipped out today, all of the cookies, all of the jars of jam—how do I forget every year that these things are heavy in quantity?—all of the fruitcakes.  I was around the block, halfway to the subway, when I heard a rip and felt a violent shift in balance.  One of the bags was giving way; oh, no, I thought, not the jams.  I had visions of an entire year’s work, the product of a hundred afternoons of standing over a boiling kettle when the temperature was already at 99 degrees, just so that I could say “Merry Christmas!  here’s your sour cherry jam!”, smashing onto the pavement.  Fortunately it was not the jam, it was the fruitcake, and I was able to catch them all before they fell to the ground.  But I knew that maneuvering all of this stuff onto the subway during rush hour would be impossible, and so I shuffled along, Caliban-like, toward the livery-cab stand underneath the elevated subway tracks on 31st Street, looking for someone willing to drive me into midtown.  I found a nice young man who was so willing, and thus I learned just how long it takes to drive the three miles from northwest Queens to 48th Street and Park Avenue at the peak of rush hour.  It takes 90 minutes, if you wondered.  Had I not been encumbered by pressies, I could have walked it in about the same time.  But if I had walked it, I would have missed the unique pleasure of hearing the worst Christmas song I’ve ever heard, or at least the second-worst.  (The very worst was that song floating around in 2001 that was supposedly the voice of God:  “You ask, where was I on September 11?” It is so awful that I have repressed the title, and the artist, and, well, everything about except for the feeling of nausea and murderous rage that welled up in me every time I heard it.) As we sat on the corner of Crescent Street and 39th Avenue for what felt like years, the radio playing one r&b reinterpretation of classic Christmas songs after another, I thought to myself, if I hear one more melisma, I will stick a blunt instrument into my own ear.

It was at that moment that the dj decided to take a break from Mariah Carey and play Lou Monte’s 1967 recording of “Dominick the Donkey (The Italian Christmas Donkey).” It has been 14 hours since I’ve heard it and I still feel unclean and embarrassed.  Oh, Bakerina, is it really that bad? Yes, it is.  It is worse than “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” Worse than “Please, Daddy, Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas” by John Denver.  Worse than that damn Chipmunks record.  Listening to “Dominick the Donkey” is like watching a drunk relative at a wedding hector a relative of the spouse’s, and gradually realizing that this is not good-natured hectoring, and things are about to get ugly.  It is like watching David Brent’s motivational speeches in The Office, where you press your fingers into your temples and try to will David Brent, stop, please, stop, please.  At the end of the song, the dj said, “Now, you know for the rest of the day, you’ll be singing in your head, ‘chingety ching, ee-aw, ee-aw.’ You can blame me for that.” Ha ha ha.  Damn right I can, and I do.  Thanks, Richard.

(For those of you kind enough to click on the link, the last line in the second verse should be pronounced, “The labels on the inside say they’re made in Brook-a-leen.” Do you understand now why this song causes me so much pain?)

Fortunately, relief was at hand, for one of my pals from the always-reliable Plastic gave me a lovely and thoughtful gift, a mixer of Christmas music that does not make me want to kill, filled with good things like “Zat You Santa Claus” by Louis Armstrong, and “Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want to Fight Tonight)” by the Ramones, and “Spotlight on Christmas” by Rufus Wainwright (I have a monster crush on Rufus, and even with the knowledge that I lack the proper, uh, accoutrements to attract Rufus, I still think that he is cute as a bug, and his voice just drives me), and “Everybody’s Waitin’ For The Man With The Bag” by Kay Starr, and Guster’s wonderful “Donde Esta Santa Claus,” and Coldplay’s surprisingly charming version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” 1fastdog, if you’re reading this, you are a kind and excellent guy, and that cd you sent me is not only good and tuneful, today it may have just saved my life.  It certainly saved the life of a certain dj.