Fastest Christmas Yet

Hard to say what made it so fast. Maybe losing a week after Thanksgiving. Maybe it is just everything is getting faster in a cyber world. But it was fast. Boom. Here and there and over. Not even enough time to see Macys windows and the lights in Lincoln Park or Its A Wonderful Life at the Music Box Theatre. Like a lot of people we have been backfilling after Christmas but of course it is not the same.

The Xmas blues comes a few days later when you face the winter. Could it be we are really in the countdown toward spring? And what does it say when we are continually looking from one date to the next. Ok Easter. Ok Fourth of July. Ok Thanksgiving. Ok Christmas. Ok New Years. That's right we do still have New Years.

But New Years didn't even live up to its reputation when I was still in the city and doing all the twenty something things. People were just sort of spent and the bad parties were legendary. But what the heck. We still have a few days to play Xmas tunes and stare at the tree. And you know what. NEXT YEAR we will get it all in.

After all there are only 361 days until next Christmas. Not so many.

Real Santa...how far would you go for your kids?
MOVIE RIGHTS SOLD!      
  Vicki Rocco of Modern Family optioned the movie rights of William Hazelgrove's Real Santa for her production company Small But Mighty Productions with an eye to a feature or a made for television movie. Ms. Rocco has to her credits, Modern Family, Arrested Development, Stand and Deliver, U23D, Empire Dreams, Heather, Britany Spears Live, and sees Real Santa as a classic that will pull in people hungry for a new take on the Christmas movie. "No one has done this. No one has taken on the physics of being Santa Claus. It is funny and heartwarming and has all the things we look for in any great Christmas movie."
                                           
STARRED REVIEW BOOKLIST

"If somebody doesn't make a movie out of this book, there's something wrong with the world.                                                                               
                                                                                                 David Pitts Booklist


"The author marries the everyday dramas found in the novels of Tom Perrotta and Nick Hornby to the high camp of Carl Hiaasen or Dave Barry. Adults looking for a funny holiday-themed tale that doesn't lose its sense of wonder in the face of realism will find a treat here. A lovingly crafted comedy about the madness that fatherhood inspires."
                                                                                              Kirkus Reviews


 

Holiday Stress for parents and Christmas for kids

You know that feeling. It is strange that right after Thanksgiving you should feel anything close to stress but something closes in on you when you go to get that Christmas tree. It is something dull and putrid that settles on your chest as you contemplate the titanic workload that is Christmas for any parent. There should have been some road sign, some warning that right after you had children the holidays became the workdays and that all those great times you remembered as a kid really were in the past. In fact you can't even remember them anymore.

You are Christmas now. You create the whole holiday from start to finish and you understand finally why your parents always zoned off in front of the television and had those hollow eyes and looked so damn tired at the end of the day. How could they be tired? Santa was coming! Tis the season to be excited about all those gifts coming your way on Christmas morning. Yet your parents looked like someone had driven over them over with a truck. They looked like they worked from morning to night and then stayed up very late for nights on end until everything was just perfect for Christmas morning. Now you know they did.

But every year it is a shock. For some reason you forget that the Christmas you remember from your childhood no longer exists. Yet for some odd reason you sort of believe it will come back right up to the point you sit down and figure out how many gifts everyone needs and how much it's going to cost and how much time you have to decorate the house, get up the tree, go to the in laws, wrap the gifts, buy the stocking stuffers and have it all done by December 24th that rushes up faster and faster every year.

And somewhere in the middle of it you just cant' reconcile this exhaustion with that kid who sailed through the holidays like a millionaire who just had another oil well come in. Somehow that kid still lurks around and encourages you to just hold on a little longer. Because somewhere, somehow, those golden holidays have to come back around. Maybe when the kids go to college.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January