When Christmas Is Finally Over

You are left with a hollow feeling after all that relief that you pulled it off. You fight the desire to watch A Christmas Story one more time or Bing in Holiday Inn or White Christmas. The tree is beginning to lose its needles and your bank account has been hollowed out...and still you just cant quite believe its all over. And there is some loss there. A door closing on some distant past that you as an adult can only get a glimpse of a few times. Sometimes, almost never.

And it is like being a kid again. Christmas is one big look back to when you were young, Your own children experience it as a first time but for all the adults it is a well trod road that ends on December 26th and then finally when all the ornaments and decorations are packed away for the next year. And maybe it is all the old Christmas movies that does it or it is as simple as putting the brakes on our very important lives for just a day and that's when those memories move in and you remember getting a first bike or loved ones who have passed or just the simple pleasure of being in your home and feeling for once this is enough.

But it ends. And like that incredible lookback at simpler times that is most Christmas Movies it is a nostalgia trip into your own simpler, younger self that lurks behind that adult trying to get all done all the time. So you cant help but feel wistful that it all went by once again too fast and that maybe next year you can slow it down and enjoy it more, but Christmas has its own timetable and it is but once a year and so the best we can do as we leave the attic or the basement and turn off the light on all those memories is know that in twelve months we can do it all over again. 

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


 

Who Wants To Make A Christmas Movie?

There has been a fair amount of studio interest in Real Santa my story of a man who becomes Santa Claus to keep his daughters belief in Santa alive. Lets face it since Elf there has not been any great family movies so maybe the studios think Real Santa  might be the answer. I started thinking about what makes a great Christmas movie and I settled on some basics.

One a Christmas myth in danger of being shattered. Miracle On 34th Street takes on the concept that Santa Claus could be real if someone said they really were Santa Claus. Who is to say they are not Santa Claus. And John Gailey the lawyer attempts to prove Kris Kringles authenticity in court and his bailed out by the United States Post office giving him proof that Santa does indeed exist. The myth of Santa Claus remains intact.

Or the moral allegory. Its a Wonderful Life. George has thrown away his life and now he has a chance to find what he has missed. All this of course done by an angel Clarence. Same with the Cary Grant movie The Bishops Wife. The path not chosen by David Niven is pointed out by the antics of the angel Dudley. The moral is that we may be redeemed through the miracle of Christmas

Of course there are the movies that are just entertainment Christmas fodder. White Christmas, Holiday Inn, National Lampoons Christmas Vacation. Feel good films celebrating the nuttiness of Christmas. Where Real Santa fits in probably somewhere between a moral allegory and the nuttiness of Christmas.

We will see if there is room for one more Xmas movie.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
Real Santa...how far would you go for your children?

The Commoiciolism of the Holidays

Yeah commoicialims is the worst. Make a buck. Make a buck. Don't care what they stand for. Just make a buck. Make a buck. So says Alfred in Miracle on 34th Street with his New York Accent.  And  we know what he means watching the Macy Day parade where every float represents a brand or a product and we are hit with every Broadway show and every commercial. Make a buck. Make a buck. And you try and find some meaning in the Juggernaut of American Consumerism where everyone seems happy as pie spending a fortune on Black Friday.

And yet you feel uncomfortable with all of it. It couldn't have always been this way. Surely we are haunted with the thought there were simpler holidays where the true meaning of being together and enjoying family was preeminent. And so we look in the Christmas movies for some meaning or we see people we haven't seen all year and think well this is all good.

And we partake but we feel Alfred's frustrations as he vents about how Christmas seems buried under a corporate bent on selling as much as they can during out festive holiday. And maybe that is the way it always was but you like to think that the Macy Parade was really just a parade once of floats and bands and that the Friday after Thanksgiving was just a day. Of course Alfred was venting in 1942 about commoiciolisms.

www.williamhazelgrove.com


www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

That Holiday Hangover

It has nothing to do with alcohol, but that could be part of it. It would be easy to ascribe the fuzziness, wooziness, utter exhaustion of the holiday hangover to making merry a bit much and once the alcohol filters out then the world would return to it's everyday equilibrium. But this hangover is a combination of money spent, days lost, family insulted, visibility lost, vocations nonexistent, while dancing with the ghost of Christmas past present and future. Because it is during the very holidays we celebrate our childhood that we glimmer mortality from drinking and eating horribly for weeks.

So it is part food coma as we trudge back to some semblance of reality and it really is a good thing we only see our relatives once a year lest we shoot them dead. What is is about siblings that become so horribly dysfunctional one can scarcely believe you occupied the same house for all those years? And parents lord in as part parent, friend, confidant, boss, irritant, until you just want to run back to your job or your office or your bedroom and repeat, I have grown up, I have grown I have grown up.

And while this rolls on you are Christmas in a very real sense and it is for the children beats in your head as you stay up until four AM and then stagger out a bleary eyed Santa ready to put it all on for the children who see only the glory of the season. And so you suck it up, drink some more coffee, inhale some more bad coffee cake and plow through the day before heading to the relatives. And isn't it amazing that Uncle Dick is still unemployed after twenty four years? And how long is Jennifer going to hang out in Hollywood as a waitress? And how did your brother marry such an idiot? Doesn't your sister see her husbands been screwing around on her for ten years!

But all this is swept under as you exchange gifts and drink champagne and Baileys and Vodka and beer and eat all the salty ham your poor blood pressure could ever manage and all the dry bland turkey you could ever stuff into your mouth and then the sweets the sweets the sweets! Is chocolate poisoning possible? You wonder as you sit straight up a three AM with your heart beating like a tom tom. Never never again you swear. I will never eat again! I will never drink again! I will never have my sister and brothers kids over to dismantle my house again and throw my cellphone into a cup of Diet Coke!

And so you emerge for a few days. Struggle to work with little sleep and all sorts of chemicals doing all sorts of things to your brain. You pass other fellow eye-creased revelers stumbling through their routines. And then, just about the time your colon adjusts, your credit card barks that it is still alive, and you begin to get your feet on the ground, it's time for....NEW YEARS!

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

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

TO MY BIG BROTHER GEORGE

AND so it goes. The final line of It's A Wonderful LIfe. I always watch that movie and I appreciate the line. But, really what does it mean? George has no money. He is in debt. His life insurance policy is all he has. As Henry Potter, the villain says, "You're worth more dead than alive George."
So, what does his brother Harry mean by that final toast? Surely, he speaks of the riches of a well lived life. George has many friends and is loved and this is finally what gives him his wealth. I wonder how many people think of wealth in those terms. I would say we have to redefine wealth. I have come up with a new criteria. Now that I have a family and I see the sands of time slipping away, I think we have all been swindled into thinking what true wealth is. This is my criteria for wealth:

When was the last time you came home early from work?When was the last time you didn't go into work to spend it with your family?When was the last time you called up a friend and did something with them for no reason at all?When was the last time you spent the entire day with your family doing nothing?When was the last time you slept in?When was the last time you took a walk? When was the last time you curled up with a good book?When was the last time you turned off your cell phone or beeper?When was the last time you planned to do absolutely nothing?When was the last time you didn't try and fill all your time with workWhen was the last time you did something with your son or your daughter?When was the last time you watched a sunset? A sunrise? When was the last time you looked at the stars?When was the last time you walked through the woods?When was the last time you didn't read the newspaper or get on the Internet and didn't care what was happening in the world?When was the last time you remembered what it was to be a kid again?When was the last time you went to a coffeehouse with a book?When was the last time you had a party and didn't' give a damn about the cost or what it did to your house?"When was the last time you read poetry?

Well, you get the picture. I have come to view wealth a whole lot differently. I saw a man the other day in front of his million dollar vacation home on a beautiful lake. His son was out on the dock. The man came out and swept the dock while his son watched. When he was done, the man went back into the house. I wondered if that man knows that one day his son won't be there at the end of the dock. So I guess that's what Harry Bailey was saying in the end. He was toasting his brother who didn't have any money but had all the things that money simply can't buy. Time. Money can't buy time and that is precious.
So I say it to loud and clear, here's to George, truly, the richest man in town. Amen.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com