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


 

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
 

Holiday Blues

The holiday blues come in different forms. There is the usual loneliness that people feel and then there is the utter dysfunctionality of family. Lets face it these are people you no longer live with and there is a reason for that. If no one shoots anyone or offends anyone for life then it has been a good holiday. Maybe juggling nitro glycerin would be the metaphor for interacting with egos bruised from history and time. But there is another sort of blues that comes in that is much darker than the normal run of the mill holiday blues. It is an existential threat that hovers right next to the ungodly amount of work and then just outright boredom.

Holidays are for kids. Well put. They are and if you are an adult then you go into a quasi combat mode of "getting things done." At a point there is too much to be done so you settle for controlled chaos and a "lets just get through this." Work on Monday  never looked so fine .But  then you tell yourself these are the best times with family and you try and find those moments. But you are bloated and tired and there is that strange empty isolated feeling. It is an existential dread.

You are another year older. Your friends have drifted to points unknown. You bust your ass routinely and can take a nap in a nanosecond. You are one step closer to the end. You do not dwell on these thoughts but they run in the background like a computer program blinking time is limited time is limited. And so you try and account for the year passed and really all you see is that is going faster and you are strangely edgy now. You can barely perform the niceties but getting up the tree and decorations have fried you out. What does it matter if we are going to die anyway. Some  of us sooner than later.

But that passes too and you think; what the hell, this is the holidays. Why aren't I more happy? Why does everyone else seem to be doing cherry things and having a great time? You have no idea. All you know is that like the holidays, the holiday blues come but once a year. And all you can do is grin and hold your glass high.

This too shall pass.

www.billhazelgrove.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

Those Xmas letters we love to hate

Tis the season and the xmas letters flood into our mailbox from friends old and and new. Tis the season and the traditional Xmas card has been given a face lift with multiple Internet photos on laminate with a letter inside the old yuletide tradition of merry Christmas and Happy New Year. The photos are glanced at and the boy and girl of yesteryear are now lounging against cars and and looking more and more like mini adults. Then that letter falls out and sails to the floor.

You open the letter knowing full well what is coming. Uncle Bud got his appendix out but they are having a hell of a time with his colon and that waste bag, but he's out golfing and running in the NY Marathon next year and teaching disabled kids in the inner city in his spare time. Or Mary and John just bought another villa in France and their kids are off to Yale and Harvard and Jeremy has just finished a new procedure that will revolutionize brain surgery while Jack hacks it out in Afghanistan after turning down three offers from the NFL. Or maybe it is the hard luck story of Jim and Bernice who have been unemployed now for ten years and just lost the house but still have their faith in God even though Jim got run over by a garbage truck and an asteroid landed on Bernice on her way to the soup kitchen.

You get the drift. The question is are these cards more beneficial to the sender or the recipient? I would say the writer of these yuletide novellas receives the greatest bang for the buck. We are the unwitting readers of anothers lilfe and it is not even fiction. Like a lot of non fiction it falls into the mundane or the trivial or the self indulgent and the entertainment factor goes right out the window. This of course is right in line with the age of Facebook and our fifteen nanoseconds of fame. The only difference is you can just log off if you choose not to read someone's blatherings. Those damn letters have a way of hanging around until after New Years.

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

Readers and the Psychic Noise of the Holidays

You are outgunned on the holidays. Woe to the reader looking to dive into that novel or biography during the R and R of Turkey Fest. You will open your book against a wall of electronic sound. The new televisions are not only flat they have Surround Sound Dolby Sound Concert Levels and they literally can shake the house. During family Holiday Rama these televisions chase the reader from room to room in search of a moment of solitude. Our modern holidays have become hell on earth instead of peace on earth. There is no peace in the digital age.

Not only are the televisions chasing you down but computers weigh in with their beeps and boops and then throw in the talking kids toys and IPOD speakers and you really can't' hear yourself think. But it is the televisions that have changed our holidays for good. They rule us now. Our life is subservient to our Plasmas decked on the walls on the counters over our beds in our bathrooms and in our basements. They are literally everywhere and they run twenty four seven. Our televisions have become the extra guest we just cant get rid of and most of us don't want too.

So that leaves the lone reader with his book or kindle looking for a crevice to get a few pages under the belt. Not an easy task for the man or woman in a modern family. The modern family is wired and televised and part of Holiday Fest is Electronic Fest. Everyone is on their laptop or IPOD so you have to wonder how much real cheer is being spread between humans. It would seem the main holiday interaction is between human and cyberspace. The digital age has taken our fascination with bits and bytes to a new level where we wonder more about out next text or email than Uncle Buds Christmas toast.

So the reader has to work hard. He must stake out his territory and read quickly. I suggest the garage or the car. Maybe outside with a flashlight. A couple of pages is really a victory in this day and age.

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