Charlie Brown Christmas - Again
We flagged the Charlie Brown Christmas Special for watching this year. A little pop-up came up on the television screen a few nights ago telling us it was time, we fiddled with our cable service, and it took a couple of minutes to get the right channel, we wanted the high-definition version.
We started with the scene where Charlie Brown confesses to being "depressed". And that is the crux of the whole show. That in the middle of the happiest time of the year, a supposed small child would confess to one of his peers (that would be LInus) that he was feeling down. And each year since the early sixties, that show has been on.
We only started watching it the last couple of years. And this year we could not finish watching it. It is a fairly short cartoon, but it set our teeth on edge. Maybe it is just us, because we checked on Amazon, and there are over 230 reviews of the special. That is a lot of people who grew up with the show. We did not grow up with it. We ignored it for decades. But now, out of nostalgia, we do look back on the halcyon days of yore, when conspicuous consumption was the rule, in the show they actually refer to an aluminum tree.
This year maybe things are not so conspicuous. But we feel from watching the television, that we should buy, buy, buy. And that is not a bad thing, not really evil, because the workers in the stores need their jobs too. We sell stuff here, mostly books, but maybe we should be reading more, or listening to our own compact discs, since the television is hypnotizing us with the endless parade of things that we don't really want. Here is our little version of a Charlie Brown sweater. We took the zig-zag line and made it like a stock market graph.
We think back over the many Christmases, and we know that they were not always filled with glee. It is the darker time of year. Even for people who do not celebrate Christmas. Maybe it is different in the Southern Hemisphere, there it is the beginning of summer.
Maybe we need one of those light boxes that we saw on the Doctor Oz show. They generate a high lumen light that dispels the seasonal blues from the shorter days. Actually here in Central Texas, we should just walk outdoors, We are just about far enough south in terms of latitude, that we could probably get some extra Vitamin D in our systems if we went out at mid-day. But we need to get out and get some Vitamin D.
We cannot complain since on the plus side, it has been raining here in Central Texas. The local streams are no longer bone-dry, though we look hopefully at the skies, since the reservoirs are still mostly emptying, even with the mild rains.
The last few days have been gray and cold. After all the record-breaking heat over the summer, it is a refreshing change, somehow we think we should be re-radiating the heat that we stored up during the last 6 months for so, but that is not working. It is probably all a matter of mental attitude. We saw a guy featured on a program about Barrow, Alaska, and when it was 30 below, he walked around in a tee-shirt. We don't know how he did it, because that is frost-bite weather, but he has somehow acclimated himself to it. He was interviewed by Jim Cantore on the weather Channel, just type in Barrow on their video search to see this remarkable man's adaptation.
Here is the special on DVD, available on Amazon for a reasonable price:
We started with the scene where Charlie Brown confesses to being "depressed". And that is the crux of the whole show. That in the middle of the happiest time of the year, a supposed small child would confess to one of his peers (that would be LInus) that he was feeling down. And each year since the early sixties, that show has been on.
We only started watching it the last couple of years. And this year we could not finish watching it. It is a fairly short cartoon, but it set our teeth on edge. Maybe it is just us, because we checked on Amazon, and there are over 230 reviews of the special. That is a lot of people who grew up with the show. We did not grow up with it. We ignored it for decades. But now, out of nostalgia, we do look back on the halcyon days of yore, when conspicuous consumption was the rule, in the show they actually refer to an aluminum tree.
This year maybe things are not so conspicuous. But we feel from watching the television, that we should buy, buy, buy. And that is not a bad thing, not really evil, because the workers in the stores need their jobs too. We sell stuff here, mostly books, but maybe we should be reading more, or listening to our own compact discs, since the television is hypnotizing us with the endless parade of things that we don't really want. Here is our little version of a Charlie Brown sweater. We took the zig-zag line and made it like a stock market graph.
We think back over the many Christmases, and we know that they were not always filled with glee. It is the darker time of year. Even for people who do not celebrate Christmas. Maybe it is different in the Southern Hemisphere, there it is the beginning of summer.
Maybe we need one of those light boxes that we saw on the Doctor Oz show. They generate a high lumen light that dispels the seasonal blues from the shorter days. Actually here in Central Texas, we should just walk outdoors, We are just about far enough south in terms of latitude, that we could probably get some extra Vitamin D in our systems if we went out at mid-day. But we need to get out and get some Vitamin D.
We cannot complain since on the plus side, it has been raining here in Central Texas. The local streams are no longer bone-dry, though we look hopefully at the skies, since the reservoirs are still mostly emptying, even with the mild rains.
The last few days have been gray and cold. After all the record-breaking heat over the summer, it is a refreshing change, somehow we think we should be re-radiating the heat that we stored up during the last 6 months for so, but that is not working. It is probably all a matter of mental attitude. We saw a guy featured on a program about Barrow, Alaska, and when it was 30 below, he walked around in a tee-shirt. We don't know how he did it, because that is frost-bite weather, but he has somehow acclimated himself to it. He was interviewed by Jim Cantore on the weather Channel, just type in Barrow on their video search to see this remarkable man's adaptation.
Here is the special on DVD, available on Amazon for a reasonable price:
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