Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!
It’s been a rough fucking year for all of us except for the billionaires who somehow managed to become even more billionairy. So take a few moments to reflect on the things that have gone right. And let’s hope the new year is better.
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I’m grateful for your support. And for the presidential election going the right way.
Thanks David, for your work, and Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays to all the wonderful folks who read and post here at The Mammoth. ????♂️??♀️?
And we seriously appreciate what you do, David! (I say this from the future, it is Boxing Day here in Australia)
I’m spending Christmas with Linda; or as I call her Bitey McMurder Dog. She’s a Romanian rescue who hates men. So my job is just to hang out with her and get bitten. She’s had a rough time though so she’s entitled to a bit of a chomp.
And now, despite the occasional evil eye and growl, we’re managing to sit a few feet apart relatively cordially.
Joining the chorus of voices thanking David, we’re very thankful for your work.
Happy Christmas David!!!
Thanks to David & Happy Day to Alan & Bitey McMurder Dog!
I, too, am of the opinion that domesticated animals are entitled to bite every now and again if we don’t live up to the human end of the domestication bargain.
Also, too:
@Crip Dyke:
Lao Ban Santa’s myriad duties probably include ensuring that Jewish people (and others who don’t observe Christmas) get fed and entertained on December 25th:
Thanks for the awesome site David! Thanks for the awesome community everyone else!
@Alan Robertshaw, you’re a good egg. Thank you for patiently and kindly working with Linda and her understandable issues.
It’s Chinese food day here as well, and it’s on the way as I type. Huzzah!
@Lizzie, this is a very good year to hear from the future. Boxing Day is grand, but even better will be hearing from 2021, kicking ’20 to the curb.
May we continue to look forward to something better, as we mark this holiday season by our own baseline survival. Wishes for health and continued resourcefulness to all of you.
@David Futrelle – You too, thanks for this site!!
For the first time in years my family “had Christmas” on the 25th. Usually we do presents/dinner later to fit it around others’ vacation schedules – not an issue this time.
First year my boyfriend was over for Christmas – the only guest allowed as per pandemic “red zone” rules in Quebec.
I missed my cousin, who’s usually there, but I talked to her on the phone, plus my aunt I haven’t talked to in ages. (I’d written to her asking for some stories I might use as sort of background for my novel.) And L., the cousin, was saying that because she couldn’t be with us she’d convinced her mom to cook some turkey for Christmas.
My brother: “But did you do anything with her for Hanukkah?”
L.: “Yeah, we ate latkes.”
At least there’s food. I mean that! Food shortages on top of a pandemic would be disastrous, so thank random luck that’s not the case here. And we did see snow – it was a record-breaking high of 13 Celsius (!) during the day, but it started snowing in the evening.
Thanks so very much to you David, and for everything you do here – you’re an example of one of the great things this year that have kept me going! And everyone else here too, thank you too.
As Scotland moves into a new lockdown, my partner and I just had a very quiet Christmas Day together.
I’ve been so grateful for them and their company throughout this whole I, and their humour, their persistence and all of who they are.
I’ve found a resurgence in my writing and poetry during the pandemic, and joined a wonderfully supportive gothic writing group (international in make up and all about diversity), called Romancing the Gothic. They run amazing classes and talks for free here and have been a lifeline for me:
https://romancingthegothic.com/
Thanks, David, for WHTM during this challenging year.
Alan, thanks for being the guy that babysits the McMurder dog on Christmas. Ouch.
Mammotheers, Happy Holidays!
Merry whatever you want to get celebrated, be it Christmas, the tail end of 2020, a birthday, or any other celebration I don’t know how.
TBH, in retrospect, I have the feeling that 2020 is the year where the slide into hell slowed or even maybe reversed. I mean, with COVID and everything, but there were less frightening clues for future. It’s the year the brexit made shitty, but not the year the English decided to do that. It’s the year Trump did the most damage, but not the year he was elected.
Probably just me being too optimistic I guess.
Sad not to be able to see Spawn#1 for the first time ever, for midnight on the 24th when we are usually together for a not-celebration, but we did a shared-split-screen thing so we could spend the eveining talking and doing online crosswords and watching a film and eating ‘together’ (apart from the sudden attack of buffering when it seemed half the city was online at the same time :-s)
Thanks to David for creating this place and keeping it going, and to everyone here who helps make it what it is.
Good things here also include Trump losing the election, because it’s helped to slightly rein in the excesses of our own very Trumpian government who were counting on his support, so a huge thank-you to all of you who played a part in his downfall! (pace Spike Milligan).
Nice pics, Alan! All Bitey McMurder Dogs should have such a looker-afterer. (reminds me of when Dog got hold of a chicken bone from a rubbish bag someone had left out on the path; I was scared it might splinter so I took it out of her mouth without realising she hadn’t clocked that my fingers were even there – that was the one and only time I found out she could bite. Ow. :-s)
To David and all the regulars, Thanks for being here during this awful year, even when I make no sense, disappear for weeks on end and make inane comments. All the best for 2021.
I woke up still feeling a tad full from Christmas dinner. Also, it is quite cold (for Texas).
I’m grateful for David, for creating a place where so many awesome people hang out.
Happy Holidays, and I’ll add in my gratitude for the site too.
That said, you probably didn’t see my last message where I asked if something could be done about the “night mode” button that’s constantly on the screen. Can there be an option to hide/unhide it, or change settings from a menu? At least I’m not seeing the more annoying button right now that tries to get you to comment, so hopefully you’ve wrangled that thing.
I’d like to belatedly wish everyong a very Happy Isaac Newton’s birthday.
I’m thankful for this site too. And that we’ve had enough income to cover essentials all year. And without that peskty day job, I got an awful lot of writing done.
@Alan I’d ask you to give Bitey McMurder Dog a pat on the head from me, but it might be sangerous for your fingers.
My son drew a special christmas tree for 2020
Happy Hogswatch! And thanks David, for WHTM and all the crap you slog through.
@Sheila Crosby: Tell your son that he’s elegantly summarized Christmas 2020 (including the vaccine still being out of a lot of people’s reach.)
And I found this delightful account of a neighborhood HOA Umbridge who clearly has no freaking clue about some of the grotesque and macabre forms the Christmas Spirit™ takes in cultures where suburban white American Protestant capitalism doesn’t call the shots:
http://cheezburger.com/13190149/hilarious-saga-of-karen-vs-frank-the-christmas-gargoyle
What does she know of Krampus? Or the Yule Cat? Or El Caganer? Or even the ghost stories that were an established British Christmas tradition (a trope that ‘A Christmas Carol” reflects, and that’s even referenced in “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”—“There’ll be scary ghost stories/And tales of the glories/Of Christmases long, long ago.”) @Gwynfydd: Romancing the Gothic is therefore a thoroughly seasonally appropriate observance!
And David, thank you again and always for continuing to carry the standard.
Honestly, I have had a better year than most. My job is part of the food supply chain (we make vitamin/mineral premixes and nutritional food additives), so I never stopped working. My immediate family has co-morbidities like age, diabetes, and recent bouts with cancer, but we’ve all stayed healthy. My elderly parents did not get brainwashed by Fox News into being MAGA zombies. Hurricanes landed all around us, but the most serious damage we suffered was our mailbox blowing away. And we welcomed a canine addition to our family, a Chihuahua mix I named Penny. My “ugh 2020” angst has mostly been the things that everyone shared.
@ Sarah kay gee
Aww. Congratulations on the new family member.
Happy/Merry to one and all!
Growing up, I lived in a very mixed neighborhood with mainly Mexican Hispanic and Jewish neighbors and never heard of the Chinese Food on Christmas thing. There was a family down the street that always took all the neighborhood kids to the movies on Christmas Day. There was always a Disney re-release at one of the movie theatres where we lived.
Still don’t know if it was a present for us kids or the adults. We got to go to a movie and our parents got a couple hours respite from our gift-excited, cookie-fueled bombast, so best of both worlds, I guess?