Ho Ho Holograms and Lasers

Holiday cheer is in short supply in 2020. Under the weight of rampant news  the Coronavirus, political turmoil, and economic uncertainty, I find myself desperately grasping at any yuletide diversion. 

If you are similarly in need of such a diversion, you’ve come to the right place. This episode is based on an essay I wrote in 1995. It was originally published in several regional print publications, and was eventually included in the collection There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays, published by Papier-Mache Press in 1997. To my surprise, the book is still available. 

So, for your holiday enjoyment, here is “It’s New, It’s Improved, It’s Christmas.” Let’s see where it goes...

 The holiday season is a time of rituals. Some of these rituals — the shopping, the music, the decorations, and the food -- are comforting in their predictability. But the relentless nature of  the shopping, the music, the decorations, and the food can also leave you curled into the fetal position, whimpering in some dark corner. 

How you react to the various rituals depends a lot on your general disposition and your credit card balance. For my part, I love Christmas. But there is one Christmas ritual that really tangles my tinsel, and that’s the seasonal editorializing about how the modern celebration of Christmas pales in comparison to Christmases past. 

It’s not that the old notions of how to celebrate Christmas aren’t all cozy and romantic -- you can’t binge watch marathon showings of “It’s a Wonderful White Christmas Carol Story on Thirty-Fourth Street” without shedding a teardrop or two into your plate of Christmas nachos. It’s just that the loudest cheerleaders for “old fashioned” holiday celebrations reliably overlook the fact that back in the day people didn’t have the option of doing it any other way. 

Dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh? No thanks. When Christmas morning rolls around I’m happy to have a well-equipped SUV warming up in the driveway for the ride to grandma’s place. I figure a horse-drawn sleigh is big fun for maybe ten minutes. After that you’re going to want Old Dobbin the haul ass  back to someplace warm where the eggnog is spiked and the family can gather in the flickering blue glow of a giant Hi-Def television to contemplate the true meaning of football. 

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire? Sorry, no fireplace. We’ve got a furnace for heat, and stuffing nuts in there  voids the warranty. Any of the roasting we do these days is in the microwave, and I’m pretty sure that if you put chestnuts in the microwave they would become little Yuletide hand grenades. Although, if you’ve got a snootful of Yule Grog, watching chestnuts explore in your microwave might be a real hoot. 

Some people may see microwave ovens as a symptom of creeping non-traditional holiday-ism. But I’ll be you that if microwave ovens  were available in Charles Dickens’  day, the Cratchits wouldn’t have had to entertain an uncharacteristically giddy Ebenezer Scrooge  for however long it takes to cook a fine, fat goose.

Holiday entertaining is, in fact, the one area that even the most severe critic of modern practices would have to admit has not changed much since Tim was Tiny. A good holiday  celebration, then as now, still involved lots of food, free-flowing drink, and a gathering of family and friends -- some of whom you’re as happy to see as a subpoena. Just as the Cratchit’s Christmas was spent with a man who, for all they knew, had suffered some kind of head trauma, so the modern holiday gathering include relatives or acquaintances who, because they watch too many talk shows, and/or have poor personal hygiene, and/or fail to maintain scheduled medication, you would normally avoid like a plate of frosted botulism. But in the spirit of the season, you smile warmly at the mystery uncle wandering around half-crocked, holding a clump of mistletoe over his sweaty, balding head. 

Charles Dickens’ story wouldn’t have become the holiday classic it has if, having spotted on their doorstep an insanely grinning, raw-poultry bearing, fresh off a rough night Scrooge, the Cratchits had pulled their shades and pretended not to be home. Which is probably what I would have done. 

Instead, knowing full well his reputation as a career grouch, they welcomed him into their home, giving us a touching story that teaches a valuable  lesson about how a little Christmas spirit can get the boss to pry a little cash out of his seldom-opened wallet. 

Sure, Christmas has changed over the years. It now starts just before Halloween. And the modern Christmas involves a lot more technology. But that just means a bigger, brighter, louder Christmas, with lasers and holograms and stuff. But even with all the noise and glitz, and by my count three entire cable networks devoted to fatally syrupy holiday romance movies, the holiday season still represents a time of hope that the nut jobs of the world will wake up and realize that peace on earth is a win-win proposition for everybody. If making Christmas bigger and louder and shinier helps to get that message across, fire up the lasers. 

 

Production Resources

• Thanks to the YouTube Audio Library for the following music tracks:
  • Christmas Village, by Aaron Kenny
  • Jingle Bells, performed by E's Jammy Jams
  • We Wish You a Merry Christmas, by E's Jammy Jams
• Sound Effects provided by Freesound.org and PacDV.com
• Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Man on the Moon: Interview with Apollo 12 Astronaut Alan Bean

The previous episode of this podcast focused on aliens who have traveled through outer space to visit the Earth. This episode flips things around a bit to focus on a member of a very exclusive group of Earthlings who have set foot on solid ground that is not earth.

On November 14, 1969 a Saturn V rocket -- more than 360 feet long and weighing over 6 and a half million pounds, lifted off from Cape Kennedy carrying the Apollo 12 spacecraft. On board were three astronauts, mission commander Charles “Pete” Conrad, command module pilot Richard F. Gordon, and lunar module pilot Alan L. Bean.

On November 19th, after traveling nearly 240 thousand miles to orbit the moon, Pete Conrad and Alan Bean boarded the lunar excursion module, detached from the command module, and descended to the dusty gray surface below them, landing in an area known as the Ocean of Storms.

Conrad exited first, followed by Bean, to become the third and fourth human beings to walk on the lunar surface.

After two excursions to gather data and collect samples, they boarded the Lunar Module on November 20th to rejoin Gordon in the command module for the return trip to earth. On November 24,1969, Apollo 12 safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean near American Samoa.

In July 1973 Alan Bean returned to space as commander of the Skylab space station. In his lifetime, Bean spent a total of nearly 70 days in space.

In 1998 I had the incredible opportunity to conduct a live, in-studio interview with Alan Bean, who was then on a book tour promoting Apollo: An Eyewitness Account, which he co-authored with writer Andrew Chaikin. The book, which is still available, features original artwork by Commander Bean depicting his experiences in the Apollo program.

November 14, 2020 marks the 51st anniversary of the Apollo 12 mission. In celebration of that event, this edition of the Where It Goes podcast presents that interview.

In the interview Commander Bean shares his insight into his time as an astronaut, discusses the personal impact of being one of only 12 human beings to set foot on the moon, and offers his thoughts on the future of the human exploration of space.

The interview reveals Commander Bean to be a warm, affable, and humble man, everything you’d want from a hero.

Of course. all journeys come to an end. Commander Bean died in Houston, Texas on May 26, 2018, at the age of 86. He was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery, where he joins his Apollo 12 crewmates Richard Gordon, who passed away at the age of 88 in 2017, and Pete Conrad Jr., who died in 1999 from injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident. Conrad was 69 years old.

For more information about Alan Bean and Apollo 12 check out these additional resources:

• Book: Apollo : An Eyewitness Account 
• Alan Bean: First Artist on Another World 
• Alan Bean, Apollo Moonwalker and Artist, Dies at 86

In Space No One Can Hear You Snore

We’ve been conditioned by books, movies, and television to have certain expectations regarding extraterrestrial visitors. Whether they’re cute and cuddly, like ET, or hideous and rude, like the critters from the Alien and Predator films, we have it in our heads that visitors from beyond Earth will be, if nothing else, interesting. But there is another possibility...