Odd Santa

Try to picture this setting.



First off, it’s very hot, the sun’s beating down; we’re in the tropics. There’s a beautiful beach and the ocean, it’s the Mediterranean, is dazzling.

This is what they call the Turkish Riviera, and the name is justified; it can hold its own with the French Riviera.



Reason I’m telling you about this place is that this is, after all, the Christmas season. And some years ago I was in this tropical paradise and had a chance to meet Santa. The real Santa.

Everyone knows that ol’ S. Claus lives up in the frozen north with Mrs Claus and a houseful of industrious, non-union elves, not to mention a stable of reindeer, and that Santa has always lived there.

Not true.



Santa Claus was originally Saint Nicholas, who lived in the fourth century and who never saw the North Pole (and maybe never saw any snow). He was born and lived right here in the hot, sunny Turkish Riviera, though the name would not have been familiar to him.

I was there working on a tourism-promotion project for the Turkish government and I thought it would be interesting to show Santa’s real home, where he was born and raised.

As for the actual saint, Nicholas, he had been famous for his generosity, for the way he gave gifts to the needy. (Well, he should have; he was a saint.) He became known throughout the Christian world.



He wound up in Holland, where they changed his appearance somewhat. They also took his name and sort of Dutchified it: St. Nicholas became Sinterklaas.

When the Dutch lived in New Amsterdam they celebrated Christmas with Sinterklaas and all the English folks living around them thought the old fellow was sort of cool so they adopted him for their Christmas too.

They couldn’t quite pronounce “Sinterklaas” however; the closest they could get to it was “Santa Claus.”



So somehow the old fellow had metamorphosed from a 4th-century saint to a corpulent chap in a red suit who was always smiling about something.

One day I was standing on that beach, working, when an Orthodox Christian priest approached and asked if I would like to see the bones of St. Nicholas? Of course, I said.

He returned with a small case, beautifully made, lined with satin, that, he assured me, contained some of the bones of the Saint. I was aware of the thousands of kids who go to see Santa at Christmastime and here I was getting to see the real Santa.

For a fleeting moment I thought of saying that I wanted a pony for Christmas, but I couldn’t be sure Orthodox priests had a sense of humor. 






This week, if you’ve had the experience, the joys as well as the plain old hard work, of raising a teenager – and yes, I’ve been there, done that – check out the clever comments of A Mom on Spin.

Remembering Miss Gustafsson

Scene: Stockholm, Sweden, a few decades ago.

I was making a tourism-promotion film for the Swedish government. Included in the list of things to show in the movie was Stockholm’s magnificent department store “NK” -- pronounced “Enkaw.” A huge place, some 12 million visitors annually, and with a staff of 1200. The client very much wanted it in the film.



So I’m standing across the street taking its picture. As I was working an employee of the store came over to me with a strange question: “You’re American? Would you like to meet an old man who was a good friend of Miss Gustafsson way back when they were both teenagers?”

Of course I would. Any friend of Miss Gustafsson would be a friend of mine.

He took me upstairs and I met the old gentleman in question. He told me how they had both, right around the time of the end of World War I, worked together at NK, a couple of kids, in the same department.

Of course, he didn’t call her Miss Gustafsson; he called her by her first name, Greta.

One day an ad agency person – yes, they had ad agencies in Sweden even then, nearly a century ago – an ad agency guy came through their workplace. He was looking for a comely female employee they might be able to use in their newspaper advertising.

Truth is, Miss Gustafsson was then a bit more on the plump side than she was later, but she was selected to pose for the ads.

It could only happen in Hollywood – or in Stockholm. A movie director liked her pictures in the paper and she suddenly found herself embarked on an amazing film career. It was clear that the name “Gustafsson” had to go; she became Greta Garbo.

“Anna Christie,” “Grand Hotel,” “Anna Karenina,” “Camille” and “Ninotchka,” among other film classics, turned Miss Gustafsson into one of the great legends of screen history.

She later stated that she had never said “I want to be alone,” though that had become sort of her trademark. What she had said, she carefully explained, was that she wanted to be left alone, which was quite different.





This week, because of the huge snowstorms in various parts of our country, I recommend Willow's winter poetry over at Willow Manor. (As the child said in "The Winter's Tale": "A sad tale's best for winter.")

An Award from Raisin Chronicles?

My thanks, Jeanne. I'm new enough as a bloggoist -- tho old enough as an egoist -- to be quite pleased with such a gift. Joyeux, as they say in Bordeaux, Noel!

Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright,
In your Cadillac that night.
It's clear - no need for judge or jury -
'Twas "woman scorned" who brought the fury.
--William Blake (sort of)



Bicker Stumper:
I'M FOR PALIN!
(Michael, that is)
:-)

RECLINER DECLINER

I’ve always been a fan of recliners – got one in the living-room and one in the bedroom.

I come home at night and there’s this friend, my recliner, good to look at with its sharp, traditional styling, welcoming me with the promise of deep comfort. But truth is, the one in the bedroom, after years of faithful service, had reached a state of near collapse. It was pretty well worn out.

Look who’s talking. :-)

So I shopped around for a new one – on the internet, naturally.

The price range for such items surprised me. Some good-looking recliners were advertised for under 200 dollars; others were over the thousand-clam mark. Yet they looked about the same.

I decided to get a cheap one; a recliner is pretty much a recliner, Ned’s pa? I bought from a well-known business organization that will be nameless except that its advertising motto is “save money, live better.”

Well, I saved money. As for the rest…

When I filled out the order, there was one line of small print that should have represented to me a huge red flag waving energetically in the breeze. It read: “Some assembly required.”

As Alfred E Newman used to say: What, me worry? There should be no problem, I thought to myself; I’m as good a handyman as any average guy – which is probably, unfortunately, true.

It started off badly. The thing arrived in two huge boxes, each weighing a ton. By the way, have you noticed that many businesses these days describe delivery of their products, especially the large ones, as “curbside delivery.” In other words, they just dump the stuff in front of your house or garage and what happens after that is somebody’s business else.

After I had struggled to get the two huge boxes inside, I began the job of putting the various pieces together. After an hour or so I remembered a documentary I saw recently about the building of Hoover Dam. I wouldn’t want to exaggerate – assembling that recliner was not as difficult as building that dam – but it was only a matter of degree.

As Plato, or maybe it was Archimedes, once remarked: cheap is cheap. With a more expensive recliner if there were some assembly, my guess is that pieces that were supposed to fit together would actually FIT TOGETHER!

That, I was to learn, was not necessarily the case with cheap recliners. But I had saved money.

It was just as well that it was for the bedroom; the lashup that resulted, a recliner with one arm-rest drooping down in a forlorn way and the other sticking up at an odd angle, would not have contributed to the artistic and sophisticated, not to mention upscale, décor of my living-room – which has little enough such décor as it is.

I’d invite people over to see my new recliner, but I’d be afraid someone might try to sit on it. :-D





Each week I'd like to mention a blog I especially enjoyed. This week it's the way the Peach Tart spontaneously burst into dance while in line at Urban Outfitters. Check it out.

Hong Kong Adventure

A number of years ago I was shooting a film in Hong Kong.



The script called for a sequence with a Chinese farmer and his son, to be shot on a farm well outside the city. I had permission to shoot on the farm for only one day, Sunday, so we had to start early Sunday morning.

The actor playing the farmer was already at the location. With my crew I was waiting for the arrival of the boy who had been hired to play the part of the farmer’s son and who was to come with his mother. The mom, luckily, spoke good English. She would spend the day taking care of the boy while we worked. But they were late.

We sat there and waited.

Whoever first said that time was money must have been thinking about film production. We waited some more.

Finally, I could see the two of them hurrying toward us. The mother apologized profusely; the lad had slept late. Fine, I said, get in. Let’s go.

As we started off, the woman had a request. Her son had had no breakfast. Couldn’t we get something? He could eat it while we drove to the location.

If you’ve ever spent a very early Sunday morning in Hong Kong – and who hasn’t? – you are aware that the town is closed up just about as tight as a drum. However, I did espy a small hole-in-the-wall sort of place that seemed to be open. It had a sign in front that read “Portuguese Cakes.”

I had no idea what those were but any port in a storm, as the saying goes. I gave some money to my assistant and told him to get something for the kid’s breakfast.

We waited some more.

When the assistant showed up I was startled to see that he had a large tray loaded with half-a-dozen containers of the aforesaid cakes. It seems that a Portuguese cake, at least in Hong Kong, was a variation on the cream-puff theme: each container had a sizable piece of cake on the bottom with a whopping amount of thick whipped cream on the top. It was difficult just to have to look at such stuff early in the morning.

I believe that kid had never tasted anything like those “cakes” before; he ate them all, and with gusto.

To get back to our production, no one had told me that the farm, our location, was on top of a hill. Nor that the only way to get to it was on a small winding road – which zigged off to the left, then zagged off to the right, etc., etc.

The inevitable happened.

Our boy actor suddenly let loose with a monumental upchuck, probably of a dimension never before seen in that part of the Orient.

The rear seat of our vehicle – and unfortunately not just the rear seat – was covered with gobs of partially-digested gateaux portugais, which had somehow become transmogrified into something rather like Elmer’s Glue, except that the smell was far worse.

As we continued toward the location, I could only wonder if Scorsese ever had problems like this. :-)

Car Shame

I’m ashamed of my automobile.

How do you think it makes me feel? To have to drive around in a ten-year-old vehicle without a sun (or, as far as that goes, moon) roof, with doors that have to be opened with a key, and without a system that would show me my global position?

It’s humiliating, that’s what it is.

I don’t have any strange woman with a soothing, cultivated voice emanating from my dashboard telling me how to drive. I don’t have digital maps to study (while I drive) that indicate where my favorite restaurant is to be found; I don’t have basics like a huge, ear-shattering surround-sound speaker system. (My car doesn’t even have a heated steering wheel.) The list of things my present vehicle doesn’t have goes on and on.



All I have is a 10-year-old vehicle like the above that is good to look at (the design of the ’99 model was classic and holds up nicely today), works well, never causes headaches or problems, and gets top highway mpgs.

And I'm fairly convinced that it could last another 10 years.

Surely a highly successful business entrepreneur like me (ha!) should instead have a very expensive, spiffy, luxury car with all the panoply of gadgets, gizmos and other often useless accessories that so many of the newer models have. Without such items, how will I impress people as I drive around?

As I say, it’s humiliating. But I guess I'll put up with the humiliation for a few more years. :-)

The Death of Cordelia

Fourteen years, that's an elderly lady in cat years, a long life -- and in this case a happy one.
The vet referred to her as a "kitty." Look at her. Stately, dignified, Cordelia was not a "kitty."





Definitely a member of the family, she will be missed.


She was named after King Lear's favorite daughter. Lear: "Her voice was ever soft, gentle and low." Very true.



If there is a cat heaven somewhere, she, of all felines, will have made it in.





"If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans." James Herriot