🎅STRANGE AND SURREAL SANTAS🎅

Would it be Christmas without bizarre Santas? Not MY kind of Christmas.

🎅🙄SMOKING SANTA!😳🎅

It wouldn't be Christmas without bizarre Santas smoking pipes.This is from an incredibly weird Christmas puppet show from the 1950s. 

Creepy Santa gif montage

Only the best.

Smoking Santa

Hey, Santa! What's your New Years resolution?

Santa vs. Satan!

It just gets more incredible. I was SURE I was down to the bottom of the barrel with that Godawful Punch and Judy show with the Hitlerian Santa. But no! This is a truly unbelievable cinematic abomination starring, in one movie, Santa and Satan. They duke it out. They actually vie for ascendancy and control of the world, if not the universe, while little children look on. It's all extremely weird, even eerie. The movie was made on the cheap in Mexico and later dubbed into a kind of English.  I know Mexico is very big on all that Day of the Dead stuff, the sugar skulls, etc. But seriously? Here, the devil wears a skirt and dances badly. Santa just wheezily ho-ho-hos, as always.

I won't inflict the whole movie on you. I've made a few choice gifs, which were hard to make because the length of the movie necessitated very large gif files. So these may or may not download, may download slowly, or may play jerkily until they decide to play correctly.

If you watch the gifs, you will either find yourself wanting to see the whole thing, or sweating with gratitude to have gotten away singed, rather than roasted by this Yuletide atrocity.

Just the juxtaposition of the Devil with Jolly Saint Nick is grotesque. The pieces just don't fit. That's why I made these gifs, to get you to believe me. Santa looks catatonic and his suit looks like it is made of vinyl, but that is beside the point.

Here is where Santa begins to realize that something is seriously amiss. He lights a sort of firecrackery-looking thing (Mexico is very big on firecrackers, too, sometimes with tragic results), which spins around and around. So does the devil, going into a weird kind of choreography.

The thing about this devil is, he has a really shitty costume. Long red underwear, it looks like, and red body makeup, but with these really loose, rattly ears. Maybe so he won't scare the kiddies too much. But just having the Prince of Darkness in a Christmas movie is too much for me to wrap my head around.

This is where Santa demonstrates the principle of "love thine enemy" by firing a cannon at his nemesis. Ah, the heavenly peace of Christmas, where God and the Devil shoot it out in the living room! Santa cackles with glee at the direct hit.

In retaliation, the devil pulls a knife on Santa - no, wait, it's a pair of scissors - and punctures some sort of bag of water, or vodka or some shit like that. Santa turns around and spits on him.

And I can't go on here. Whenever I close my eyes now, I see red.

Rockin' with Santa

Caitlin is out front at the start, then on the left side from 0:26 to 0:52. After that, you can follow her easily because she is the BEST DAMN DANCER UP THERE!

Tappin' with Santa

Caitlin, amazing, at the Christmas dance recital (on the right side in the first two shots). Keeps tugging at me, because of course I remember her getting born, and everything after that. Now that she's officially a teenager, Grandma's not cool any more - not that she ever was! - so the unpopularity which dogged me all my life, and which I had seemingly beaten for a while, has caught up with me again. It was ever thus; I must get used to it. 

Meantime, she just killed it! She kicked ass, though tap was not always her strong suit. The founder of the dance company, the legendary Miss Charmaine, tactfully asked her if they could work together individually for a while, and "something" happened - she just caught fire. Now she wants to move on to hiphop (or hip-hop or hip hop or however you spell it). I've seen her do hiphop, and she's great, a natural. It's a much harder form of dance than you would think, with a ton of choreography. One must be both loose and precise. Oh never mind, she'll figure it out. Way to go, Caitlin!

My congratulatory PicMix glitz animation for Caitlin.

Scary little Christmas: violence on the puppet stage

This has to rate, if it rates at all, as the most violent thing I've ever seen on a puppet stage. It's shocking not just for its casual and gratuitous violence, but for the stunned looks on the faces of the kiddie audience, held captive by the most un-jolly Santa I've ever seen. Most Santas just don't have it down, in particular the laugh: it comes out ha-ha-ha, or, as in this case, an evil little chuckle. There are moments when this guy is lecturing the kids in which his gestures are like something from the movie Downfall.  But that's nothing compared to the puppets, who rip into each other with heartless, sociopathic glee. There is a very fake soundtrack of forced children's laughter layered on top, which does not match the help-me/get-me-out-of-here faces of the kids at all.

There is no shorter version of this that I could find, or I'd post it. Eight minutes is just too much of your life to waste on something like this. And yet, it's fascinating. Here Santa is the ultimate authority figure. You WILL watch this puppet show, and you will like it.

Santa Claus, Punch & Judy (1948) Violent Puppet Show

Almost as mind-blowing as the Star Wars Holiday Special. It gets points for extra violence. NEVER let a child watch this! This guy was one of the frontrunners in my Santa Smackdown, but lost by a whisker (heh-heh) to the demented, frightening Santa in the stop-motion classic, Hardrock, Coco and Joe.

Creepy Santa Smackdown!

Yes, it's here again - the competition of a lifetime, or at least this week. Back when I could make really great gifs on the new program, Gifsforum (I mean last night), I did some kick-ass weird Santa ones from old cartoons and childrens' programs. Oh, and then guess what? The whole thing shut down. It stopped working. I can't find anything on the internet to explain this, as it does not seem to happen to anyone else. There should not be a quota! Gifsforum, when it worked (last night!), would do a 15-second video of pristine quality in less than half a minute. Well, back when it was working. Now it has stopped.

Like my mouse. Something supernatural is happening with my mouse. Or mice. A few mices ago, my mouse just conked, and I finally had to put a new battery in which seemed to solve the problem. A week or so later, it conked. Bill gave me a brand-new one, I put a battery in, and a week later it conked. On the THIRD mouse I began to suspect supernatural forces, or a batch of bad batteries. My son the computer genius, who has NEVER been stumped by a problem, has no idea what this is. Like people who can't wear a watch because it stops, I get huge, searing, visible electric shocks off car doors, and I don't know of anyone else who does. I have to literally ground myself with my elbow when I get out. What the fuck?

Perhaps that's the price of toying with supernatural forces. Never mind, here are the few I made before this disaster took it all away from me again.

The first Santa looks like something from the Third Reich: the Hitlerian gestures, swaggering and head-shakes. This was part of an archaic Punch and Judy show that was indescribably violent.

And this one. Just what is Santa doing under the bedclothes? At one point he appears to give himself a narcissistic kiss. I don't think children should see things like this.

Santa in blackface, looking menacing during his yearly break-and-enter. In the old cartoons, his bag always has patches on it. Obviously he is from the Al Jolson school of chimney-sliding.

Santa burns his ass off.

Ummm. . . 

The strangest video, a movie shot in 1898 when most movies lasted a minute or so. Here Santa is wraithlike, carrying something like a bush (a Christmas tree?) This was one of the 15-second ones that I'll never make again because it has all STOPPED WORKING.

And here he is. . . winner of the 2013 Creepy Santa Smackdown! Are those his teeth that he is baring under his moustache? If so, he also wins the Evil Santa award. The things you find on the internet. Until Gifsforum stopped working.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm 

Christmas Cartoons from the Third Reich

I searched far and wide, long and hard for this special Xmas video. Took maybe 2 minutes. There are numerous weird, antiquated cartoons out there that express, supposedly, the spirit of the season, but this is the strangest: it's a Santa's Workshop kind-of-thing with a decidedly military flavour. This was from the early '30s and I don't think the Nazis had really happened yet, so this must have been a kind of foreshadowing.

From that disturbingly hearty beer-hall anthem at the beginning to the precision-march of the toys at the end, the whole thing is an exercise in conformity and obedience.  I was completely squicked out by Santa's final song, which reminds me of nothing more than that festive Yuletide carol,Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles. As with most cartoons and  film portrayals of Santa, he is terrifying, with an evil whiskey-voice that sounds like the guy who did Peg Leg Pete or whoever he was,  that big ugly guy with the villainous laugh. 

No wonder little kids' first encounter with Santa Claus seems to uniformly inspire terror and screams, until their parents force them to sit on this bizarre character's bum-hot lap and listen through a synthetic beard to his wet flabby lips pronouncing lies about what they'll get this year.  All that "well, we'll see" bullshit.

Who IS this monster who envelops them in the scent of sweaty polyester? As with almost all childhood mysteries, no one explains it to them. They have no idea who or what Santa is. It's a kind of initiation, almost a Christmas circumcision in which the cost of entry into the Spirit of the Season is bleeding and pain.

Kids want to believe, they really do, though it must really fly in the face of logic in these days of high technology. It was hard enough when I was a kid and technology had reached its apogee with our giant Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder in which the tapes constantly broke and had to be spliced with scotch tape. We could at least record the sound tracks of our favorite  cartoons and movies and play them over, and over, and over again until our parents screamed, the tape snapped and the reel went flap-flap-flap-flap-flapping around. 

So now how do they do it? How do they maintain such a transparent fiction? Aren't they frightened by some strange man dressed in a red fur costume breaking into their house? At some point, don't they realize that their parents have been lying to them?

My daughter, a TV news reporter who at 8 years old already had a gift for getting to the real story, one day asked me in a sort of "come on, tell me" voice, "There isn't really a Santa Claus, is there?"

So what was I to say? At eight, she wasn't even disillusioned. She just wanted to wring the truth out of me. 

"Well. . . ummm. . . Christmas is a lot more magical and fun if you pretend there's a. . . "

"I thought so." She looked more satisfied than dismayed, her suspicions confirmed. Then she looked at me again with that let's-get-the-real-story expression.

"What about the Easter Bunny?"

Ye gods! Was there anything left of childhood? Were there no harmless illusions we could maintain? Not in the face of an 8-year-old future TV news reporter.  It wasn't long until I overheard her talking to one of her little friends, sharing her newfound knowledge about how they'd all been blatantly deceived for years.

"Uh, Shannon. .. "

"WHAT? I'm just setting her straight here. I'm doing her a favor."

We never got to the Tooth Fairy, but I am sure by then she had figured it out on her own.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm 

Miracle on Rae Street

Only at this time of year can you get away with this kind of display! This incredible light show blazes in my neighborhood every Christmas on Rae Street, Port Coquitlam, collecting donations for various charities.

If you think it's all a little too much, especially as you approach the house nearly blinded by the brightness, just try taking children there. It becomes a whole different scene.

That's not a real Santa, though you'd never know it by the kids' reaction. And he moves!

The display includes an incredible array of figures: Rudolph, Frosty, various Disney characters, and just about every other Christmas figure ever known, all lit up like brilliant candles in the dark.

NOEL!

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Sitting on Santa's knee

 

 

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm