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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2011-12-15, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2011. PAGE 5. I’m sleeping with a woman in Corsica. Not from Corsica – in Corsica. What’s more, her husband is in bed with us. He doesn’t suspect a thing. It’s…complicated. For one thing, I am not – worse luck – actually in Corsica myself. I am in snow- bound Canada, typing at a kitchen table with a scarf around my neck. But my avatar, my Doppelganger, my other self, is down there in Corsica, enjoying the ocean breeze that’s wafting through the open window and over the, er, three of us. It’s like this: once upon a time I had a radio show called Basic Black that ran on the CBC – the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. One day a slick-looking dude from the PR department buttonholed me in the CBC cafeteria. “We’d like to do some advertising for your show,” he purred. Swell, I said. “We were thinking of T-shirts,” he said. Okay, I said. What would you like on the T-shirt,” he asked me. “Uh…the name of the show?” I guessed. He shook his head sadly, as if he was dealing with a slow-learning Labrador. “We’ll need more than that,” he said. We kicked it around for awhile. He rejected the idea of snappy slogans, funny quotes or a staff photo. My coffee was getting cold. “How about I draw a cartoon of myself,” I suggested. “Perfect”, he said. That’s how we ended up with 147 cartons of Basic Black T-shirts emblazoned with a cartoon head depicting a bald guy with a big nose and a straggly beard grinning crookedly above my scrawled signature. The cartoon is laughably amateurish and looks, if I may say so, unlike any human alive. Everybody says it’s a perfect likeness. That was my first embarrassment – everybody who saw the gargoyle I’d scrawled immediately knew it was me. But worse – it became (unlike any of my books) an immediate best-seller. We couldn’t keep it in stock. In a matter of weeks the Basic Black T-shirt was showing up on the torsos of loggers in Prince George, wheat farmers in the Prairies, secretaries on Bay Street, oyster-shuckers in Lunenburg and (I know – I saw the photo) on a co-ed quartet of skiers schussing down the side of a mountain near Invermere, BC. Who, aside from ski boots, appear to be wearing nothing but their Basic Black T-shirts. Well, that’s the thing about this garment – it only comes in one colour (black, natch) and, as an extra cost-cutting measure, the PR department decided we would order it in just one size: Extra Large. If you’re built like Arnold Schwarzenegger (or, for that matter, like an Amazon with breast implants) – it’s a perfect fit. Otherwise, you’ve got pyjamas. That’s how I came to be sleeping with that woman in Corsica. “I’m wearing my Basic Black T-shirt to bed tonight,” she wrote on a postcard. I suppose, technically, I’m sleeping with hundreds of women right now, when you think about it. Thousands, maybe. Well…dozens, for sure. But it’s no bed of roses. The husband of that Corsican correspondent I mentioned? I hear that he’s…wearing me too. I told you – it’s complicated. Arthur Black Other Views Been there. Got the T-shirt We all have Christmas traditions. I have even written about some of my own. But for almost 10 years now, my friends and I have engaged in a Christmas tradition that flies in the face of everything your average Christmas gift shopper holds close to their heart: Buying someone a gift they’ll actually like. Honestly it has reached an utterly overrated status. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the year the HBO series The Sopranos ended. My friend Scott and I made a pledge we would buy the set of DVDs for one another for Christmas that year. Now what kind of sense does that make? We might as well have bought them, saved the wrapping paper and cards and just headed home and watched the DVDs. No having to wait for Christmas necessary and no gift exchange would be necessary because we’re both holding the exact same item. Madness. Thankfully we realized the utter stupidity of such a practice and came up with something more civilized: The Stupid Gift Competition. If the name doesn’t say it, the Stupid Gift Competition is an epic battle for bragging rights and stupidity supremacy (there have never been actual prizes awarded) aimed at finding one another the most random, absurd and useless gift you can find. Now while at first glance the Stupid Gift Competition might appear... well, stupid, it’s a lot more interesting than you might think and it rarely turns into the united flushing-money- down-the-toilet exercise it sounds like. There are always themes and modest price limits and year after year I find that the Stupid Gift Competition occupies the bulk of my Christmas shopping time. The competition gets you thinking and it forces you to be creative. You really have to know your friends, almost better than if you were buying them a proper gift. We’ve all been Christmas shopping and we’ve broken down and bought a gift card or something very generic that anyone would like because frankly we just couldn’t figure out what to buy someone. I know those shopping for me have hit that wall once or twice. I am told I am one of the hardest people on this planet to buy a Christmas gift for. The Stupid Gift Competition doesn’t offer a bail-out clause like your standard shopping excursion. And of course, there are bragging rights at stake and among men, what’s more important than bragging rights? Surprisingly enough, out of the competition have come gifts that have stood the test of time. On Scott’s wall right now hang two native wood carvings of odd-looking, distorted faces. One is meant to be him and the other (the one with the beard) is meant to be me. There was, of course, the year where the theme was a stupid gift that you had to make (like a craft of some sort). There isn’t a year that goes by that I don’t accidently open the box that hold that year’s present to me: A plaster mold of Scott’s face. It’s uncanny how much it looks like him and it’s unsettling that it’s sitting face-up in a cardboard box. In addition to feeling of fear that comes along with the face mold, these gifts always conjure up thoughts of good times, and the laughs that come along with unwrapping a bottle of doe urine or a three-foot-tall Buddha statue or testing one another about how they’d fill in question boxes in Paris Hilton’s princess diary book are unparalleled. So for this Christmas, I’m not suggesting you go ‘stupid’ I’m just saying for my friends and I, it seems to work. Stupid traditions In the last few weeks I’ve heard conflicting weather reports about how much of a white Christmas Ontarians will actually see. I’ve heard some reports say it will be green, others say winter will be in full swing by the time jolly old Saint Nicholas crunches snow underfoot while he walks across rooftops. Either way, I think that snow has a lot to do with how Christmas-y it feels in the world. I’ve had several discussions in the past few weeks about how it just doesn’t feel like Christmas yet. One such conversation occurred after hearing the tune “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” on the radio. Discussions inevitably led to one conclusion: Christmas isn’t Christmas until you’ve shoveled the walkway (and/or the driveway) a few times. Christmas isn’t Christmas until you’re hanging your hat, mitts and boots over the vent to dry them out a little bit quicker and Christmas isn’t really Christmas until you have to spend most mornings warming up your car before you’ll even consider stepping in it. Maybe that’s why shopping has been so easy for me this year. I’ve been able to walk in to most locations, find what I’m looking for and get out with minimal struggle and no waiting in lines (my biggest pet peeve as regular readers will hopefully remember). Inevitably, as most things end up doing, this got me thinking about the inclusivity of the holidays. Yes, I know the true reason for the season. I know what we’re celebrating and what we should be celebrating. I’m aware that far too many people think of Christmas as a time of holidays, stuffing the turkey and then yourself and presents and far too few remember that Christmas is a celebration of the birth of a religious icon. However, it actually warmed my heart to think that so many people have found another relation to the holiday times. I realize there are a lot of people out there who celebrate Christmas as the day they get presents and not the day Jesus was born, but, being forever an optimist, I don’t see anything wrong with that. Christmas has become intrinsically linked to snow and cold weather and that is something we can all relate to and all understand. This time of the year I think it’s important to remember that, while Christians prepare to celebrate the birth of their savior and Jews prepare to celebrate the miracle of having one day’s fuel last eight days, everyone is preparing for a rest and for time with their families. Regardless of whether they say Happy Chanukah, Merry Christmas, Joyous Kwanza or Happy Holidays (more on that later), they are preparing for the same thing; a special time of year to celebrate with family and friends. I’m sure that (or at least I hope that) people of the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere feel the same; these holidays which run from Dec. 20 through Jan. 1 are all linked to the snow and the cold in our minds as much as they are anything else. It gives us a common ground (or hides a common ground underneath freezing cold ice crystals, whichever you prefer). I won’t try to play the ambiguous politically-correct card. I have a Christmas tree in my home because I’m a baptized and confirmed Christian. However I do tend to try to distance myself from that when I’m dealing with anyone else in case they aren’t Christian. That’s why the term “Happy Holidays” doesn’t anger me or frustrate me at all and certainly doesn’t raise the ire in me that I know it does in other people. This time of the year, in my mind, has always been about finding the common ground and celebrating what you can universally while also paying tribute to your own practices with your family and friends. Having a greeting that allows you to safely acknowledge anyone’s religious practices without stepping on any toes or risking alienating a friend of a different creed than you is a good thing, not a bad thing. “Happy Holidays” allows me to say the same thing to everyone regardless of race or religious. It means enjoy this cold, snowy and icy part of the year and may whatever celebration you subscribe to go well for you. It doesn’t mean (as some people have tried to convince me) the death of Christmas. Anyone who balks at someone wishing them a Happy Holidays and tries to instruct them on why they should say Merry Christmas is, in my mind, being about as un-Christian as they can be. We’re taught to practice patience and forgiveness and, above all else, we’re taught to love our neighbours regardless of whether they pray to the same invisible man in the sky as us. This should be a time of bringing people together, not driving them apart into separate sects and I am glad that the snow serves as a catalyst for that. So I say to you all, enjoy the cold and the snow while it’s still around because it is a sign of the holidays and regardless of how you celebrate and what your reason for this season is, may you enjoy the time with your friends and family and find it as fruitful as you hope it is. Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense Denny Scott Denny’s Den It’s beginning to look a lot like holidays THE EDITOR, I wonder if anyone noticed that the “Looking Back Through the Years” in the Dec. 8 issue of The Citizen in a list of the 1950 recipients of scholarships to the University of Western Ontario, mentioned one Alice Laidlaw? Alice Laidlaw is now world famous author Alice Munro. She again resides in Huron County after spending many years on the West Coast. I don’t know how the other recipients fared, but this was definitely money well spent. Brendan Reilly, RR 3, Brussels. Letters Letters to the editor are a forum for public opinion and comment. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of this publication.