Happy X-Mas!
Ho-ho-holiday fun with movies, music, and Marvel mutants
Season’s greetings, friends!
As we prepare to say “goodbye” (more like “good riddance”) to the smoldering wreckage of 2023, I wanted to take a moment to express my sincere gratitude to ALL OF YOU for making this year far better than it had any right to be. Thank you very much for taking time out of your busy schedules to read and support my Substack, and especially a hearty thanks to the A-Team (You know who you are!) whose comedy and camaraderie have made checking in on Notes a real pleasure. I am continually amazed and humbled by how many fascinating people and brilliant writers there are here.
Case in point,
I highly recommend giving it a read. That article popped in my head as I was considering cranking out a fun, little holiday post. It had struck me as rather funny that we call Christmas “X-Mas”1 because it reminded my pop culture-addled brain of Marvel’s mightiest mutants, the X-Men. It may as well be called Professor X-Mas!
And so, I decided to put together a blatant ripoff and poor facsimile homage to Cosmographia’s excellent post featuring my comparisons of four X-Mas-related holidays and their X-Men counterparts. Enjoy, and let me know which other character combos I missed!
1) Christmas and the Blob
2) Boxing Day2 and Wolverine
3) Hanukkah and Jubilee
4) Kwanzaa and Nick Fury3
Bonus: This is the part where I put an end to the most common, silly, yet dismayingly resilient Christmas debates and give YOU the definitive answers you need to silence any crazy relatives who try to roll one of these convo-grenades out during dinnertime. So, without further ado, here is The Official List of Christmas Bests!©
Yes. Yes, Die Hard is a Christmas movie. But, no, it is not the best Christmas movie. That would be A Christmas Story.
Speaking of which, the best Christmas story (lowercase “S") is Dave Sedaris’s 6 to 8 Black Men. (It seems they couldn’t even find that many who wanted to attend Dave’s reading here. Talk about a “White Christmas”; that is the whitest audience ever!)
Despite all of the X-Men references here, the best Christmas comic is actually a DC book: The Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special.
The best Christmas song is the 1981 genre-defying classic Christmas Wrapping by The Waitresses, and it isn’t even close. This is fundamentally, metaphysically, tautologically true.
The (distant) second best is The Christmas Song as performed by Nat King Cole.
The third best is What’s This? from A Nightmare Before Christmas.
I will readily concede that I am no
—the undisputed Queen of the Playlist—but I hope this at least gives you a good start when picking out some X-Mas tunes this season.And not to pile on, but the worst is that one Mariah Carey song. (OK, every Mariah Carey song.) I’d rather be Baker in Die Hard 2 (also a Christmas movie) when McClane stabs him in the eyeball with an icicle than listen to another note of that affront to Baby Jesus.
We have tackled a wide variety of topics this year and still seen an extraordinary amount of growth here at the Temple. That support and interaction is a wonderful gift for which I am extremely grateful. The Muses and I have even bigger and better stuff lined up for all of you in 2024, so stay tuned! I am very excited about some of the projects in the works, and I truly believe it will be a great year for all of us! In the meantime, no matter which X-Day you celebrate, have a fantastic holiday, and…
Yes, I know the “X” in “X-Mas/Xmas” actually refers to Christ and not Professor X.
Yes, I know Boxing Day comes from Britain. OK, I kinda sorta know, the origin is all over the place, but Canadians celebrate it, and that’s good enough for me, bub.
Yes, I know Nick Fury isn’t an X-Man, but he has worked with them a lot, and I really wanted to make that FBI joke because Maulana Karenga and his stupid holiday suck so bad.
Hahaha these are great! And glad you enjoyed the architecture post!
I made a City of Heroes supergroup called X-Mas a few days ago led by Professor X-Ray Elf, who became a dentist and is very good at pulling teeth. I tried to get people to make Rudclops the Laser-Nosed Reindeer, the Abominable Iceman, Yukon Wolverinius, and whatever other misfit they could dream up to go live at the misfit isle as well as Santa who lives at the magnetic north pole and is the antagonist until he too gets to join the X-Mas, no takers, probably just because people were too busy with the holidays.
I've also joked Elon Musk, if he put an AI in everyone's brain, would make a new religion called Xianity with a holiday called X-Mas but that's less relevant and less funny in this case.