December 26, 2025

December 25, 2025

MERRY CHRISTMAS:

Posted at 11:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

MERRY CHRISTMAS:

Posted at 10:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Hope your hearts were light.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Posted at 9:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

SASHA STONE: Why We Watch It’s a Wonderful Life:

There is only one movie most people watch around Christmas, and that has to be the ultimate Christmas movie, Frank Capra’s sublime It’s a Wonderful Life.

What’s remarkable to me about this movie is that everyone still watches it and loves it, even though it is unapologetically religious. It’s a Wonderful Life is what Hollywood today would label “faith-based,” even though no one would describe it that way. And yet, it’s inescapable. This is a movie about prayer. It’s a movie about angels and a movie about faith.

Hollywood would never make a movie that dared to say, as It’s a Wonderful Life does, that we all believe in God and that there are such things as angels watching over us and that in times of complete and total helplessness we pray.

Read the whole thing.

Earlier: It’s a Wonderful Life: Holiday Classic Takes On New Meaning As Jimmy Stewart’s Post-War Struggles Bleed Into Film.

Posted at 8:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

COVID FOUR YEARS AGO: Jill breaks White House rules to go maskless as Joe is accused of staging bizarre dancing nurses show at the White House to distract from his catastrophic failure to order enough COVID test kits.

President Joe Biden was slammed on Thursday for holding Christmas festivities at the White House this week, complete with nurses singing ‘We Need a Little Christmas’ and a maskless First Lady, as critics claimed the event was ‘tone deaf’ and meant to distract from the president’s COVID policy failures.

The White House invited the famous Northwell Health’s Nurse Choir to perform at this year’s ‘Spirit of the Season’ TV special Tuesday night, and many were quick to point out the poor visuals of happy nurses singing amid the current Omicron surge.

The performance also featured some singers without masks, as well as a maskless Jill Biden off to the side, despite the White House’s indoor mask mandate in place.

To add to the schizophrenia, just a few days before the dancing TikTok nurses appeared with “Dr.” Jill,” the Biden Politburo was telling the rest of America — just in time for Christmas — that the Winter of Death was at hand:

UPDATE: Merry Christmas from Hunter, “Dr.” Jill, and oh yes, the former president is (Photoshopped?) in there somewhere! — in the back of a gloomy, badly lit photo:

MORE: Biden shares perplexing family Christmas photo with Hunter front and center.

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

GET CHRIST OUT OF CHRISTMAS? Atheists Gets Their Tinsel in a Twist When Sarah Huckabee Sanders Refuses:

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Posted at 6:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HEH, INDEED:

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

MERRY CHRISTMAS:

Posted at 5:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE SAN FRANCISCO STORY BEHIND THE ‘CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS’ ALBUM:

Unique among those Christmas hits are the songs from “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” the 1965 animated Christmas special starring Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” gang. The movie’s soundtrack might be the most recognizable jazz music in history. Piano player Vince Guaraldi’s renditions of classics like “Christmas Time Is Here” have become the definitive versions, and tunes like “Linus and Lucy” — which the gang jams to onstage — have reverberated through pop culture ever since.

Schulz has close ties to the Bay Area. Although born in Minneapolis, he moved to Sebastopol in 1958, then relocated to Santa Rosa in 1969, where he lived until his death in 2000 (a museum and skating rink were built celebrating his work). But the Christmas special’s soundtrack has uniquely San Francisco roots and, if not for a string of coincidences, may have never actually been heard by the public — let alone hit No. 2 on Billboard’s album chart 57 years later. A four-hour “super deluxe” version was released in October featuring material recently discovered in the Fantasy Records vaults.

Guaraldi was born in North Beach in 1928. After a brief stint at San Francisco State and a tour in Korea as an army cook, he hit the SF jazz scene and quickly received a contract from locally based Fantasy Records. While playing live around San Francisco, he picked up nicknames like “The Italian Leprechaun” (he was just over 5 feet tall) and Dr. Funk. He and his trio gained some popularity through covers of Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfa on their 1962 album “Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus,” then had a bona fide hit with the B-side “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.”

It’s hard to believe, but prior to its self-inflicted Weimar-ification*, San Francisco quite a brilliant city.

Related: Charlie Brown’s Inside Job. What gives the 1965 Peanuts special its staying power? “All the suits had said no to the religious element in the special, but Schulz insisted. Everyone at the network was prepared for a flop, but Schulz wasn’t thinking of network executives when he made the special. He was thinking about children and about the nature of God. The suits didn’t understand it, but from the first broadcast, the kids who watched it loved it, and made it a huge hit from then on.”

More: How Charles Schulz Got the Gospel Past CBS Execs in A Charlie Brown Christmas.

* Instagram v. reality! San Francisco unveils taxpayer-funded open-air Christmas market that’s become dystopian hellhole after being besieged by city’s famed druggies.

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll