A Christmas List

These are a few of my favorite things:

My favorite movie is “Up.” It used to be “Citizen Kane” but “Up” is by far a better movie, and, perhaps the greatest movie ever made.

My favorite ice cream is cherry vanilla. I mean, c’mon! It’s cherry and it’s vanilla! I know!

My favorite sport is baseball. Let’s face it: Every other sport is basically just a bunch of grotesque freaks of nature or armed assailants beating each other senseless in the meaningless quest of getting the “bone of contention” from one side of the playground to the other — a sort of organized mob rule. In baseball, the other team has the bone and that’s fine with you. Your job is to find your way home, by hook or by crook, while they chase the damned thing around all over the field.

My favorite disease is cancer. Because I had it and I beat it. It wasn’t my favorite when I had it — in fact, it was my least favorite – but after I beat it I was amazed at how much I had learned about myself from having it. You should try getting it some time.

My favorite holiday is – surprise! – Christmas.

My favorite Christmas song is “What Child Is This?” but that’s only because they just changed the words to “Greensleeves” which happens to be my favorite song anyway.

My favorite Christmas album isn’t “A Charlie Brown Christmas” or the Carpenter’s “Christmas Portrait.” Those are really good, but my favorite is an obscure record that I stumbled across in the three-for-a dollar bin over 30 years ago – maybe 40! I bought three albums that day: One was a classical album, Mozart, I think. I love the “Wolfgang banger” but this album never really stuck. One was called “Spanish Organ Music,” and was just that, organ music written by Spanish composers that went way back – 16th century. Believe it or not, this album became one of my favorites. I really can’t explain it.  Don’t care for organ music. But for some reason these old Spaniard dudes got me hooked on the stuff.

It’s the third album I bought that day that has become something of a legend in the Arnosky house. It’s called, simply, “Christmastime” by the Swingle Singers and from the day I brought it home it took its place as the musical score behind our entire Christmas season: Load up the car to get the tree? Pop the ‘Swingles’ in the dashboard hole and we’re off. Decorating the tree? Swingles. Christmas Eve dinner? Swingles in the backround; the sweet jazzy strains waft through the house like the smell of roast turkey and pumpkin pie for the ears. Our kids must have thought the damn thing was playing in the stable that night on the very first Christmas, or that the angels heard on high were none other than the Swingles Singers themselves.

In this Kardashian age, as we watch Kim and Khloe and the fat one throwing up each week at the vomit trough, or spend more money on a wedding than most school districts get allotted in a year – a wedding that resulted in a marriage that didn’t last as long as one of the groom’s basketball seasons – it’s hard to believe that so much pleasure and comfort can be derived from something that cost only

33 cents.

At “Keeping Up with the Arnoskys,” the plates are chipped and the silverware doesn’t match but when the kids come home for Christmas, and I punch up the Swingle Singers, and we all sit around the dinner table, we are no less thankful that we have a dinner to sit down to and a home to come home to. And that’s why baseball is my favorite sport. In the end, I guess we’re all is just trying to find our way back home – yes, even Kim and the girls. But, like the Magi, they chose to go home a different route, spending a fortune along the way.

Well, I got news for you, Kim: I know a guy in the comfort and joy racket.  He can get it for you wholesale.

33 cents.