The Applejack Old Fashioned: A Christmas Miracle?
In any event, it's been the Spirit of My Christmas Present
You have received this newsletter because you cleverly subscribed to The Comic Muse, the newsletter of novelist, dramatist, philosopher, puppeteer, and mixologist Daniel McInerny. Find out more about Daniel here.
December 31, 2024
“Children, it is the last hour,” as St. John the Evangelist ominously reminds us in the first reading of today’s Mass (1 John 2:18-21). Here in the last hour of 2024, let me wish you all “the anointing that comes from the Holy One,” and every rich blessing in 2025. As always, thanks for joining me here at The Comic Muse.
The end of the year finds me enjoying a quiet day of warmish temperatures and glowering skies at home, allowing my nervous system to knit itself back together after a strenuous December. (For those not in the teaching profession, December and May are, for teachers, like tax season for accountants, with May being even more hectic than December).
But the final grades have long been submitted now, and the first six days of Christmas have passed with joyful and, I might say, well-paced celebrations with family. Well-paced because, due to my married kids’ in-law commitments, we have not yet been all together in one room this Christmas. Our daughter Lucy was with us on Christmas Day and on the following day when our son Francis and his wife Caitlin joined us (just yesterday was the first anniversary of their wedding). Then this past weekend our daughter Rita, her husband Patrick, and our grandson Raffi (Raphael) joined us after spending some days with Patrick’s family. Amy and I had a whole wonderful day with Raffi on Sunday while Rita and Patrick attended a wedding (their fourth wedding anniversary is this coming weekend).
However, this coming weekend we will all finally be together at our house for an entire day of Christmas/New Year/pre-Epiphany feasting and festivity—and Amy and I are very much looking forward to that. In preparation for that celebration, I have been playing a game with our grownup kids, sending them via text not-quite-daily quizzes, instructions for a scavenger hunt, stories, etc. Amy and I have one or two other special surprises planned for the day, including a puppet show for Raffi thematically linked to the game I’ve been playing with the grownup kids. Big fun.
On the Christmas playlist comes up one of my all-time favorites, “Once in Royal David’s City” performed by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge. On a Christmas Date some years ago Amy and I went to the Kennedy Center to hear the Washington (D.C.) Chorus perform their Christmas program. They sang this song as their opening number, the members of the chorus entering the darkened auditorium in single file, each carrying a candle, with all the lights coming up on the climatic, soul-stirring chorus. Stunning.
“Go on to the useless presents.”
Well, they’re not all presents. But there have been good books. Recently I signed up for the long march of Tolstoy’s War & Peace, which I have never read. I bought a beautiful hardbound edition—having been tipped off by someone online to read the Anthony Briggs translation on the first go-round—consisting of 1300 pages of dauntingly small print. But I am determined. I’m still in the early 200s (though trying hard not to notice the page numbers), having just fought the Battle of Schöngraben with Prince Andrey and Nikolay Rostov. I’m enjoying it very much so far.
But wait. Is Bob Dylan’s “It Must Be Santa” the weirdest, most oddly infectious, Christmas song of all-time? Discuss. And, in particular, why in the song Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton are named as reindeer.
That line, “Go on to the useless presents,” is from Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, which I have always loved. Another Christmas memory. Many years ago, while teaching high school in Minneapolis, I adapted this prose-poem as a stage piece and directed all five of my junior-year drama students in a production of it that we performed one afternoon at school just before the Christmas break. I remember going to a costume store in Minneapolis and buying bags of fake snow (little shreds of plastic) which I gleefully spread all over the school’s gym/auditorium, including the seats, to surprise the audience when the house doors opened. Raffi’s puppet show will also feature fake snow. Aristotle tells us that spectacle is not the most important thing in drama, but is an important part of it nonetheless.
Also reading my former professor Robert Sokolowski’s Phenomenology of the Human Person, both for its own sake and also in preparation for two different classes I’m teaching this spring. I’ve read great parts of it before—it plays a role in Beauty & Imitation—but I’m enjoying it now cover-to-cover. Monsignor Sokolowski is 90 now, and one of the joys of 2024 was a dinner in June that Amy and I enjoyed with him in D.C.
There have been movies over Christmas, too. Amy and I just finished (again) the 2005 BBC adaptation of Bleak House. There is more than one fabulous adaptation of A Christmas Carol, but this 2005 Bleak House is, I believe, the best adaptation of a full-length Dickens novel. Every acting performance is superb, and the story is hugely enjoyable.
And speaking of Dickens adaptations. On a long round-trip drive into D.C. to help our Lucy move into her new apartment, Amy and I listened to a marvelous full-cast audiobook of A Christmas Carol, narrated by the incomparable Derek Jacobi.
And that’s not all. I guess it’s a real Dickens Christmas, because we’ve also been rewatching the TV series Dickensian—a charming mashup that brings many of Dickens’ characters into one new mystery story—with Bleak House’s Detective Bucket as the sleuth.
Cocktails have not been missing this Christmas, either. At our Christendom College faculty-staff O Antiphon Party we received, in our exceedingly well-stuffed satchel of swag, a bottle of Laird’s Blended Applejack, which lauds itself as “America’s First Spirit,” having been distilled in New Jersey since 1698. Apparently, George Washington was a big fan. Which explains how he got through the winter at Valley Forge. 2 oz. of Applejack. ½ oz. maple syrup. Orange bitters. Garnished with a slice of orange. Shake well and…you have an Applejack Old Fashioned. Your own little Christmas miracle.
Meeting Amy for a glass of wine later at Rappahannock Cellars, our local winery over in Huntly. That will be the length and breadth of our New Year’s Eve jocularity. We prefer to keep hunkered down. New Year’s Day will feature Mass for the Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God at the Chapel of Christ the King at Christendom College, followed, hopefully, by more quietness, reading, football (British), and knitting of the nervous system.
I do hope you and yours enjoy a most blessed and merry beginning of 2025!
Another highlight of 2024 was the premiere of my play, The Actor, at Christendom College in November. Amy gave me this lovely framed poster from the production as a Christmas present. Haven’t hung it yet!
P.S. What an honor that The Good Death of Kate Montclair was named by
as one of her Top 5 Reads for 2024. Thanks, Hannah! For more “Best of” literary discussion from the Ladies at Reading Revisited, here you go!