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| Happy New Year |
New Year's Eve is upon us so 2025 is disappearing over the horizon. It wasn't a bad year for me, but it was expensive. A lot of home maintenance costs tried their best to drain my wallet. I hope your year was fine as well.
And here's hoping 2026 works out for all of us. Enjoy any parties to attend and fireworks you may see, and enjoy your misplaced optimism while making New Year resolutions. You probably won't keep them anyway, but hope springs eternal.
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Nikolay Dubovskoy (1859-1918) was a Russian romantic landscape painter. He traveled extensively and painted landscapes of different regions. He also was active in artist salons and academia. While well known in his day, the Soviets ignored him and his works were forgotten for a period.
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| Portrait of Nikolay Dubovskoy by Vladimir Makovsky |
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During Easter I frequently post Victorian Easter cards which are, to put it mildly, rather bizarre. I decided to see what Victorian Christmas cards were like. Uhhh... that may have been a bad decision.
Above we have a young lad in a teapot, presumably the adults are brewing some ankle-biter tea. Below we have snowman's ghost with a club getting ready to waylay a pedestrian, and then Santa Claus is committing armed robbery -- I suppose that is either commentary on Christmas commercialism, or perhaps Santa raising funds to pay his elves' salary.
From there on the cards continue to be strange. I assume the cards are meant to be jokes, but, like a Hieronymus Bosch painting, time has stripped the visuals of their meaning leaving only oddity behind. At any rate, if you get one of these cards this Christmas, will it be from friend or foe?
Well, another odd TGIF post. During the Christmas season, figuring we've all heard traditional Western Christmas songs over and over by now, I always change things up by posting some Japanese Christmas songs.
While not an official Japanese holiday, Christmas is still quite popular and celebrated. Not being a Christian nation, the Japanese have jettisoned the religious elements of the holiday. However, they embrace the secular trappings: Christmas trees, Santa Claus, decorations and so forth.
On Christmas families will gather for a meal, often, and oddly enough, a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Meanwhile Christmas Eve has morphed into a couple's holiday akin to Valentines Day.
That explains Japanese Christmas music. They are either parties, lovey-dovey couple stuff, or, like the above video, both mixed together (while the band members are dancing about doing J-Pop girl group sort of stuff -- bouncing on couches, acting cute, and giggling a lot -- the singer is happy she has a boyfriend now so she doesn't have another lonely Christmas). In the video immediately below, they've changed 'jingle bells' into 'single hell', and we have the travails of a dateless salaryman.
The rest are a sampling of other J-pop Christmas tunes, with my favorite being the last which has a level of frantic insanity that is very J-Poppy in its weirdness.
