"Donald Trump Jr. Says His Father Is a Regifter"

Bloomberg reports:

President Donald Trump's eldest son says his father is a "regifter" who "may or may not" have once given him the same gift he presented to his dad the year before.

Donald Trump Jr. says in an interview with the entertainment program "Extra" that because he is his father's namesake, he "got regifted all the things that were monogrammed for him at times."

And he says that one Christmas he called his dad out on the regifting, explaining that he was the one who'd had the item monogrammed.

In addition to being a re-gifter, the president is also reported to be a double-dipper, low talker, and master of his domain.

How do kids stop believing in Santa Claus?

From a Slate article:

As Occidental College cognitive scientist Andrew Shtulman writes in a study soon to appear in the journal Cognitive Development, “Santa violates our expectations about spatiotemporal continuity by visiting all the world’s children in a single night; he violates expectations about containment by entering children’s houses through their narrow chimneys; and he violates expectations about support by flying through the air on a wooden sleigh.” Still, kids' belief in Santa is stronger than nearly any other fantasy character. . . .

Shtulman rounded up 47 children between the ages of 3 and 9. All the kids in the study said they believed in Santa, but it turned out that they didn't all think about Santa in the same way. An older child who was more capable of identifying the implausibility of Santa Claus would argue, for example, that Santa could know whether every child was naughty or nice because, as one reported, “He has cameras all around the world.” Or they might suggest that Santa's reindeer can't actually fly; they're held up by yarn. By contrast, younger children would simply answer that Santa's reindeer fly thanks to magic.

The children were attempting to reconcile the folklore surrounding Santa's superhuman abilities with their developing knowledge about the constraints of the physical reality in which they live. Some kids were already better at distinguishing the plausible from the impossible (for instance, when asked, they said that pickle-flavored ice cream is possible but unlikely, while applesauce can never be turned into an apple). These kids had also “begun to engage with the mythology surrounding Santa at a conceptual level, questioning the feasibility of Santa’s extraordinary activities while also positing provisional explanations for those activities in the absence of a known answer,” writes Shtulman.

Granted, Shtulman wasn't necessarily interested in the question of Santa per se. Nor could he directly assess the kids' skepticism, because provoking young kids to question the plausibility of Santa might draw the ire of their parents. Instead, he sees Santa-related lore as exactly the sort of false knowledge that's typically transmitted to kids from people they trust most: parents and teachers. “Studying children's beliefs about Santa can shed light on how children interpret testimony that they cannot personally verify through firsthand observation,” he says.

For most kids, at some point the weight of evidence against the likelihood of Santa being real becomes too heavy to sustain their belief, even if their parents continue to encourage it. Shtulman relates the story of one child whose mother continued to talk up Santa. Then, as she set about wrapping presents, she found a note that her son had written on the back of the paper: “If Santa uses this paper, Mom is Santa!”

Sitting around listening to Christmas presents

We're playing the remastered version of the Beatles' Revolver. My stepdad reacts to George Harrison in "Love You To": "He sounds so enthusiastic: 'I'll make love to you, if you want me to . . . Or, if not, I'll just play my sitar . . . '"

What would you do if you got hundreds of letters to Santa at your address?

The New York Times might as well be begging bloggers to embed this saccharine mini-documentary today, and I'm happy to oblige:



"I think if you're going to do one, you should do 'em all. Or, none at all. I don't know, is that weird? . . ."

"That to me is like saying, 'Oh, well, I can't fix all the world's problems, so I'm not going to fix any of them.'"

Music Friday: My favorite Christmas song

"Sleigh Ride" seems to be most popular in versions with sumptuous female vocals — here's KT Tunstall:



Inevitably, there's a jazz version by Harry Connick, Jr., overflowing with panache. He leaves in a whole section that Tunstall leaves out ("There's a birthday party at the home of Farmer Gray . . .").



(Is that Dwight Schrute standing up in the back at 2:15?)

Bela Fleck and the Flecktones give it their virtuosic bluegrass-jazz treatment:



(Did you catch the bassist Victor Wooten's wink at an even more famous Christmas song near the end?)

The original version brings out the brilliance and harmonic adventurousness of the piece (performed here by the Boston Pops):



That version was composed by Leroy Anderson (a master of orchestral candy) in 1946. Mitchell Parish added the lyrics a few years later. Though the title and orchestration make it clear that Anderson did envision a horse-driven sleigh, Wikipedia tells us that he "had the original idea for the piece during a heat wave in July."

New Christmas

I just got back to Albany after a week-long vacation in Madison (part of why the blogging has been light in the past week). The family always spends Christmas together, but this time we had two new (to me) family members, my stepdad and stepsister. We had a lot of fun playing a game that can't be bought in a store, which we called "Word Storm." (I'll explain it in a later post so you can play it too.) We mixed some of our old Christmas traditions with some new traditions. We cooked dinner and breakfast together.

We watched a home video of our old family, shot with a rented camcorder in early 1987, when I was 5 years old. Though most of the video is unavoidably boring, I always watch it eagerly anticipating the occasional flashes of humor or insight. At one point, my mom asks me if I have a message for the grown-up John watching this in the future. My answer: "Travel all over the world." In another scene, she asks what I think of our family, and I respond, "I think we have a very nice family, and we have lots and lots of fun -- with the whole world being white." Huh? No, I wasn't raised by white supremacists; I was holding a white paper napkin up to the camera lens and joking about my state-of-the-art special effects.

I gave that answer with such gleeful enthusiasm that it's hard to imagine I was just saying what I thought I was supposed to say. Having Christmas in 2009 with a family I wouldn't have recognized even last year, I thought back to the young John -- how little he knew but also how important some of the things he knew were. I felt saddened to think: here we are, a very nice new family that could have been having lots of fun together for the past couple decades. I immediately corrected myself: no, that's impossible, things could only have happened exactly as they did. Whether they should have happened another way is irrelevant now. You can only go forward into the future. But you can still remember the things you knew when you were 5 years old.

Sitting around the house on Christmas talking about a video game

"You have to kill all these penguins, but the goal of the game is just to save a penguin."

"I guess it's a special celebrity penguin."

Christmas ...

... is just too costly.

That article's from 1990, so the figures are outdated, but most of the points still apply today. Samples:

Although for many years Christmas has been justified on the grounds that it is "merry,'' rigorous quantitative analysis establishes that the opposite is the case....

[U]p to a third of purchases may be ill-suited to their recipients. Christmas is really a throwback to all the inefficiencies of the barter economy, in which people have to match other people's wants to their offerings. Of course, money was invented precisely to solve this "double coincidence of wants" problem. ...

For parents, one especially exasperating aspect of Christmas is mindless toy fetishism.... What's more, toys are unusually hazardous consumer products....

Christmas increases congestion. At least in large urban areas, it is by far the most unpleasant time to shop, travel, dine out, or go to the bathroom in a mall. Just when stores are at their most crowded, shopping becomes mandatory; just when everyone else is making family visitations, they are de rigueur....

Christmas destroys the environment and innocent animals and birds.... This year, according to the Humane Society, at least 4 million foxes and minks will be butchered just to provide our Christmas furs. To stock our tables, the Department of Agriculture tells me, we'll also slaughter 22 million turkeys, 2 million pigs, and 2 million to 3 million cattle, plus a disproportionate fraction of the 6 billion chickens that the United States consumes each year. To anyone who has ever been to a turkey farm, Christmas and Thanksgiving take on a new and somewhat less cheerful meaning. Every single day during the run-up to these holidays, thousands of bewildered, debeaked, growth-hormone-saturated birds are hung upside down on assembly-line racks and given electric shocks. Then their throats are slit and they are dropped into boiling water....

Christmas leads to a sharp rise in absenteeism and a slump in labor productivity that is unlikely to be recaptured the rest of the year....

Far from being "the season to be jolly," Christmas is really the season of sadness and despair. This period's compulsory merriment, hypercommercialism, heavy drinking, and undue media emphasis on the idealized, two-child, two-parent, orthodox Christian family makes those who don't share such lifestyles or religious sentiments feel left out, lonely, and even somewhat un-American. And even in so-called normal families, media hype about the season's merriments often raises expectations and sets up many for disappointment....

Christmas is one of the single most important contributors to obesity -- the average American consumes more than 3,500 calories at Christmas Day dinner alone. Naturally, January is the peak month for diet plans, many of which end up in failure and despair.

Perhaps most important of all, from a purely distributional standpoint, Christmas almost certainly aggravates inequality, since most gift-giving takes place within the family or the same social class, and doesn't reach the people who really need our help. Salvation Army drum-beating aside, Christmas almost certainly reduces our capacity for charity by draining us of wealth that we might otherwise give to the needy, and of our charitable impulses....

Christmas commercialism, of course, is a modern innovation. The ancient Christians did not even observe the holiday until the fifth century, medieval Christians observed it much more modestly, and the Puritans sensibly refused to celebrate it at all. Only in the last fifty years, with the perfection of mass-market advertising and the commercialization of religion in general, has it become such a command performance. Modern Christmas is like primitive Keynesianism, a short-run-oriented economic experiment that has been tried and found wanting. It is the flipside of the positive contribution the "Protestant ethic" once made to capitalism -- Christianity's high holiday now almost certainly makes us feel worse off.

Music Friday: Elvis Presley, Blue Christmas

This may be my favorite performance of a Christmas song by anyone (and I say this having just heard the Johnny Cash version playing in a mall):



I love the: "without you, uh-without you ..."

And the way his voice almost-but-not-quite cracks on the "all right"!

If you're doing some late Christmas shopping for someone who enjoys good music, I recommend the 3-DVD set of Elvis's "'68 Comeback Special," which includes this performance and hours more like it.

CHRISTMAS FLASHBACK: "The greatness of Elvis really came through...."