The Twelve Days of Christmas is a ridiculous song. If you sing at a fast tempo and skip five or six verses, you can sing the whole thing in just under 40 minutes. Yet sadly, the song's length is the most sane thing about it. I love Christmas carols... but I do not like The Twelve Days of Christmas.
In the first seven days of the song (which, as far as I can tell, is sung in real time), a total of 59 birds are presented as gifts. Fifty-nine birds? Did I give you the wrong impression concerning my feelings for birds? I mean, I have nothing against them, but let's leave some of them outside. Maybe one of these days of Christmas I could get a truck full of bird seed, because tuppence doesn't grow on trees.
And ten lords a leaping? I don't even know what I'd do with one lord a leaping. I'm going to have to rent a bus just to take them all down to the pier. Now, nine ladies dancing... there's a gift! That's something I've wanted for a long time. See - if you personalize a gift like that, good things happen. But the lords and the drummers and the sanctuary's worth of birds... ridiculous.
Perhaps the most upsetting thing of all about The Twelve Days of Christmas... there's only ONE day of Christmas. December 25th. Maybe for next year's one day of Christmas I'll get my true love a calendar.
(When my wife saw this drawing, she said, "You know - turtle doves aren't half turtle." I know that. I'm not an idiot. They're half dove.)
2006 is down to its last few hours. Starting tomorrow morning, I'll be writing the wrong year on checks and things for the following four to seven months. Really looking forward to that. It's been a good year... new job, new blog, new house, fun trips, lovely wife...
A fox with a stretched out body... a snail with a beard... a cash-carrying fellow in a terrified sprint... a lady stirring a mixing bowl with her foot. If this page of sketches only had some vampires and assorted birds, it would be a showcase of everything that Christmas means to me. Oh, hey - there they are!
This is my Christmas card to all of you who still come to this place I call "blog." I don't know a lot of you personally, but it's nice knowing that you stop by occasionally to see what I've drawn and to partake of my mental wanderings. I'm glad there's you, or I probably wouldn't have a blog. So thank you all, and happy holidays!
As part of a joke on his show last week, Conan O'Brien mentioned a fake website. He found out later that NBC has to buy any website he mentions if it doesn't already exist, so for $159, NBC became the owner of HornyManatee.com. Conan didn't want the site to go to waste, so they started adding stuff to it, including fan art. I sent in this one that I spent about a half hour on. Conan and his show are the coolest.
The Twelve Days of Christmas is a ridiculous song. If you sing at a fast tempo and skip five or six verses, you can sing the whole thing in just under 40 minutes. Yet sadly, the song's length is the most sane thing about it. I love Christmas carols... but I do not like The Twelve Days of Christmas.
I drew this for our Christmas card last year, based on the song "Santa Claus is Coming to Town." Some of my friends said they had to hide or destroy the card because it was scaring their kids. That song always made me a little uncomfortable, so I was glad to relay that terror to a new generation of children.
It has been widely suggested that manatees (or "menatee") could be behind the myth of the mermaid. Sailors who were unfamiliar with manatees may have seen them and mistook them for the mythical, human-like species. A manatee surfacing in a patch of seaweed could have appeared to be a mermaid with long, flowing hair.