Monthly Archives: October 2010

Chez Holy Bee, on a Halloween night sometime in the early 1980’s…

Funnily enough, I don’t remember any family trips to the pumpkin patch. I went regularly to our local patch as a school field trip in my early elementary years, but we only got to pick one to take back with us on the bus. I do remember a copious amount of pumpkins around the house each October, at least four of which went under the knife to become jack o’lanterns. They came from somewhere, but I was either not involved in getting them (pretty unthinkable) or this is a rare case of a holiday tradition of which I have no memory (equally unthinkable.) I don’t know.

Flipping through one of my picture books sometime in 1980, I came across an illustration of a boy in a tiger suit. This, for some reason, went off like a rocket in my five-year-old skull. I decided then and there that the acquisition of, and proud wearing of, a tiger suit would be the focal point of my existence.

The cardboard witch cutout in the background was a mainstay of our Halloween decorations until at least 1990, along with the green skull in the Dracula pic below

The end result, hot off my mother’s sewing machine, was a minor disappointment — it was not the plush, upholstered, fuzzy theme-park-mascot-style suit from the illustration, but rather a limp, featureless thing made of the thinnest tiger-print cotton with a mask like a grain sack. My bare hands dangled from the sleeves instead of being concealed in paws, and my battered size 1 Keds gave away my humanness at the suit’s bottom. The disappointment lasted only a moment, however, for this was an honest-to-goodness tiger suit. I decided I was immensely pleased with it no matter what. (In retrospect, I’m kind of glad it wasn’t a deluxe tiger suit, as that might have spun me off into a life of being a “furry,” and I’d be off somewhere yiffing right now instead of entertaining and informing you good people.) The fact that the tiger suit was completed close to Halloween was a happy coincidence. My tiger-suit mania could have hit me in January just as easily as late September. Continue reading →

“This is the Holy Bee coming at you with music and fun, and if you’re not careful, you may learn something before it’s done. Hey, hey, hey…”

Americans claim to love tradition, but rarely have the patience to allow real traditions to develop. We have the media to force-grow traditions for us. Remember, Christmas was once a relatively obscure Catholic holiday, little recognized in the United States until the 1820s or so. What caused it to take off? The media. “The media” back then, of course, was print: books, newspapers, and magazines — and their editors spotted a hot trend in the Washington Irving’s “olde English Christmas” writings. Very soon, Christmas became safe, Protestant…and profitable. Don’t try to say Christmas has only recently “gone commercial.” Just take a look at the advertisements in any mid-19th century magazine’s November or December issue. Christmas in America has always been a way for retailers to clean up, and there’s nothing wrong with that — it’s still a special, awesome, cheerful time of year. You can ascribe that to the religious aspect of the holiday if you need to (I don’t), but we needn’t be ashamed of its media-driven, profiteering origins as a uniquely American holiday. There was no “golden era” to which we can roll back the clock. (Yes, there was a time when the commercialism was less brazen, but that’s a reflection on society as a whole, not just Christmas.) And, please, don’t get me wrong — I love Christmas, and you should, too. My point here is we invent things over a very short period of time, and then pretend those things have always existed. Continue reading →