Another Week: Number 157

There was a time when Amy and I bought and decorated real Christmas trees, when we wore matching bathrobes and had extensive lists of people to send Christmas cards to and buy presents for. We attended big office parties in Chicago’s suburbs and its downtown hotels, and celebrated Christmas in living rooms full of relatives, buried in wrapping paper. One Christmas morning, we flew to Europe and sampled the cocoa and chestnuts in Germany and France.

It was a lot of fun, but it could create stress — and we understood it was optional. Once Amy’s cancer struck, festivities started to get pared back.

Most days now, it’s just the sparrows and me, and that suits me fine. Christmas is much more subtle — just the silent addition of a few more seconds of daylight each afternoon since Sunday’s solstice.

As I prepared my oatmeal and coffee on Christmas Day in the morning, I thought about the lyrics to the old English carol, “I Saw Three Ships,” and had to look them up on Wikipedia to find out how the vessels were connected to Christmas.

It turns out that ”Our Saviour Christ and His Lady” were in those ships (all three). This is the first I’ve heard about His Lady.

On Christmas afternoon, I drove to my mom’s apartment to serve her lunch, and before long, my sister Collete joined us and began preparing a delicious prime rib dinner. Colette’s husband, Kevin, and daughter Katie arrived next, followed by Kevin’s son and his wife. Stories were told, football games were monitored, songs were sung, cheesecakes were devoured, and a guitar was played. It was an enjoyable afternoon and evening.

Winter eased this week, with temperatures above freezing most days. I walked 12.92 miles.

Daniel Lawrence O’Keefe and the genesis of Festivus

On Thursday morning, a Hollywood Reporter story caught my attention while I was scrolling through Google News:

The True and Traumatic Origins of Festivus, the ‘Seinfeld’-Popularized Christmas Alternative

This article details how Seinfeld staffers pulled Festivus from writer Dan O’Keefe’s upbringing for use in a December 1997 storyline starring Jerry Stiller.

We watched Seinfeld regularly during its initial NBC run, but never really engaged in the elaborate fandom the show inspired through reruns. I did have a younger colleague in days gone by who was a Festivus enthusiast.

The holiday was originally the brainchild of O’Keefe’s father, Daniel Lawrence O’Keefe, a writer and editor at Reader’s Digest, described by his son as “a brilliant, complicated, tormented, weird, extremely funny, charismatic, terrifying, probably undiagnosed bipolar guy.”

The detail that interested me most was the elder O’Keefe’s book, Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory of Magic. It sounds like the sort of topic that typically grabs me — but it’s 600 pages, and some Amazon reviewers find it “wordy” and “dry.” For now, it’s just favorited and not purchased.

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, by Sarah Vowell

Watching The American Revolution in November, I was tickled by the many anecdotes regarding the Marquis de Lafayette, so I followed that PBS series with a book from 2015 — Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, authored by Sarah Vowell, who used to be seen fairly regularly on shows like David Letterman’s and heard on public radio. I previously read Unfamiliar Fishes, her book about missionaries to Hawaii in the 19th century.

Vowell’s style incorporates plenty of humor and mixes modern observations with historical narratives. This volume includes at least as much about Lafayette’s American mentor, George Washington, as it does about the enthusiastic young French nobleman.

Between the Ken Burns series and Vowell’s book, I gained a much greater appreciation for many facets of the USA’s founding, like the privations of Valley Forge and the precariousness of the patriots’ campaign.

The TV series — fine though it was — would have been better had it included input from Vowell.

The Brothers McMullen (1995),
The Family McMullen (2025)

Thirty years ago, Edward Burns made a movie for $25,000, and it was good enough to impress Robert Redford, win the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and go on to gross $19.3 million.

Now, Burns has created a sequel, currently streaming on HBO Max and promoted as a feel-good, family story for the holidays. So my mom and I watched both on Saturday evening.

Amy and I had seen The Brothers McMullen when it was originally released, and we enjoyed it. The shoestring budget and the setting in Burns’ real-life family home in Long Island, New York, gave the film a unique authenticity.

Watching it again three decades later, that genuineness remains — but some ragged edges are more obvious. The plot concerns three brothers who are all navigating relationships with women, and their vacillating between commitment and indifference gradually becomes exhausting. It’s a strong debut effort.

The new sequel — The Family McMullen — is slop. Burns has taken assorted elements that struck a chord with the first movie’s audience and assembled them like buttons to be pressed over and over in the absence of an actual story. Catholicism, F-bombs, relationship doubts, Notre Dame sweatshirts, and family annoyances harken back to the first film more frequently than smartphone notifications.

The new movie is shot on a standard rom-com budget, so all of the amateur charm is lost. Also lost is brother Jack (Jack Mulcahy), who has died. Connie Britton reprises her role as Molly, and she’s fine, but this is not a good script. Mike McGlone is back as Patrick, a Catholic caricature of cartoonish proportions, and Ed Burns returns as Barry (Finbar) McMullen, the once-obsessed filmmaker who is now just a foul-mouthed, insulting ass.

Barry has a daughter, Patty (Halston Sage), and a son, Tommy (Pico Alexander), who engage in sibling hostility and their own relationship storylines.

Alexander drove me up the wall. He’s good-looking and nimble-mouthed, but his every line was delivered in a performative bubble with no connection to his co-stars. Instead of a real person, he came off like an ESPN anchor delivering scripted wisecracks.

One redeeming feature of The Family McMullen is Tracee Ellis Ross as Tommy’s girlfriend’s mother. In a short sub-plot that soon grow silly, she’s a momentary relief from this whole draining exercise — which is neither “holiday” nor “feel-good.”