Seven years ago, I ran this column Thanksgiving week. Since many people might need a laugh this year, I'm running it again, with minor edits. Happy early Thanksgiving to those of you in the US.
It's two days until Thanksgiving, and I bet some of you are stressed.
Maybe it's because you're cooking and ... it's the first time you're
hosting, and you want it to be perfect. Or your mother-in-law is coming,
and your turkey never lives up to hers. Or the weatherman is predicting
snow on Thanksgiving and you're afraid that your relatives won't show
up ... or maybe that they will.
Or maybe your stress stems from being a guest. Are you an introvert,
dreading a day of small talk with the extended family? A picky eater,
going to the home of a gourmet who makes food way too fancy for your
tastes? Or are you a dieter, going to the home of someone who likes to
push food and you're likely to spend the day going, "no thanks, no rolls
for me," "no thanks, no candied yams for me," "no thanks, no cookies
for me," ... "dear lord, lady, what part of no thanks don't you get?"
No matter who you are, or what your situation, Thanksgiving can cause
stress. The best way to deal with stress is laughter. And that's where I
come in. So set down that baster and get ready to smile, because I've
got some fictional characters who've had a worse Thanksgiving than you.
Paul and Jamie Buchman from Mad About You
They tried so hard to make the perfect dinner ... only to have their dog, Murray, eat the turkey.
Rachel Green from Friends
All she wanted was to cook a nice dessert for her friends ... only to
learn too late that she wasn't supposed to put beef in the trifle. It
did not taste good.
The Gang from Cheers
Those poor Thanksgiving orphans. They waited hours for a turkey that
just wouldn't cook ... only to then suffer the indignity of being
involved in a food fight. (For anyone who's ever read my story
"Biscuits, Carats, and Gravy," this Cheers episode was the inspiration.)
Debra Barone from Everybody Loves Raymond
She was determined to have a happy Thanksgiving despite her overly
critical mother-in-law ... only to drop her uncooked turkey on the floor
three times before flinging it into the oven. Yum.
Arthur Carlson from WKRP in Cincinnati
He wanted to create the greatest promotion ever, inviting the public to a
shopping mall and providing free turkeys ... live ones ... only to learn too late
that tossing live turkeys out of a helicopter from
2,000 feet in the air isn't a good idea. As God was his witness, he thought turkeys could fly.
Garner Duffy from "Bug Appétit"
I've written a bunch of funny Thanksgiving stories over the years. One had a food fight. One was set at a nudist colony. One involved ... well, the title gives you a hint. In 2018, "Bug Appétit" was published. Its main character, Garner Duffy, is a con man. And all he wants for Thanksgiving is to eat some good food at
his mark's home before stealing her jewelry. He learns too late
that her mother is ... an inventive cook. This story was a finalist for the Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards, and the fine folks at Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine asked me to record it for them. You can listen to it here: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/eqmm/episodes/2019-04-01T06_10_35-07_00 I hope you're smiling and feeling less stressed by now, dear readers. Until next time, happy Thanksgiving!
Back in the day, an elementary school teacher chose to chastise us students on the poor quality of our handwriting. Pointing to the alphabet displayed over the blackboard, she said, “Look at those letters! Look how perfect they are! Do you think they were drawn by a machine? They weren’t. A person wrote those.”
Which simultaneously shamed and puzzled youthful Joe. The green-and-white sheets of cardboard were clearly printed by a machine. Beyond that, some part of me must have received her meaning. A human being had shaped those letters, even the weird Q that looked like an overwrought numeral two.
One of the enduring factoids about the origin of the United States is that we’ve gotten our national birthday wrong. (That is so you, America!)
Citizens here embrace the Fourth of July as a holiday, when in fact July 2nd was the day of the vote that severed the colonies from the Crown. July 3rd was spent quibbling over the document Thomas Jefferson had spent 17 days drafting in his boarding house on Seventh and Market streets in Philadelphia. Finally, on July 4th, Congress accepted, or adopted, the language of the Declaration of Independence.
Congressional printer John Dunlap was authorized to print broadsides for the general public of the (now former) colonies. Only 26 copies of these are known to exist today. In 1989, a man perusing a flea market bought an ugly $4 framed picture and discovered an original Dunlap tucked inside. It sold in 2000 during a live Sotheby’s internet auction for $8.14 million to the late television producer Norman Lear.
Yet those broadsides are not the document Americans carry in their collective memories. The document preserved behind bulletproof glass at the National Archives is known as the engrossed Declaration. That’s the word used in the 18th century for an official handwritten legal document.
The man whom historians consider most likely to have put quill to parchment to create this piece of calligraphic history was named Timothy Matlack.
He was a political radical, a brewer, and the founder of the Society for Free Quakers, an organization for like-minded individuals who had been booted by the Friends for the bellicose stance they took during the Revolutionary War. After two Quakers criticized his sons for taking up arms in the conflict, Matlack had them caned. People openly mocked Matlack for wearing a sword around town, which was admittedly weird in an era of flintlocks.
A clerk in the Pennsylvania State House, Matlack was known for his lovely penmanship. He had engrossed the papers commissioning George Washington as general of the Continental Army.
For the Declaration, Matlack picked out a piece of parchment that was close to a square. He might have used a pin to mark off his margins and a straight edge to keep his lines straight, though the document bears no evidence of those standard techniques. His quill would have been dipped in handmade, iron gall ink.
The document contains only 1,337 words, excluding the signatures. So far as I know, Matlack only made two errors, spelling the word “Representative” wrong in the fifth grievance, and omitting the word “only” in a later sentence. Jefferson may have inserted the corrections careful readers will find in the document.
Members began affixing their signatures to the engrossed parchment on August 2, 1776. (The last signer may have signed as late as 1781. Col. Thomas McKean of Delaware was off fighting the war.)
Americans who grow up seeing reproductions of this document often don’t realize that it is handwritten; Matlack’s lettering looks too consistent and too florid to be “real.” The heading—“The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America”—resembles a classic black letter, or “Gothic,” font, and reappears in four other spots in the text. The rest of the document is written in what we can only assume is Matlack’s standard fancy hand.
Brian Willson
Which brings us to 2003, when a gentleman named Brian Willson tracked down a copy of the Declaration he’d acquired as a kid, on replica parchment, and began studying it intently.
By then, Mr. Willson had become one of the world’s leading typeface designers. Since 1993, he has created an impressive library of fonts, often culled from handwritten documents. He has, for example, created typefaces based on the handwriting of Abigail Adams, John Paul Jones, Stephen F. Austin, Frederick Douglass, Sam Houston, and John Quincy Adams, just to mention a few. He created one, dubbed Professor, that mimicked the handwriting of his father, who was a professor of Germanic languages. And once, after spotting the hasty scrawl of a handwritten diner menu in Maine, where he lives, he produced Oak Street, the “messy-looking” typeface of his dreams. (You can inspect all of these at his main web site: 3IP Type Foundry.)
It’s impossible to overstate how important typefaces are to the modern world of design. One of Mr. Willson’s fonts was used to represent the handwriting of Severus Snape in the potions book shown in the movie
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. His work has appeared on the cover of a book by Nicholas Sparks, the design of The Spiderwick Chronicles book franchise, the cover of an album by the Dave Matthews Band, and a Ken Burns parody shown on the Jimmy Kimmel Show. My personal favorite was the appearance of one of his text fonts in a throwaway-but-critical scene in the comedy series, Arrested Development. Another interviewer dubbed Mr. Willson’s work “crazy famous,” and I’m inclined to agree.
Acting on a hunch that Matlack’s hand would prove popular with designers, Mr. Willson spent a “tedious” six months transforming Matlack’s handwriting into 608 characters. It’s not enough for a type designer to replicate the look of the letters that appear in their primary source. They must also extrapolate from the primary source. How would Matlack, in others words, have written a dollar sign ($), the at symbol (@), or the trademark symbol (™)? His process, Mr. Willson says, went like this:
Pore over the old scripts, looking for the most typical and legible letters of the upper- and lowercase alphabets, along with numerals, punctuation marks, etc.
Scan each of these glyphs and bring the saved digital scans into a program with vector graphics tools (usually Adobe Photoshop), then begin tracing.
Export the traced outlines as PostScript files that can be imported into a font design application (Fontographer or FontLab), where each glyph can be tweaked, perfected, and (in the case of cursive scripts) made to seamlessly connect with every other.
The result is a font which Mr. Willson dubs American Scribe. (Naturally, that is the font I'm using to illustrate this post.)
“Matlack did indeed have lovely, legible penmanship,” says Mr. Willson. “Whereas I don’t recall thinking things like, ‘Oh, he must’ve dipped his pen here,’ it’s always gives me pause to see the occasional ink blot or inserted word (as “only” inserted by Jefferson in the Declaration) or cross-out or underscore in some of these old documents.”
The font set he created actually replicates those ink blots…
I asked him what it’s like to trace the words of a long-dead person and then presume to write like them. “In all the old pen fonts I’ve designed,” he says, “I feel like I’m somehow ‘inside the head’ of the writer whose script I’m replicating. You can seemingly get a feel for the emotions based on pen pressure (or lack thereof) and the like. There’s something extra there, too– as when you recognize the handwriting of a beloved family member in the address on an envelope you might receive in the mail (or used to receive, as handwritten letters aren’t anywhere near as common as they used to be).”
Now, you might well ask who buys such a product, and how do they use them? The most logical clientele are designers who work at historical sites associated with the Revolution, such as Colonial Williamsburg, who need reliable fonts to create a library of replica documents. Mr. Willson hears from users and fans often.
“It’s one of the finest rewards of this work,” he says. “And, yes, some folks likely wish to give the feel of the Revolution in their use of American Scribe, but others simply like the look of the font and their use is entirely unrelated (as when it appears on wine labels, say).”
I take perverse glee knowing that someone took so much time to remember Matlack’s work. The great irony, of course, is that his original parchment is so badly faded at this point in history that we must all rely on the 1823 Stone engraving to see what the Declaration looked like during its first century. The U.S. Constitution, written just 11 years later, is in much better shape. Both repose in darkness in the rotunda in Washington, DC.
Visitors who want a peek must press a button, which illuminates the documents for a little while. All day long, as tourists traipse through, the sacred principles of a nascent nation wink on and off, as if saying, We’re still here. We’re still here. We’re still here…
The celebrated actor with the most unusual command of the English language never stepped into the Globe Theatre or on any other London stage, nor Broadway for that matter. His enunciation of Shakespeare brought down the house. Consider these famous lines from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:
“A wose by any other name…”
and
“Woemeo, Woemeo, wherefwore art thou?”
Yes, this is the megastar who uttered arguably the cleverest, wittiest, most famous applause-winning line in any theatre:
“My twusty wifle is a twifle wusty.”
You nailed it, we’re talking Elmer Fudd, the thespian who put the ‘warning’ in Warner Bros.
A Fudd by Any Other Name
Unbeknownst to many fans, shotgun-toting big ‘El’ had his name appropriated by outside forces. Nay, not those words of conspiracy theorists: FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) or its variant, FUDD (fear, uncertainty, disinformation, doubt).
Instead, dictionaries define fudd as an old-fashioned person. More narrowly, NRA fans derisively refer to non-militant gun owners who use rifles made of wood and steel exclusively for hunting rather than weapons of war fabricated from carbon fiber, and esoteric ceramics and polymers.
Generally, fudds of this sense don’t see the necessity of tactical weaponry. They are thought to side with more restrictive pre-Clarence Thomas interpretations of the Second Amendment. Personally, I thought they missed a bet by not using fuddite. Luddite… Fuddite… Never mind.
The above are North American denotations. Among British definitions of fud is a Collins entry of Scottish root meaning tail of a rabbit or hare. Which brings us to today’s terrible Easter crime. No, not the terrifying Skeezicks or Pipsisewah weirdly nibbling the souse off Uncle Wiggily’s ears, but handling an over-population of Beatrix Potter bunnies.
Oops. Sowwy
One childhood Easter my young brothers, friends, and I thought abusing the Peter Rabbit song would be hilarious. I’m not sure if the real crime was the homicide of Peter or that we drove parents nuts singing it to the saturation point. So on behalf of disturbed third graders everywhere…
Here comes Peter Cottontail
Hopping down the bunny trail.
★BANG!★
Thud. Thud.
{sigh} Children can be horrible little delinquents. And along with millions of children everywhere, we bit the ears off chocolate bunnies! (although I preferred giant coconut eggs.)
In the hour before the sun peeked around the mountain, a green, green figure clumped up the hill, dysphoria washing over him yet again. Scrooge McGrinch felt misunderstood. His shrink explained he suffered from hereditary hormonal imbalance, festiphobia (a fear of holidays) and affluenza (a love of money). As the 7th generation following the historic marriage of Ebenezer Scrooge Jr and Ethylene Glycol MacGrinch, his skin still bore the same pigment as an eight-dollar bill.
[For our vast audience of molecular biologists, see DAT1, DRD2, and SOD1-/- in ‘Condition Green’, Morley et al, JAM, 2022.]
Then he heard a racket, a cacophony of four voices, and his spirits leaped in joy. Off the trail, caught in an avalanche of snow, were wedged his sworn nemeses, a quartet of bratty elves who made his pitiful life miserable.
Four Awful Elves
Boozy, Doozy, Floozy, and Woozy had awakened at 4:30, giggling and chuckling. The lads chortled at the notion of joyriding the village’s most recent resident, Bolderdash, understudy for the nine celebrity reindeer. In the dark of the mudroom, they pulled on boots, mittens, and stocking caps. Emboldened by a generous slug of wintergreen schnapps, they headed toward the barns.
Bolderdash was not thrilled to be shaken and awakened when a bridle slipped over his nose. The brightly lit factory and rail yard swarmed with activity at that early hour, so the jackanapes led their captive reindeer into the dark before climbing aboard.
They cantered down the tracks of the Polar Express and galloped into the night. At the edge of the plateau near Kringle International Airport, a landing FedEx cargo plane zoomed overhead, startling Bolderdash. He balked. He had had enough. In a fit of pique, he bucked and skidded to a halt at the edge of a precipice.
Four little figures flew over a cliff and landed up to their chins in deep snow, fortunate they didn’t set off an avalanche. They found themselves trapped in cold white stuff, unable to move. Meantime, Bolderdash sulkily stalked back to the barns, hoping for a little more sleep before roll call.
The Problem and the Proposal
A half hour passed until Scrooge McGrinch stumbled upon the naughty elves. He said, “You… You in the red hat. What are you miscreants doing?”
The elves appeared confused. Two wore red hats and two wore green hats. “In the dark, O Verdant One, we grabbed toques without noticing the colors. None of us can see what we’re wearing.”
“You brats wear colorful hats, but you don’t know the hue, do you?” said McGrinch. “Let’s play a little game.”
Scrooge McGrinch wasn’t a mean man… Well, okay, he was mean in multiple senses of the word, but he wasn’t entirely heartless. Following a modicum of smug enjoyment, he said, “If anyone can figure out the color cap you’re wearing, I’ll rush to Ski Patrol to dig you out, else I’ll call your parents and they won’t be happy.”
The elves shivered. “We’ll give it a try, Your Viridescence.”
Four elves in a row are immovably buried up to their chins in snow.
Their names and positions are Boozy₁, Doozy₂, Floozy₃, and Woozy₄.
Two wear red hats, two wear green, but no elf knows what color he wears.
Each elf can see only the elf or elves directly ahead.
Woozy is separated by an impenetrable snowdrift.
None can glimpse their own hat, nor do colors reflect off the snow.
Elves are not permitted to discuss what they see.
Solution after the break.
And so Scrooge McGrinch promised to rescue them if any elf correctly identified the color hat he was wearing, otherwise they faced the humiliation of begging the Big Elf’s help. Which elf might deduce his hat?
We are now into December, with its best-of lists for the year, wall-to-wall holiday ads, and bustle of work and family functions. And with it, crime.
Oh, there's plenty of real crime on the 10 o'clock news. Here in Cincinnati, though, the formerly depressed neighborhood of Over the Rhine has gone from gang violence to drunks shooting each other outside bars. Having Ubered for about four years, five if you count the Door Dashing during lockdown, I'm not surprised. OTR, as it's commonly called in Cincy, is half bars and all crowds after 10 PM on Fridays and Saturdays. Great cash, lousy company. I don't miss that side gig.
But crime is more fun in the movies. You could probably name a hundred crime movies set at Christmas. After all, 'tis the season for endless debates as to whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. It is. So is Deadpool, since the Merc with a Mouth tells his favorite taxi driver "Merry Christmas." They were part of a Christmas marathon the one year I spent the holiday alone. (Along with A Christmas Story and Christmas Vacation. So there.)
But leaving the ceremonial dropping of Hans Gruber on Christmas Eve aside, when the police cruisers all become a festive red from his splattering on the pavement (OK, that's not in the movie. Just the fall.), there are literally dozens upon dozens of Christmas crime movies out there. Some pretty obvious.
20th Century Fox
Like Home Alone. I mean, it has Joe Pesci. How is that not a crime movie? Most people see it as a live-action Warner Brothers cartoon. But let's get to the nitty gritty. Home Alone is Kevin left, of course, home. Alone. Over Christmas. That's the setup. The real story is the Wet Bandits, two guys straight out of those Warner Brothers cartoons, only with a nine-year-old in place of Bugs or Daffy. I've known a couple of recovering burglars in my time, and both have said it's the stupid ones who don't turn around and leave the moment they realize someone's awake. Not these geniuses. Kevin, with a house full of groceries, plenty of time off from school, and a creepy neighbor guy who turns out to be an ally, proceeds to make as much noise as possible. Even playing with a VCR (Remember those?) to play that infamous line, "Keep the change, ya filthy animal." When noise and lights don't work, Kevin booby traps the house, tapping his inner Rambo and possibly laying groundwork for the phrase, "Come at me, bro." These are very stupid criminals, and the average kid, even pre-mobile phone, would have dialed 911 and left the phone off the hook for the entertainment of the dispatcher.
Miramax
Then there's Bad Santa. Once again, burglars. This time, it's a drunken mall Santa and his diminuitive elf who plan to rob the mall after close on Christmas Eve. Billy Bob Thornton is Willie, the Santa, which should scare you already. He's foul-mouthed, verbally abuses his boss (played by the late, great John Ritter), and cheats on his wife with a bartender who has a Santa fetish. (To be fair, he hooks up with a few other women off screen, so at least he's consistent.) Marcus, the elf (Tony Cox), is the smart one, planning the operation and recruiting Willie's wife as the getaway driver. Marcus can deal with his drunken, horny, misanthropic partner. But it's a kid named Thurman who throws a monkey wrench in the works. Thurman (Brett Kelly, who seemed to play every ten-year-old in every movie filmed between 2000 and 2005) thinks Willie is the real Santa Claus. Some might say this is a real-life take on How the Grinch StoleChristmas, but then Jim Carey played the actual Grinch right around then.
Focus Pictures
Around the same time and also featuring Billy Bob Thornton is The Ice Harvest, featuring John Cusack. Based on the Scott Phillips novel of the same name, it concerns two small-time hoods who steal $2 million from their boss. Set in Wichita, Kansas on Christmas Eve, the pair split up while waiting out an ice storm to flee town. Thornton holds the money while Cusack tries to lay low. But Cusack lusts after the bartender at the strip club where he's holed up. He hints he has money. She hints she might be a gold digger. Unfortunately, Cusack has picked up a buddy, played by Oliver Platt in the days before he played grumpy old men. It's a series of double-crosses that ends up with Cusack and Platt leaving town and a trail of bodies behind. Is it a Christmas movie? It's Christmas Eve. And while it may not be as Christmas-themed as Home Alone and Bad Santa (or even Die Hard, which is a Christmas movie. I have spoken.), the time plays as much into the story as the place.
So what other Christmas capers are there? Are they Christmas because they revolve around Christmas in the plot? Or just set at Christmas? Or, like Deadpool, does a smart-mouthed mutant just tell a taxi driver "Merry Christmas?"
Friday and Saturday followed Halloween with Día de los Muertos, the popular Mexican version of All Souls Day. Celebrations are colorful and exciting. Like unpretty gargoyles on a church, Halloween and Día de los Muertos may confuse casual observers as to their religious bona fides.
All Souls remembers those who have come before, ephemeral passages our modern world neglects. But on this holiday of remembrance, I stumbled upon a passing you’re unlikely to forget.
Shock and Aww
For those who believe the world fosters no more eternal love stories, meet Carolyn Hamilton. She has such a gift for description, we barely resist falling into the gravitational pull of her words.
The title demonstrates truth-in-publishing still exists. Tik Tok has inured us to sensational headlines where ‘shock’ and ‘disturb’ may mean an influencer is showing off her too-transparent fashion haul so that, oopsie, nobody misses the show, yawn. Audience, please restrain your intense emotions.
Hamilton, if anything, understates shock. The White Queen told Alice she could imagine six impossible things before breakfast. Contrariwise, I found myself believing two antipodal understandings before dinner. I could comprehend a reader shocked and disturbed, and I grasped precisely how and why Carolyn… well…
I couldn’t have done it… I doubt most could. But Like Water for Chocolate, I get it. I get it. Unlike Tita’s story, Carolyn celebrates happiness.
Another turn in the rotation, another Summer holiday! Happy July 4th to SleuthSayers near and far!
And of course, me being me, I have some thoughts about this most American of holidays, and I fully intend to let 'er rip.
You know, some current events. Laced with a fair bit of (hopefully) relevant historical analysis. Some snark. Some "getting real."
So, the usual.
But first, some writer-adjacent humor!
❦
A writer and his agent were stranded in the Sahara Desert, the only two survivors of a plane crash. After wandering for several days without food or water, they climbed the top of yet another sand dune, only to see an oasis, with a lagoon and a bubbling spring of fresh water beckoning them.
The two of them stumble/tumble/run down the dune to the oasis, and just as the writer is kneeling down to take a drink from the lagoon, out of the corner of his eye, he sees a stream of yellow liquid arcing from behind him into the lagoon.
The writer looks over his shoulder, and to his horror, sees that the agent is PEEING in the pool!
”What the HELL are you doing?” the writer yells.
The agent beams back at him. “I’m improving it.”
❦
Q: What has twenty-seven actors, three settings, two writers, and one plot?
A: Six hundred and seventy-one Hallmark movies!
❦
Q: How many mystery writers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Two. One to change the bulb, and the other to give it an unexpected twist at the end!
❦
He is not wrong.
❦
Q: What do you call an immaterial fantasy writer?
A: A non-fungible Tolkien.
❦
Q: What's the difference between a 19th-century shipwright and a 21st-century writer of fan fiction?
A: One tries to fit as many cannons as they can onto a ship. The other tries to fit as many ships as they can into canon.
❦
Q: Why don't escaped convicts make good writers?
A: Because they never finish their sentences!
❦
❦
And on that note, let me come clean.
This year I have no moral to impart. No examples from history to share. No pithy remarks about the state of our Republic, other than to express my continuing pride in it and abiding faith in its foundation: the People.
Nothing I say here is going to change who anyone reading it plans to vote for. So let's take the day and grill, and watch fireworks, and listen to that one uncle tell that same story about the time he met Ed Begley, Jr. in an airport one July 4th many, many years ago, and hold our loved ones close and make the best sorts of memories.
You have heard the saying about how a seventh son of a seventh son is a lucky man indeed, right? Special, and possibly imbued with magical powers to heal and ward off evil? No? Well, it's mostly an Irish thing, so is it any wonder that with a name like "Brian Thornton," I practically grew up on stuff like this?
The connection between fathers and sons, the things they carry in common beyond the genetic, is part of what I'm writing about today. You see, I was born on a holiday. So was my son. Not the same holiday, but a holiday, nonetheless.
The holiday with which I share my birthday? April 1. Yep, April Fool's Day (Spare me the jokes. Trust me. I've already heard them!). My son? Well....
Here's a niiiiice subtle hint for ya!
On June 19th, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger, new commander of all U.S Army troops in Texas, issued General Order Number 3, and directed that it be read out as a proclamation on the main street corners and in the public squares of the newly captured city of Galveston, Texas:
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.
This proclamation officially brought to an end the institution of slavery within the borders of the United States in fact as well as in legal code. With the Trans-Mississippi section of the states rebelling against the government of the United States having been surrendered to Union troops by Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith a mere seventeen days earlier, it was close to a sure thing that many enslaved residents of the area had no idea that President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 had already (legally and technically) set them, and every other slave in the states then in rebellion against the Union, free.
So of course it goes without saying that as of 1865, June 19th has been viewed by many in this country as being a real mile marker in the history of our imperfect, flawed, lumbering, plodding, inefficient, frequently unfair, and yet still-the-best-option-we-have-going republic.
Think about it. 159 years ago this incredibly important event signifying the end of nearly 350 years of legalized slavery took place, and today, 159 years later, we as a nation commemorate it with a federal holiday, and what I am given to understand is a whole lotta barbecue.
Which means that not only did slavery on this continent have an official ending date, but one that none of the following could erase from collective memory:
Racially motivated violence.
The failure of Reconstruction.
Racially motivated violence.
Black codes.
Racially motivated violence.
Jim Crow laws.
Racially motivated violence.
Hundreds upon hundreds of racially motivated lynchings.
Racially motivated violence.
The presidential administration of Woodrow Wilson.
Racially motivated violence.
"Sundown laws."
Racially motivated violence.
Racial segregation.
Racially motivated violence.
The Klan.
Racially motivated violence.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Racially motivated violence.
Steppin Fetchit.
Racially motivated violence.
Ex-Confederate post-bellum revisionism (See Germany, June of 1945 onward over several decades: "Yes, Hitler was terrible. I never liked him and I never voted for him and I was never a Nazi and I didn't know what they did to the Jews until the Allies freed the concentration camps..." etc., etc., etc. Now tweak it a bit: "The war was never about slavery. It was about states' rights..." Un-huh. Sure.).
Racially motivated violence.
Douglas Southall Freeman.
Racially motivated violence.
All those cheap bronze statues of ex-Confederate military leaders popping up all over the country in the 1920s (thanks largely to groups like the above-mentioned United Daughters of the Confederacy).
Racially motivated violence.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy (Again).
Racially motivated violence.
The "Lost Cause" hogwash.
Racially motivated violence.
The Birth of a Nation ("Hey! President Wilson! Look! The Klan are the GOOD GUYS!").
Racially motivated violence.
The Civil Rights backlash (in so many ways still ongoing).
Racially motivated violence.
Racial profiling.
Racially motivated violence.
Keeping Harriet Tubman off the $20 bill.
Racially motivated violence.
And did I mention....
Racially motivated violence?
I'm sure I'm leaving plenty out.
Bear in mind that I'm an historian with an advanced degree and a specialization in 19th century America, and yet I never once heard of Juneteenth in any way, shape, manner or form until just about ten years ago. Now I know what you're thinking: "What does that say about your skills/education as an historian?" I'll tell you what it says about them. It says, "I was born white and male, raised and educated on the West Coast, and didn't hear about it until I actually did."
Now to tie it all together with a bow.
My son is 12 years old. I first heard about Juneteenth if the context of its coincidental sharing the date with his birthday. That's right. At 11:55 AM on June 19th, 2012, James Andrew Thornton came in to this world. That's 147 years after General Granger's proclamation of General Order Number 3.
The part that gets me? James is older than our collective national recognition of the importance of Juneteenth by 8 years and 364 days. President Joe Biden, the most consequential president of my lifetime (Yes, I said it, and I MEANT it. And what's more, I'm bringing receipts.), signed "Juneteenth National Independence Day" into existence the day before James' 9th birthday, on June 18th, 2021.
As i said above, our creaking, inefficient, sluggish, slow-to-change republic has been tardy on the recognition of this so very important holiday, this hallmark moment, this mile marker, this signifying that we as a nation finally get that it is WRONG to enslave fellow human beings.
The United States. Nearly always late to the party. But still the best option we've got.
So Happy Juneteenth! And Happy Birthday to James, who, at 12, is older than the holiday!
(Yes, I am aware that this won't post until the 20th. My celebration of this important day stands!)
No, I don’t mean I was abandoned or orphaned, although strictly speaking, most of us are as parents pass on.
Melayna as Valkyrie
My adoption happened a mere 3-4 years ago. At the time, not only was I supposedly, theoretically adult (adulterated?), but so was Layna. Words like putative, ostensible, and purported might be useful here when talking about grown-uptitude.
Before we met, Melayna told her mother not to expect her to like me, but soon my charm, my wit, and my bountiful modesty won her over.
Frankly, she won my respect and admiration. I’ve mentioned elsewhere she saved a man’s life one stormy night at no small risk to herself.
Convenience Store
While she was pursuing her medical education, she briefly worked the night shift at 7-Eleven north of Orlando’s main airport near the East-West Expressway. I worried about her safety and picked her up one night.
She puzzled me by spending a few minutes buying a hot sandwich, a cold juice, chips, a candy bar, and an apple. I knew her mother had dinner awaiting her at home, but I said nothing.
As I headed toward my car, she swerved toward the dumpsters. There she handed the food she’d bought to a homeless man, a derelict who thanked her by name. He was a man others mistreated, but not Layna. I thanked him for keeping an eye on her.
Melayna as biker chick
Grocery Store
So here’s a girl, my polar opposite in many ways, an Illustrated Woman whose fifty-some tattoos could have inspired another two Ray Bradbury novels. This photo from an earlier article shows one side, but she’s one ruff-tuff creme puff.
When she grocery shops, she enquires what I might need. She’s even careful about date stamps on milk.
On forms that ask for emergency contacts, I list her as number one. If hospitals want to pull the plug, Hell will freeze before she allows that to happen. As Erma Bombeck noted, as we age, the child becomes the parent and the parent the child.
My friend Steve is the same way. His ancient, creaking, blind and deaf dog was like a pet out of a Vincent Price reanimated movie. The line between living and taxidermied became thinner than a microtome slice.
Daddy Tissues
I’m not sure when Melayna began calling me Dad… Daddy. The first time, I wasn’t certain I heard right, but I was flattered.
I skipped the Terrible Twos and dodged the Know-It-All Nines. I didn’t suffer through those fractious teenage years. I missed all that floor-pacing at 2am wondering where my child was. Arguably I’ve unduly benefited.
Or course when I say we’re opposites, it’s only superficially true. I admire her kindness and consideration. She loves animals. Like my brother, she knows music well beyond her decades.
We share the same twisted sense of humor. Many times, one of us will remark sotto voce. Nobody else gets it, but I catch her eye in the rearview mirror, a quiet joke shared. Her mother thinks we should DNA test to be sure we’re not related.
For her birthday, I tentatively created a tattoo for her. Her mother opposed tats and had made her promise not to increase her art count until mama was long gone. So I showed her mom what I’d created and braced for the firestorm. The conversation went,
“Never, ever! Over my dead body will I allow… Oh, my God, it’s so cute. It’s her! She’ll love it. Yes, okay this once, yes.”
I assigned the Lil Darkling baby vampire copyright to Melayna to share or not as she wishes.
Follow the Bouncing Balls
Melayna came with a couple of hatchlings of her own. Her XY offspring recently adopted an infant. I sketched a cartoon for the happy couple. Before giving it to them, I asked others to critique and comment in an effort to nail the humor. To my dismay, no one got the joke.† I began to consider adding a caption, when someone sent a draft to the parents… and they got it immediately. They’re the ones who counted. Yay, win!
And me, I’ve leapt from zero kids to a multi-generational great-grand-something. And that’s great-great.
† Just in case you have a life outside of texting on your phone, many message apps, sensing the person on the other end is preparing a message, display an indicator of three dots rotating on the screen. For this article, I animated the dots, an advantage my poor test subjects didn’t have.
Everyone who made a New Year's resolution, singular or plural, raise your hand. Okay, you can put your hand down.
A month has now passed since you vowed to make some sort of change to better your life. How many of you made a resolution which had to so with your writing? Did that resolution have the goal of writing a set number of words within a fixed time period? Or maybe the goal of selling X number of stories per year? How many of you are reaching or are on track to reach that goal? Show of hands.
You might want to know that a 2023 market data research report by Gitnux shows that 50% of people make a New Year's resolution, but only about 8% of those people keep it. Whoa! So much for good intentions. And, only 64.6% of those people keep their resolution past the first month, which means that more than one third of these resolutionists have dropped out of their own well-intended program. My friend, the odds are against you. You may already have both feet well on the road to perdition.
Now, we don't want you to end up being roasted in some writers' hell, or even temporarily delayed in a writers' purgatory, so listen up, here's what you're gonna do.
First, you should always choose a goal where you have control. If your stated goal was to sell more stories, then you are probably already in trouble. For instance, should the readers, and therefore the editors, agents and publishers, decide that your chosen genre is going out of fashion this year, that is something over which you have no control. Under those circumstances, your well-intended goal becomes more difficult, if not impossible to achieve. If you don't believe that can happen, then ask yourself where the westerns went.
You also have no control over a situation where the editor receives more than one story similar in plot, story arc, ending, setting, etc. and therefore your submission is rejected because he only has room for one of these similar stories. Or, if the editor suddenly decides to put a themed edition together for that month and your story, as great as it is, doesn't fit the theme. Or, my favorite, "Your submission doesn't fit our needs at this time." You, as the writer, have no control in these types of situation
The second way to help you not break your resolution(s) is to choose a reasonable goal to begin with. Can you really write a thousand new words a day, five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year Sure, your favorite author may be able to accomplish that feat, but don't set yourself up for failure and disappointment because of a goal set too high. Remember, time must also be set aside for rewriting, editing, promoting, networking, conferences, meetings, family time and just plain living. You can always start out with a lesser goal and gradually raise the word count as time goes by and you become more proficient at your craft.
Okay now, everybody with a good idea on how to make a New Year's resolution and/or how not to break one…
December 26th, as all British mystery fans know, is recognized as Boxing Day. The holiday never became established in the United States. Boxing Day rose to prominence in the Victorian Era. By then the United States had separated from the United Kingdom and were busily creating our own holidays.
Within the early Christian calendar, the day was, and for some remains, St. Stephen's Day. December 26th commemorates the early Christian deacon and First Century CE martyr. St. Stephen, by tradition, dedicated his life in service to the poor.
Celtic people began celebrating Wren Day on December 26th. A dead wren was mounted on a pole and paraded through the village streets. The wren boys knocked on doors asking for money. In exchange, they gave the household a tail feather. The plume is supposed to bring good luck (Unless of course, you're the wren). At least one legend binds these two tales together. St. Stephen, although he was just Mr. Stephen at the time, was hiding from his enemies behind a bush. A chattering wren revealed his location to his captors. Different versions are reported, but in each story, the wren is labeled as treacherous.
In the spirit of St. Stephen, the money collected was to be donated to worthy charities.
At least two different origin stories exist for Boxing Day. The predominant one holds that during Victorian England, wealthy landowners presented gifts to servants and the poor on the day after Christmas. The servants had to work Christmas Day preparing their employer's feast. The day after, they were allowed to celebrate the holiday with their families. The landowners ate informal meals consisting of leftovers. The servants were provided with boxes containing money, hand-me-down clothing, and other goods, as well as leftovers from the family meal. These Christmas boxes lend their name to the day.
The other common theory holds that on the day after Christmas, the church opened the alms boxes, and the parish distributed the proceeds to the needy.
Victorians also often spent December 26th outside. After Christmas Day, inside a house jammed with relatives, the urge to get into the open air, burn pent-up energy, and get space from the family proved overwhelming. The hunt became a popular Boxing Day activity. Presumably, if wrens were killed, they would be distributed to Irish friends and subsequently hung from poles.
A host of traditions have come together to make this day after Christmas a holiday for more than just post-yuletide retail therapy.
One December holiday tradition important to the SleuthSayers community is the announcement of the Black Orchid Novella Award winner. Since 2006, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and The Wolfe Pack, the Nero Wolfe Literary Society, have been recognizing novellas. Robert Lopresti and Steve Liskow are past recipients of the award. Back in 2016, I submitted "A Meter of Murder" to the contest. In "Meter," John Milton, the blind 17th-century author of Paradise Lost, served as the sleuth. The committee chose my story and inducted me into the community of published short story authors. I remain indebted to them.
My congratulations, therefore, to Libby Cudmore for her winning story, "Alibi in Ice." We'll get to read her tale in the summer issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.
I'm circling back to a Milton story, sort of, in the January/February issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. In "The Devil in the Details," an English professor finds inspiration for his misdeeds in the words of Paradise Lost. As always, I'm honored to be included in the pages of the magazine, this time alongside fellow 'sleuthers, Robert Lopresti and Michael Bracken. Now here is a tradition I'd love to continue throughout 2024.
Whatever your holiday traditions include, I hope that you enjoy them with family and friends either inside or outside. May all your books and stories sell. And if your holiday tradition involves wren slaughtering, may the SPCA never find your home address.
Nollaig Shona Dhuit. (Google tells me that's a holiday greeting in Irish.)
Many years ago, SleuthSayers published a charming animated version of White Christmas as sung by the Drifters. This year I stumbled upon a 3D version. Given an excuse to compare and contrast whilst enjoying the Drifters, here are the two versions. Enjoy and a have a wonderful Christmas.
Holiday Greetings, SleuthSayers Faithful! Since my spot in the SleuthSayers rotation comes every other Thursday, it seems inevitable that every few years my spot will fall on this, in many ways the most American of holidays.
I'm speaking, of course, about Thanksgiving.
The last time I wrote a Thanksgiving post for Sleuthsayers was in 2020, when we as a planet found ourselves mired deep in the Time of COVID. If you'd like to compare, you can find that post here.
So here's my three-year update of what I'm thankful for:
My Family: most especially for my wife, Robyn, and my son, James. The two of them keep me honest and keep things around Casa Thornton fun. Also grateful for my parents, my brother, aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, etc.
My Friends: What can I say? Friends old and more recent, they fill me up, and support me. And I do my damnedest to return the favor.
My Health: After some recent challenges to my health, things have been looking up for the lion's share of 2023, with only metaphorical blue skies in evidence for 2024.
My Writing: I dove into the deep end of the short story market this past twelve months, and it was nice to be able to not only find my groove again, but really work to up my game, write scenes I might not have considered, conceived or attempted earlier in my career. It's been, and continues to be, a wonderful ride!
My Day Gig: I love my job. Make this, jobs. Both of them. My writing career (see above) has been, and continues to be, a labor of love that has paid dividends since the jump. My day job is teaching history (currently, and for the past seventeen years, to eighth graders). With COVID, overcrowded classes, and wrestling with a district administration that frequently seems to fail to understand the importance of what I do for a living, it had admittedly been a struggle over the past years.
The kids, for the most part, have remained AWESOME. Absolutely the best portion of what I do. And this year, even more so.
This year, I'm teaching a new subject (Yay U.S. History! And I'll miss Ancient & Medieval, but this is still a welcome change.), working on updating curriculum across multiple fronts. And get this: one of the newest members of my school's history department is a former student of mine. Yes, I have indeed been around that long.
I've written before about "Kids These Days", and fresh on the heels of parent-teacher conferences held just last night, my thoughts turn yet again to this subject: these children and the families who love, support and raise them, are our collective future. And judging from the families I've gotten to know and their wondrous progeny, our future rests in good hands.
The Writing Community At Large: I mentioned "friends" above, and many of my friendships began as acquaintances in the writing community, so of course I have friendships which double dip in "both" my daily life and my peers among the Writing Community at large (thinking especially of my MWA-Northwest cronies here). But more than that, I continue to find writers in general interested in what other writers (myself among them) are up to, and more than willing to be of assistance if at all possible. Twenty or so years into the game, I cherish these associations, and this community, more than ever.
Where I Live: I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I've lived a lot of places, but there really is no place like home. Still love the Pacific Northwest.
Yes, I know, I know. The rain. I've lived in the desert. Still enjoy visiting. Lived on the prairies. Magic there, too. LOVE going back.
Still, this is home.
The Seattle Mariners and Baseball in General: Yes, I know they missed the playoffs. Don't care. We'll get 'em next year. And it's only 80 days until "Pitchers and Catchers Report"!
SleuthSayers: This place helps keep me writing. Those twice-monthly deadlines are always there, looming. And as my wife (who ought to know best) is fond of saying of me, I do my best work on a deadline. And that thankfulness includes those of you dear readers who took the time to read this, and for all the folks who have stopped in to have a look at my work over the past decade and a bit.
And on that positive note I am off. Here's wishing us all a safe and Happy Thanksgiving!
