Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all! I'm taking a break from blogging but I'll be back after the holidays on January 4, 2021.

A Christmas Cult Classic

Christmas is right around the corner, so time to sit back and enjoy some classic Christmas movies like It's a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street.

I never realized there were Christmas cult classic films, until a few years ago when someone gave my kids a collection of Christmas movies. The motion pictures included were not well known, to say the least, but all were good for a laugh. 

The strangest--and corniest--was Santa Clause Conquers the Martians.  It's a 1964 science-fiction movie that regularly receives the honor of being listed as one of the worst films ever made. A featured player is ten-year-old Pia Zadora.

Here's a part of the plot from Wikipedia:

The story involves the people of Mars, including Momar ("Mom Martian") and Kimar ("King Martian"). They're worried that their children Girmar ("Girl Martian") and Bomar ("Boy Martian") are watching too much Earth television, most notably station KID-TV's interview with Santa Claus in his workshop at the North Pole. Consulting the ancient 800-year-old Martian sage Chochem (a Yiddish word meaning "genius"), they are advised that the children of Mars are growing distracted due to the society's overly rigid structure; from infancy, all their education is fed into their brains through machines and they are not allowed individuality or freedom of thought.

Chochem notes that he had seen this coming "for centuries", and says the only way to help the children is to allow them their freedom and be allowed to have fun. To do this, they need a Santa Claus figure, like on Earth. Leaving the Chochem's cave, the Martian leaders decide to abduct Santa Claus from Earth and bring him to Mars. As the Martians could not distinguish between all the fake Santas, they kidnapped two children to find the real one. Once this is accomplished, one Martian, Voldar, who strongly disagrees with the idea, repeatedly tries to kill Santa Claus along with the two kidnapped Earth children. He believes that Santa is corrupting the children of Mars and turning them away from the race's original glory.

It goes on, but you can tell from this that it's pretty bad, very funny, and not your average Christmas movie! Do you have any Christmas cult classics you'd like to share? Thanks for visiting and have a great week!

Pearl Harbor Day

"December 7, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy," President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously proclaimed. And today is Pearl Harbor Day, the 79th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

My mother was ten years old when the attack happened. She was playing with paper dolls (in the days before Barbies) when she heard the announcement on the radio (before the days of television). At that young age, she wasn't too aware of what was going on, but she remembers neighbors (back in the days when people actually knew their neighbors) gathering in her home later that day and discussing what would happen next.

War had been raging in Europe for two years, but the US had yet to become involved, other than providing aid to the United Kingdom. So what did happen next as a result of the attack on Pearl Harbor? An article from USA.com explains it well:

The surprise raid on the major U.S. Navy base near Honolulu killed more than 2,400 Americans and left another 1,100 injured. In short, the strike signaled the entry of the United States into World War II.

Just before 8 a.m. on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, hundreds of Japanese planes made the surprise raid on Pearl Harbor. During the attack, which was launched from aircraft carriers, nearly 20 American naval vessels, including eight battleships, were damaged or destroyed, as well as more than 300 aircraft.

The official American death toll was 2,403, according to the Pearl Harbor Visitors Bureau, including 2,008 Navy personnel, 109 Marines, 218 Army service members and 68 civilians. Of the dead, 1,177 were from the USS Arizona, the wreckage of which now serves as the main memorial to the incident. Fifty-five Japanese soldiers also were killed.

Until the raid, the U.S. had been reluctant to join World War II, which had started on Sept. 1, 1939, after Germany invaded Poland.

In those nearly 2 1/2 years, the U.S. had extensively assisted the United Kingdom, virtually the sole source of resistance to the Nazis in Europe, with arms and other supplies. However, the goal of isolationism – brought on, according to the State Department’s Office of the Historian, by the Great Depression and the memory of massive losses during World War I – led Roosevelt and Congress to be wary of intervention. Pearl Harbor reversed that in a day, with Congress issuing a declaration of war after Roosevelt’s speech on Dec. 8, 1941.

And as they say, the rest id history! Do you have any relatives that remember that day? Thanks for visiting and have a great week!