You might be chipper, content, full of good cheer – that is, you might a person who enjoys crowds and deadlines and the giving of gifts. This is your time and I say, blessings.

Or you might feel like you’re sucking a bare electric wire, stressed and frantic because your always busy life has become a nightmare of scurrying and doubt. (Will Granny like the pajamas? What to get for Aunt Bertha, a Scientologist who’s just declared herself to be a vegan? And nephew Horatio….doesn’t he already have every comic book ever published?)

One size never fits all, in holidaying as in everything else.

Well, which it is? Santa or Scrooge or the Grinch?

Let’s eliminate the Grinch from this discussion. Dr. Seuss was a national treasure, but – let’s face it – the Grinch is fantasy and was never intended to be anything else. And the jolly old elf? Okay, there’s a vaguely historical basis for him, but the guy in the red suit with the beard? Naw. Not for anyone older than eight.

Leaving us with Scrooge. Old Ebenezer is fiction (and was never intended to be anything else) but his is a fiction rooted in some truth. Haven’t we known a Scrooge or two? Haven’t we been a Scrooge? Show of hands, please.

I’ve just put mine down.

Oh, I can, and have, justified my Scrooge attacks with sweet reason. Isn’t Christmas really a pagan holiday, a celebration of the end of winter and the coming of spring, with its brightness and warmth? An occasion for rest and renewal? Perhaps a way to reassure ourselves that, despite the darkness, we will survive? And hasn’t it morphed into something the opposite of what it once was, a festival, not of light, but of greed and showing off for the neighbors? The season of frayed nerves and bereft bank accounts? Of terror at the arrival of the Master Card envelope?

Yeah, afraid so. But we Scrooges – in the hush of our chambers, at three in the morning, we know the real reason for our sourness, don’t we?

When one’s life is flaking apart, for whatever reason, displays of cheer and the sound of song exacerbate the anguish. So the churches and the bars and the AA meetings do brisk business on the holiest of eves, because a lot of lives are flaking. Remember Thoreau: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Amen, and Thoreau’s observation can be most painfully true on Christmas. So we’re not mad at the season, we Scrooges. We’re mad at ourselves for allowing our existence to become one of quiet desperation.

When the holiday is a deserted street and an empty bottle, what’s to celebrate?

We have to blame someone or some thing, and Christmas won’t argue with us.

Some of us Scrooges will awaken in the morning and, I don’t know… send a kid to buy a goose?

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

This week the ESO Crew is back in the station as we travel to 221b Baker Street to discuss the world’s greatest detective, Sherlock Holmes. Our guests this week are Holmes Artist Mark Maddox, Holmes Author Bernadette Johnson, and Holmes Historian Tom Elmore. Also Bobby sits down with Pulp 2.0 Press publisher Bill Cunningham to discuss his upcoming Sherlock Holmes project, the return of Martin Powell and Seppo Makinen’s Scarlet in Gaslight graphic novel.

Join us for yet another episode of The Earth Station One Podcast we like to call: It’s Elementary, Dear Watson. The Game is Afoot!

You get all this and more at http://www.esopodcast.com/.

Direct link: http://erthstationone.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/earth-station-one-episode-91-its-elementary-dear-watson-the-game-is-afoot/

Download this podcast from Itunes or Subscribe to our RSS Feed at http://www.esopodcast.com/.

Next week, Earth Station One steps back inside the TARDIS to review the new Doctor Who Christmas Special as well as a roundtable discussion with some special guests about our favorite holiday-themed stories as we travel from 2011 to 2012.

And we would love to hear from you. What are your favorite holiday-themed stories? Leave us a comment at http://www.esopodcast.com/, at the ESO Facebook Group, email us at esopodcast@gmail.com, or call us at 404-963-9057 with your list. We might just read yours on the show.

The ESO Crew

Holiday-themed comics have long been a tradition, along with holiday-themed… everything else. That’s cool; if you can’t make a buck pushing Santy Claus, when can you?

As far as our four-color medium is concerned, we inherited the tradition from the newspaper strips. These guys went all-out, and back when there were still a lot of continuity strips stories would be interrupted for Christmas and New Years (Hanukkah rarely, Kwanza, Ramadan and Saturnalia never) or, better still, holiday themes would be incorporated into the ongoing story. This was carried over into proto-comic book form when Will Eisner and his largely Jewish crew produced their annual “Christmas Spirit” story.

Outside of Santy-themed covers, it took a while for the comic book publishers to reliably produce annual holiday fare. The two that lasted the longest where Archie’s Christmas Stocking (with variations on that title, including the all-embracing evil “holiday” word) which started in 1954, and DC’s Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, licensed from Robert L. May, who owned the glowing streetkill. That title commenced in 1950. Dell had special Christmas editions of the various Disney and Warner Bros. cartoon characters, and before long most other publishers jumped on the sleigh.

As a child, Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer confused me. That’s a statement you don’t often read, but it’s true. The original series ran for twelve years, which meant twelve issues. All were unnumbered. At some point I understood DC didn’t number their first issues (I later discovered why), but I knew Rudolph to be an annual event. A collector even as a child, I wanted to know how many issues I had missed. The title continued in various formats – giants, tabloids – until it was no longer worth the licensing fee. Yet holiday-dedicated superhero comics continued; DC was way ahead of the curve with its Holiday Special (sic) going back at least to 1980.

This year, we continue to have holiday output from Archie – including a trade reprint of Stocking stories – and a pretty nifty tome from Marvel that first appeared as individual digital stories. This latter book is one of my favorite Marvels of 2011. But unless I overlooked a page in the Diamond catalog, nothing from DC Comics. No Christmas title, no Holiday title, nothing from the company that pretty much started it all.

At first I thought Mark Waid just didn’t need the money this year and is probably overbooked writing every seventh title published. But then it dawned on me.

Maybe Bill O’Reilly is right. Maybe there is a War On Christmas. After all, those bleeding hearts at Warner Bros. studios now have full control of the company, and Bill and his friends at the New York Post keep telling us they’re heartless bastards. I guess this is proof.

O.K. Fine. I’ve got my Marvel holiday comic, and my Archie reprints, and besides, I firmly believe there ain’t no sanity clause. But I’m sentimental enough to wish you-all a wonderful holiday season.

Quite frankly, we deserve it.

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil