Erin O'Riordan writes smart, whimsical erotica. Her erotic romance novel trilogy, Pagan Spirits, is now available. With her husband, she also writes crime novels. Visit her home page at ko-fi.com.
"The grand Yule-tide festival is opened on the eve of St. Nicholas Day, December sixth; in fact bazaars are held from the first of the month, which is really one prolonged season of merrymaking.
"In Germany, St. Nicholas has a day set apart in his honor. He was born in Palara, a city of Lycia, and but very little is known of his life except that he was made Bishop of Myra and died in the year 343. It was once the custom to send a man around to personate St. Nicholas on St. Nicholas Eve, and to inquire how the children had behaved through the year, who were deserving of gifts, and who needed a touch of the birch rods that he carried with him into every home. St. Nicholas still goes about in some parts of the country, and in the bazaars and shops are sold little bunches of rods, real or made of candy, such as St. Nicholas is supposed to deal in. In some places Knight Rupert takes the place of St. Nicholas in visiting the houses. But Kriss Kringle has nearly usurped the place St. Nicholas once held in awe and respect by German children.
"Because St. Nicholas Day came so near to Christmas, in some countries the Saint became associated with that celebration, although in Germany the eve of his birthday continues to be observed. Germans purchase liberally of the toys and confectionery offered at the bazaars, and nowhere are prettier toys and confectionery found than in Germany--the country which furnishes the most beautiful toys in the world."
- Yule-Tide in Many Lands by Mary Poagle Pringle and Clara A. Urann, 1916
Happy Krampusnacht to all who celebrate. Don't forget to leave your shoes out for St. Nicholas to fill with goodies tonight, if you haven't been naughty and carried away by Krampus in his sack!
I bought this for my nephews.
My Top 100 Songs of the Spotify Year*:
1. Hymn to Virgil - Hozier: Not my literary art-rock ass loving a song about Dante's Inferno.
10. Nina Cried Power - Hozier: It's not the waking, it's the rising.
11. Disease - Lady Gaga: Up from its #50 position last year, when it had barely come out before the Wrapped cutoff date came up.
12. Cold Cold Ground - Tom Waits: In September 2024,Homicide: Life on the Street actors Kyle Secor and Reed Diamond started a podcast. I re-listened to some of the songs that were on the series when it originally aired (although not used in the streaming version on the Peacock network).
13. Spirits - The Devil Makes Three: I learned this song from a playlist on Jessie Lynn McMains's Substack.
14. The Devil's Nine Questions - Carolyn Kendrick: This neo-folk recommendation came from a podcast but I forgot which one.
23. Stay - Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs. These oldies are from Perry's Mix Tape for Truman.
24. Cruel Summer - Taylor Swift: My #4 song last year and probably the Taylor Swift song that brings me the purest joy. But I can only listen to it in the summer. I abandon it when autumn comes. I forgot that I started listened to it because of Good Omens.
I have to admit, the revelation that Neil Gaiman is a garbage heap of a human being really dulled my enthusiasm for Ineffable Spouses. David Tennant and Michael Sheen, it's not your fault.
25. Burn Your Village - Kiki Rockwell
26. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening - Robert Frost, Blake X: This poem is really nicely set to a melody. And I can only listen to it in the winter. I'm a mood listener as much as I am a mood reader.
27. Poet - Bastille: My #6 song from last year, I made myself chill out on listening to it quite so much so it wouldn't completely lose its power to affect me.
38. Kill of the Night - Gin Wigmore: I know this one from the first season of The Umbrella Academy.
39. Gin House Blues - Nina Simone
40. Ava Adore - The Smashing Pumpkins
41. Aloha Lucifer - Melanie [Safka], Charming Disaster: This is a particularly cute song, in which the singer claims to have ended up at Hell's gate by confusing the mellow "hang loose" hand gesture of Hawaiian culture with the "horned hands" hand gesture of Satanists and heavy metal enthusiasts.
49. How Bad Do U Want Me - Lady Gaga: Mayhem again.
50. Take Me to Church - MILCK
51. Where Did You Sleep Last Night - Sleigh Bells
52. Saints - The Breeders
53. Peacefield - Ghost: This one is about the Russian Revolution, I'm pretty sure.
54. Danger - The Vantages
55. Yes, I'm a Witch - Yoko Ono
56. Lover Please - Melissa Etheridge: Up from its #92 spot on last year's list.
57. True Religion - Shygirl, Club Shy
58. Kiss the Go-goat - Ghost
59. Goddess - PVRIS: Honestly? I can't remember what this song sounds like or what inspired me to listen to it. It's, like, deleted from my memory banks.
60. Building a Mystery - Goodwerks: The Sarah McLachlan song with a male vocalist; it's so Dean Winchester-coded that I put it on the Destiel playlist.
67. Creep - Scala & Kolaczny Bros.: I know this cover from the Simpsons episode "The D'oh-cial Network." I know the Radiohead original from being a teenager in the '90s.
68. 1979 - The Smashing Pumpkins
69. Down Bad - Taylor Swift: This one is so brilliantly written, with its comparison of a failed love affair to an alien abduction.
70. Super Bon Bon - Soul Coughing: This one was also used on the Homicide: Life on the Street soundtrack in its original run.
83. Paparazzi - Lady Gaga: Because Alexander Skarsgard was in the music video and I remembered that when I watched Skarsgard as a self-aware robot construct on the tv series Murderbot.
Skarsgard Aside: I have to see the above-mentioned Swede in his recent film Pillion. He plays the leader of a biker gang who enters a BDSM relationship with a repressed young man. The young man is played by Harry Melling.
84. Stay ( Faraway, So Close!) - U2
85. Shallow - Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper
86. Black Parade - Beyonce
87. Gimme Shelter - Merry Clayton
88. Love Potion No. 9 - The Clovers
89. So Cruel - U2
90. I Need - Meredith Brooks
91. Wish I Knew You - The Revivalists
92. II Most Wanted - Beyonce, Miley Cyrus
93. Bodies Hit the Floor - Sofi Tukker, Drowning Pool
98. Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover - Sophie B. Hawkins
99. Low - Cracker
100. Venus - Bananarama: Yep, I love my girl groups.
*Fuck ICE. Chinga la migra. Yes, I share a Spotify subscription with my spouse. No, we do not agree with Spotify's decision to accept advertisements from the United States equivalent of the Gestapo.
"Yule-tide in France begins on St. Barbara's Day [Sainte-Barbe], December fourth, when it is customary to plant grain in little dishes of earth for this saint's use as a means of informing her devotees what manner of crops to expect during the forthcoming year. If the grain comes up and is flourishing at Christmas, the crops will be abundant. Each dish of fresh, green grain is used for a centerpiece on the dinner table."
- Yule-Tide in Many Lands by Mary Poagle Pringle and Clara A. Urann, 1916
December 2, 1984: Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, is so poorly maintained it causes the largest industrial disaster in history. The accidental release of methyl isocyanate causes the immediate suffocation deaths of more than 2,000 people, injuries in more than 50,000 people, and an additional gas-related death toll of perhaps another 8,000 people. Although the Indian government charged Union Carbide executives with homicide, the company claimed it was not under Indian jurisdiction and these officials did not appear in court to face these charges.
December 3, 1935: Linguist Milman Parry, 33, an assistant professor at Harvard University whose work introduced the serious study of oral storytelling tradition to academia, travels to Los Angeles with his wife Marian. Marian’s mother, who lived in California, had been the victim of some financial abuses. The Parrys came to help her; Milman packed a revolver in his suitcase, as he’d done on earlier trips to then-Yugoslavia, where he’d collected recordings of Bosnian oral poetry. This time, when the Parrys went to change for dinner in their room in the Palms Hotel, the revolver became entangled in a shirt inside Milman’s suitcase. Its safety catch was not engaged. As Milman reached into the suitcase, the revolver discharged, shooting him through the heart and killing him.
December 4, 1987: Children’s book author and illustrator Arnold Lobel dies of AIDS-related cardiac arrest. He is 54 years old.
December 5, 1931: Poet Vachel Lindsay dies by suicide after intentionally drinking a bottle of lye. His last words are reportedly, “They tried to get me; I got them first!”
December 5, 2016: A 28-year-old man from North Carolina arrives at Washington, D.C.’s Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant armed with a rifle and two additional firearms. The man, who had been reading completely falsified conspiracy theories that the restaurant served as a front for child abuse by D.C. elites, threatened staff with the weapons and fired the rifle in the restaurant’s kitchen, apparently a “warning shot” not directed at anyone. He is arrested before anyone inside the pizza place is hurt. In March 2017, the man pleads guilty to federal weapons charges and judge Ketanji Brown Jackson (not yet an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) sentences him to four years in prison. He is released from prison in 2020.
December 7, 1941: A surprise attack on U.S. territory by the Japanese military at 8 a.m. on this Sunday morning kills 2,403 Americans (2,335 military personnel and 68 civilians) and wounds 1,143. The attack on the U.S. naval base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu was intended to incapacitate the Pacific Fleet of the American Navy, even though the U.S. was officially neutral in World War II at this time.
Among the wounded was my paternal grandfather Bill, 17 years old at the time. He was blown off his ship (the USS West Virginia) and knocked, unconscious, into the water, awakening in the base hospital with a shoulder injury. He recovered and was reassigned from pharmacist’s assistant to EMT so he could help care for the more seriously wounded sailors.
December 7, 2010: Kim Tinkham, age 36, dies of what was most likely metastatic breast cancer. Tinkham had appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2008 to talk about the then-popular book The Secret. Tinkham claimed her Stage 3 breast cancer had been successfully treated with alternative medicine. The doctor who appeared with Tinkham on that show and backed up her claim, Robert Oldham Young, was arrested in 2014 and convicted in 2016 for theft and practicing medicine without a license.
Young’s claim was that cancers are caused by an imbalance of the body’s pH and that an “alkaline diet” can treat and prevent cancer. Little to no scientific research supports this claim.
December 8, 1980: John Lennon is murdered by handgun outside his apartment building in New York City.
December 9, 1977: In the NBA, the L.A. Lakers play the Houston Rockets. At the beginning of the second half of the game, Laker Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Rocket Kevin Kunnert scuffle over a rebound. In the scuffle, Kunnert elbows Abdul-Jabbar’s teammate Kermit Washington. Washington punches Kunnert in the head.
Kunnert’s teammate Rudy Tomjanovich runs over, intending to help break up the fight. Washington takes a swing at Tomjanovich, striking him in just such a way that fractures his skull. Tomjanovich falls to the court, unconscious and bleeding, although he quickly recovers and, apparently due to a rush of adrenaline, walks around the court in a seemingly aggressive manner. Tomjanovich doesn’t know it yet, but in addition to a broken jaw and nose, he has a fracture near the base of his skull leaking cerebrospinal fluid. He has to be rushed to the emergency room and given emergency surgery, since this is a life-threatening skull fracture. Tomjanovich requires five months of physical recovery before he can play again.
December 9, 1995: American author Toni Cade Bambara dies of colorectal cancer at the age of 56.
December 10, 1816: The body of Harriet Westbrook Shelley, the estranged wife of Percy Shelley and the mother of his son and daughter, is discovered in the Serpentine River. She is pregnant and has apparently died by suicide. She is only 21 years old.
December 10, 1929: Poet, publisher, and World War I veteran Harry Crosby kills his mistress, Josephine Noyes Rotch, and himself inside a friend’s apartment. Crosby’s wife Caresse becomes worried about her husband’s whereabouts when he fails to show up for a dinner party with the poet Hart Crane. Crane will also die by suicide two years later.
December 11, 2021: Anne Rice dies at the age of 80 of complications from a stroke.
December 12, 1999: Satirical novelist Joseph Heller dies of a heart attack at the age of 76.
December 13, 2011: Gianluca Casseri, a far-right author, Germanic neo-Pagan, devotee of American fascist Ezra Pound, and historian of J.R.R. Tolkien goes on an anti-immigrant shooting spree in Piazza Dalmazia, Florence, Italy. He shoots five street vendors who are all immigrants from Senegal, wounding three and killing two. Casseri then kills himself.
December 14, 1920: George “The Gipper” Gipp, legendary Notre Dame football player, dies of strep throat and pneumonia in St. Joseph Hospital (then in South Bend, now located in Mishawaka). He is 25 years old.
George Gipp is buried in his native Michigan, but an often-told legend around the Notre Dame campus is that Gipp's ghost haunts the old theater building, Washington Hall. According to the legend, when Gipp missed curfew and got locked out of his dorm building, he would sleep outside Washington Hall.
December 14, 1995: 28-year-old professional skydiver Rob Harris dies while filming a Mountain Dew commercial. The commercial, a James Bond spoof in which a Bond-like figure snowboards out of an exploding plane, is aired featuring previous takes, but none of the footage from Harris’s final jump, contrary to urban legend. Harris’s fatal fall is triggered by tangled lines and a backup chute that fails to deploy in time.
December 16, 1913: Ambrose Bierce writes to his literary secretary, “I am going to Mexico with a pretty definite purpose which is not at present discloseable. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think that’s a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico–ah, that is euthanasia!” Neither Bierce’s literary secretary nor any of his other acquaintances ever hear from him again after this letter. He’s presumed to have died in Mexico, perhaps in an early example of “suicide by cop,” or in this case, suicide by revolutionary.
December 16, 1988: Disco singer Sylvester James dies at his home in San Francisco from AIDS-related illness. He’s 41 years old.
December 17, 2021: Visual artist, classic album cover designer, and novelist Eve Babitz dies at age 78 from Huntington’s disease, the same hereditary neurodegenerative disease that killed Woody Guthrie.
December 18, 1966: Tara Browne, the heir to the Guinness stout fortune, dies in the hospital one day after crashing his Lotus Elan sports car into a parked truck. Browne had been driving at over 100 miles per hour through London and sped through a red traffic light before crashing. Browne’s passenger, model Suki Potier, was not injured in the accident.
In popular cultural, Browne is remembered as the man who “blew his mind out in a car” in the Beatles song “A Day in the Life.” Browne and Paul McCartney and John Lennon were acquaintances.
December 18, 2015: A fire at Mzuzu University Library in Mzuzu, Malawi, destroys an estimated 45,000 pieces of media.
December 19, 1848: 30-year-old Emily Brontë dies of tuberculosis.
December 19, 1991: Musician Henry Rollins and roadie Dennis Cole return home from a Hole concert at the Whiskey a Go Go nightclub when they are held up by a pair of men with guns. The men demand money, and when they discover that Rollins and Cole only have $50 of cash between them, the men order Rollins to go inside the home (which Rollins and Cole share) to get more. Rollins escapes and calls the police. Cole is shot in the face by the robbers and dies. The assailants have never been identified or arrested.
December 20, 1882: Swiss Romantic poet Alice de Chambrier dies at age 21 from complications of diabetes.
December 21, 1940: Heavy-drinking author F. Scott Fitzgerald dies of a heart attack, leaving his novel The Last Tycoon unfinished.
December 22, 1940: The day after F. Scott Fitzgerald dies, author Nathanael West runs a stop sign while driving home to Los Angeles from a trip to Mexico. He and his wife Eileen McKenney are both killed.
December 22, 1995: Retired dancer and Gone With the Wind actor Butterfly McQueen, then 84 years old, dies at the hospital from burn wounds she suffers when she attempts to heat her home using a kerosene heater that malfunctions.
December 23, 1888: Vincent Van Gogh, suffering from a severe bout of depression, cuts off a piece of his own left ear with a razor.
December 24, 1851: A fire at the U.S. Library of Congress destroys 55,000 books, or approximately two-thirds of its collection at the time, including most of the books donated by Thomas Jefferson that made up the library’s original collection.
December 24, 1936: Stage and early silent film actress Irene Fenwick dies at age 49 due to complications of an eating disorder. Her husband Lionel Barrymore (great-uncle of Drew Barrymore), who famously plays Ebenezer Scrooge on the radio every Christmas, is forced to turn the role over his brother John (great-grandfather of Drew Barrymore).
December 26, 2002: Photographer Herb Ritts dies of AIDS-related pneumonia at the age of 50.
December 27, 1974: Ned Maddrell dies at the age of 97. He was the last fluent speaker of Manx, a Celtic language of the Isle of Man.
December 27, 2016: Actress and author Carrie Fisher dies during her fourth day in the intensive care unit of Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. She has suffered from respiratory failure while aboard a flight on December 23rd. Her exact cause of death could not be determined, but artery disease, sleep apnea, and use of cocaine and opiates are all thought to be contributing factors. Fisher is 60 years old.
December 29, 1170: Knights loyal to King Henry II assassinate Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, inside Becket’s cathedral.
December 29, 2003: Maria Sergina, the last fluent native speaker of the Akkala Sámi language, dies and the language goes extinct. Akkala Sámi was spoken by the indigenous Sámi people of the Kola Peninsula in Russia.
December 30, 1903: The Iroquois Theatre in Chicago hosts a performance of Mr. Blue Beard before an audience filled with women and children out making a day of after-Christmas shopping. A faulty arc light causes the background scenery to catch fire. A number of inadequate fire safety precautions, including too few exits, lead to a disastrous fire that kills more than 600 people.
December 30, 1999: Former Beatle George Harrison, his wife Olivia, and their son Dhani are asleep in their home, Friar Park, outside London at around 3 a.m. local time. George and Olivia hear glass breaking. George goes downstairs to investigate, only to find a 33-year-old man screaming. The stranger had broken into the home by breaking a window with a bit of lawn statuary. The man has a knife and stabs George repeatedly in the chest until Olivia comes down and hits the man with a fireplace poker. The intruder then tries to strangle Olivia with the cord of a lamp. Olivia manages to fight off the attacker.
George survives but has to have part of a lung removed. The attacker, who is experiencing serious mental illness, is found to be not criminally liable for his actions because of his mental state and is admitted to a secured mental health hospital, where he stays until after George’s death in 2001 from cancer.
I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving, if that's a holiday you celebrate. Now, please enjoy these affiliate links to some excellent book deals. Remember that books make wonderful gifts for the winter holidays.
These are all Amazon affiliate links, but I will have you know that I recently also became an affiliate of its rival company, Bookshop.org, which sells only books and not potato peelers, and also shares its proceeds with independent bookstores. If you'd like to support this blog through Bookshop.org, please visit https://bookshop.org/shop/aeess.
A new book in the All Souls series by Deborah Harkness? Sign me up immediately. The book description talks about Diana and her twins but doesn't say anything about Matthew Clairmont, making me worry that something has happened to that vampire I want to marry, but still, I need to hold this book in my hands and learn its secrets.
I always used to say that if I had a personal theme song, it would be "Human Nature" by Madonna Louise Ciccone.
Remember ReciteThis? From the internet of 12 years ago?
Today, Friday, November 28th, 2025, Madonna has released a remix album titled Bedtime Stories: The Untold Chapter.
In our time, when a global shift toward reactionary politics has led to a resurgence of Puritanical censorship culture, Ms. Ciccone was wise to release a new remix of "Human Nature." Express yourself, don't repress yourself. That's still good and necessary advice about the nature of creating art.
The above and below images are from a Cody, Wyoming newspaper.
What is this Piggly Wiggly ad calling me? Just kidding, I know they're probably spelling "thoughts" in a playful, colloquial way.
By 1925, Thanksgiving Day in the United States was already married to watching American football.
Don't worry, people from the 1920s. I'm sure your habit of buying things on credit won't cause any kind of financial panics by the autumn of 1929. I'm sure the Roaring '20s will lead smoothly into the Roaring '30s, when there definitely won't be The Great anything.
