Excerpt: Like Getting Honey from a Stone

Chapter

When asked what Christmas movie he most wanted to watch, Ben consistently answers: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.
The adult who asked the first question would then ask a second question with a deep frown wrinkling their face. “Are you certain?” the crest fallen adults would ask. Offers would then be tendered for It’s a Wonderful Life (non colorized), Miracle on 34th Street (any version of it) and A Christmas Carol, the original 1934 incarnation.
Ben’s heart could not be swayed. The movie he wanted to see showed him something he saw no place else. In every other movie he watched, Santa Claus, was depicted as a super human who was omniscient, benevolent and without flaw, besides his strange taste in clothing.
When Ben looked around the room to the rest of his life, he saw no one and nothing similar to that.
But when the Santa as played by John Call, photographed in ‘blazing space vision’ sat imprisoned by the Martians, trapped alone with two strange children that not only did not laugh at his jokes but looked at him so morosely he apologized, Ben saw something recognizable.
He saw a vulnerable person stuck with the wrong family. A family that would never understand him. They would never laugh at his jokes, know what made him smile, or guess at the inner workings of his mind. They would never do any of that, not without the benefit of a few gamma ray gun blasts to the cerebral cortex. Or maybe not ever.
In that tiny glimpse of the complexities of family dynamics during the holidays, or during alien abduction, which at the time looked very much the same, Ben saw a Santa he could relate to.
When he looked at all the other depictions, nothing else caught his eye.

Chapter

Honig’s favorite Christmas movie was a film that almost no one else considered as a Christmas movie. In 1948 John Wayne and John Ford partnered to make one of the least heralded films in their other wise well praised collaboration.
The Three God Fathers features beautiful vistas of merciless landscapes, theft, mind games, tone deaf singing, violence, bible quotations, suicide, both visual and auditory hallucinations by the main male character and a soft spoken mother figure who knew with unshaken knowledge that her child had value and could survive any dire event.
Because all of that, with the exception of the horses and the cacti, could be seen within her own house at any time in her early child hood, Honig found the film comforting.
None of her friends grasped that idea and always insisted on watching Little Drummer Boy, followed quickly by Frosty.
Since both of those stories hinged heavily on child abandonment, Honig watched with understanding but no enjoyment.