December 2022

The Halloween spiders and ghosts are gone from my neighbour’s yard and the Christmas decorations have taken their place in the form of a large inflatable Santa. The big plastic St. Nicolas is a symbol of peace and non-denominational Christian love. It’s also a huge, red bag the size of a Mini Cooper, so you can hardly blame the nine year old who is beating the hell out of it. Santa can take it, mind you, rolling with the punches and wobbling back up for more, like a belligerent drunk 

The sight is unsettling for some of us, but I doubt the neighbour’s kid is troubled by the metaphorical blasphemy. The kid’s dad seems to get the inappropriateness of it all, but I suspect he’s more worried about Santa springing a leak, which would send the wrong message  all together to the merry passers by. Have you ever seen those inflatable figures—Grinches and Minions and Disney Princesses—when they’re deflated? Picture a sad puddle of wrinkled plastic and you’ll get the idea. It’s enough to put Alka-Seltzer in your Egg Nog.

I sometimes watch Hallmark Christmas movies to catch up on my seasonal symbolism. If there’s one thing that defines the characters in those stories it’s their obsessive Freudian absorption with Christmas. I’ve taken to running off check lists to help me keep track of the key plot elements, and as I watch I tick them off: winter festival, check; snowball fight, check; tree lighting, check, and so on. There’s something pleasant about predictability. It’s what makes lovers of detective mysteries seek out the next tale of a weary detective, struggling with his demons, who tracks down the serial killer after risking his own life. These detectives could work on their anger issues by punching out an inflated Minion now and then, but I really shouldn’t make light of this type of genre fiction. After all, that’s what I write. 

It’s odd, though, given the predictability of the genre, how much time I spend to reverse my readers’ expectations. Won’t they be annoyed at me when they find out that… Whoops! Stop right there. No spoilers. Well, there’s nothing for it but to change the subject. 

But since you brought it up—how do you end that kind of story? If it’s a mystery, you have to end it when the puzzle is solved, don’t you? Or can you give your beleaguered characters a few minutes to unwind after the big reveal, to stare unto each other’s eyes? Is the mystery author allowed to do a victory lap at the end, or would that denouement constitute the dreaded ‘anticlimax’—akin to calling after your audience/readers when they’re already walking up the aisles to the exits?

Then again, I’ve always been the guy who sits there watching the credits, in case the film maker has dropped a little Christmas gift in after the name of the head grip—an outtake say, or even a teaser for a sequel. It’s hard to say. I wouldn’t want my readers to get pissed off with me by drawing out the ending. Maybe I just don’t want the book to end, but I’m a polisher at heart, and I tend to buff the ending until, in my mind at least, it shines a little, like the star on the tree.

One way of sacheting an ending is to bring things back to the beginning again.

Which brings me to the picture at the beginning of this little holiday meditation. It’s art, and I created it—sort of. My preferred medium has been changing over the years: water-colour, acrylic, and then acryla gouache, but in each case, I get my hands, work space, and sometimes my clothes, all messy. 

Nobody got messy creating this image though; all I had to do was type a few key words into a software program and the computer, aided and abetted by the web, synthesized the picture to order. I grudgingly admit it’s not bad. The implications really bother me though. Who needs a fleshware artist if the computer can do it all? 

I sometime marvel at those amazing artists who can create realistic paintings that outdo hi-rez photographs. I used to feel secure that no computer could do the kind of whimsical fantasy paintings that I do, though. Well, forget that. Some of the most stunning whimsical fantasy on the web is AI generated. Of course, there’s no actual ‘original’ for someone to buy, but does that matter? Maybe fantasy artists today can only aspire to daub images in globs of paint that rival the artistic temperament of a chip.

But I’m getting gloomy. Maybe I should go out and take a swipe at my neighbour’s big, puffed up Santa.