
Santa appears to be hanging by his fingertips beside this browning magnolia tree.
Either reindeers are growing or Santa is shrinking.
With mistletoe on his cap, Santa goes in for a peck at Mrs. Claus.
One Santa drives an ice cream truck with peppermint candy wheels, while a Florida Santa shows his midriff without shame.
But soon Santa must mount his sleigh and head to the homes of good little boys and girls. Twelve days and counting!
To be fair, all cats hate you. The contempt is thinly-veiled. For those of you unfamiliar with the wide-eyed Brazil nut pictured here, it’s Carmen Miranda, aka The Chiquita Banana Lady. And wide-eyed she was!
She may have danced her way to fame with a pile of fruit atop her head, much to the chagrin of Latin nations who felt stereotyped, but she had the last laugh. By 1945, she earned more than $200,000 (over $2 million in today’s money), becoming Hollywood’s highest-paid entertainer.
Numero uno, y’all!

She must have had fabulous posture and core control to forever be balancing colorful edible headgear and bearing the burden of 27 lbs of heavy metal accessories. No pain, no gain.

In August of 1955, Miranda was shooting a a song and dance number for the The Jimmy Durante Show when she fell to one knee. Out of breath, she finished the segment and went home. The next morning, Miranda died from a heart attack at her home in Beverly Hills. She was only 46.

To see her sing and samba, catch this 1943 clip of her in “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat.”

We don’t need to rehash the Rockefeller Christmas Tree incident. Singers age and so, too, their vocal chords. I’ve winced recently when both James Taylor and Amy Grant tried to reach those old high notes. God bless them for trying but sometimes old goats can’t do young goat tricks.
Time catches up with the best and richest of us. And enough already with the 44-year-old decolletage. This is not a vision of love.

You’re a married mommy, remember? Yes, technically still married. You are better than this.
I wish you could stay the lithe, curlyheaded racially questionable five-octave pre-diva chanteuse that you were my freshman year of college, but it’s not possible. You remember her? The one who married the cadaver from Tales From The Crypt?
Ick. I could have told you marrying Smarmy Much-Older Tommy Mottola was a bad choice.
But nearly a quarter century has passed since my buddies and I would pass college bars where drag queens belted out “Love Takes Time” in strapless sequined dresses. Time has been taken, my dear. It has been took.
So just be 44. Use a little more material. Cover it up. Stop trying to splash around in a bikini in the fountain of youth. You’ll just drown. Or worse, flail about pitiably while your middle-aged orbs spill out. From one 40-something to another: honey, just run for dry land. Let the fountain alone.

Mercy, even the trash man is trying to scoop you into a recycling bin. At least let him take the dress. Or the duct tape Borderline gloves.
You still get to be Mariah. You just can’t be Forever 21. So sit back and collect royalties and obsess over glittery butterflies and Marilyn Monroe and raise dem babies. And don’t kick Nick to the curb. He seems like such a nice boy, such nice manners. I’d introduce him to my Nana. Why, I saw him help Lara Spencer on with her pink coat this morning on Good Morning America. With or without his ruby slippers and velveteen jackets, he’s the best thing to ever hit America’s Got Talent. Give him a second chance. You knew he was young when you married him. You knew you’d have to raise him up.
And if you’re feeling perimenopausal and hormonal, feel free to throw shade all over Nicki Minaj. I don’t care if it is her birthday today. Do what you do best.
Look on the bright side: you can still be beautiful with clothes on. You’re not dead like Whitney. You can sing better than all of us poor peons who don’t have a Morrocan-style hookah lounge; you just can’t sang like in days of yore. But that’s First World Problems, girl. While your peers are busy misplacing car keys, you can chuckle in your rainstorm of Benjamins. Who needs car keys when you have a driver?
You can still be the mistress of condescension. Time hasn’t slowed that down.

And look, I’ll go one better. I won’t tag this post “vintage” like I usually do.
Look, we all have obese friends who ask too much of our heirloom furniture that we just had appraised on Antiques Roadshow by those buff Keno twins, and that stinks, but the good news is that Texaco can MARFAK your car. What on earth?
Snapping wicker=bad
40 Point lubrication=good
Makes perfect sense, right?
Did you realize these unkempt tramps were to blame for the ruin of the running board? Neither did I. Not until today. But this 1941 Chevrolet ad has opened mine eyes to the truth.
Just look at those adjectives: swank and streamlined. Running boards were preventing those adjectives from existing. And look how happy she is! A woman who wears an entire colony of minks on her frame is a woman I can trust. Maybe it’s badgers, wolverines–I don’t care, as long as they keep her warm.
And did you know there was a real fear of package-carrying tweens in knee breeches and dress shoes attacking your windows if your car had running boards? It was practically an invitation.
Here I was thinking auto makers had simply stopped caring about style, but all along, I was wrong. I had never stopped to consider the peril involved in taking TWO STEPS.
This is what they mean when they talk about light-bulb moments, friends. Running boards were downright dangerous.
It’s December, folks. Some of you Northerners can relate to Trenchcoat Trent and the loss of his dapper derby. Should that really happen in a civilized country? God bless Chevrolet for hitting CTRL+ALT-DEL on the cursed running board.