Bah!

Novelist Victor Hugo (Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame) was born on this day in 1802.

"A glittering humbug," was what fellow author Thomas Carlyle called him.

But ours is the best, right?

The first session of the United Nations General Assembly was held on this day in 1946.

"The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was." -- Thomas Carlyle.

Holiday of the Month: Christmas

"If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, hear what he had to say, and make fun of him."   --   Thomas Carlyle.

   Christmas was Sully’s favorite time of year, even though his father had died so close to it. Since he’d been on his own he hadn’t had a place to go, besides the Hi-Note, and before that Joe’s and The Lizard and Irene’s, but the spirits of Christmases past had comforted rather than tormented him. He remembered vividly the Yule trees of his boyhood, the smell of them and the plumpness of their branches, which he’d imagined might be harboring nests of turtledoves, tapering to a spindly tip surmounted by a papier-mache angel whose wings brushed the ceiling, and which at night was enhaloed by the circle of light cast there by the tree’s lights. He could still see, with an almost palpable clarity, his first gifts: A radio, a cowboy outfit, a trike--he’d had his dad shovel a path along the driveway through the snow, so that he could ride it, before he’d even opened his other presents.  --  Chapter 45, The Misforgotten.