These Holidays Are Strangerous
The newsletter for The Strangerous Channel
You’ve subscribed to The Strangerous newsletter! We’re going to do something a little different this week. So hold on to your Christmas hams.
MATM, or Em, is a multimedia artist, videographer, and pastor of a nontheistic technohumanist church. She saw a ghost once, but is convinced it was actually a time traveler from the future we’ll one day create with a hypersentient AI.
The UnHoly Days
You know the Victorians ate mummies, right? On purpose. Chopped up the dead and ate them. They were convinced there was some sort of medicinal benefit to doing this. There is nothing more Victorian than eating mummies.
“Mummy brown” (ground up mummies mixed with linseed oil) was even a paint color. It is a fun exercise to walk through an art museum and wonder, “Is that someone’s grandmother as the shadow of that tree? The one to the left of the fluffy white general and his very bored horse?” Isn’t life hilarious?
Christmas was growing in popularity as a Victorian holiday, and Charles Dickens was its evangelist. He thought the message of Christmas should be humanistic, to encourage us toward a generosity of spirit and whatnot. That seems like a pretty understandable reaction to the unbelievable suffering experienced across the British island as they made the shift toward industrialization. As long as we’re making connections, I think this past year was fairly… Victorian.
Right? What a motherfucker 2023 was. Yeah, the past few years have also been rough, but it definitely wasn’t getting better in ‘23. War, Fauxflation. Criminal celebrities. Celebrity criminals. It’s like the world is a snowglobe filled with trash and some hellish elder god just keeps shaking it.
Did y’all catch the realtor millionaire who got recorded for all eternity saying that unemployment should rise another 40 to 50% so we all remember that we’re beholden to people like him? That we should be “put in our place” with artificially imposed scarcity? YIKES. “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” So, can we hex him with some night spirits to remind him of his mortal state already? What was Cratchit’s sorcery that commanded those spectral justice warriors? Hang on. I’m going to get my candles. This bitch wants to hit him with a toaster.
We’re still getting pwned by a virus that destroys your brain, immune system, and internal organs. Jason does his best to protect my delicate, frail electric meat tube (I’m disabled and chronically ill), but we’ve officially run out of busking options. He’s applying to jobs all over the globe as we speak. Shanghai? Washington? Pissant, Texas? We’re considering everything, because to date the Scrooges remain unhaunted, and groceries grow more dear.
So, die 2023! Take your last ragged breath and get in your grave already! Take the Scrooges with you! We’ll put you in a box and crush you with stones and chunks of black, sodden earth. Hurry up and mummify so we can grind you disrespectfully into a powder and make art with your goo and bones and linseed oil. We’ll eat you and get wiser, know better, and grow whole.
From your rot, let’s see the seeds and bulbs sprout a better year. Let’s see if 2024 will be a metaphorical springtime, with more generosity, time for learning and sharing knowledge, discovery, more kindness and charity, more care for the vulnerable, more people like Jason, (who at this very second is putting his dreams on hold to provide for my medical care and safety). More of this spirit. Less of that one.
And more for you. We have so many things we want to share with you, and we really hope 2024 allows us to do that. But for now, we have to pack and move to a more affordable place, wherever they will employ us, wherever we can stay safe. We’ve run out of savings, so we have to do it now. You’re busy with the holidays, so you may not even notice the absence. But we’ll try to get more content out as soon as we can.
More adventure! More strange tales and facts! More games and storytelling! The ideas are there. We’re just waiting for the opportunity.
So rest up. Bury the bad old year. Make room for a better year to come. Hope and plan with us. Show some gratitude to friends and kindness to strangers. Remember the Tiny Tims and help if you can. Even Scrooge came around in the end. And Zukunzgeist bless us, every one.
Thanks to everyone who goes with us into 2024. We wish a better year for you too!
Support The Strangerous
Want to help support the channel and see us grow?
Follow! Share! Comment! Link! Save! Subscribe! Get Notifications! It really helps and we appreciate it so, so much.
You can share our posts and reels on Instagram, share our YouTube videos and playlists, and share this newsletter.