Author: The Hopeful Romantic

Here we are again, in the holiday season and again, the war of words come out with both barrels blazing. Santa (ironic, I know) Monica Ca. has canceled Christmas, at least on public lands. Full story here.  Years ago I wrote a post about the War on Words …

As a child of the San Fernando Valley, I knew the yuletide as a time of frost-free mornings when I could not see my breath. Turning down my collar against the warm, I would trudge sludgeless streets past yards absent of snowmen, where green and …

With the arrival of December, Christmas music is pretty much inescapable. Whether it’s “Jingle Bells” playing at the grocery store or “Here Comes Santa Claus” on the radio, holiday music is everywhere. But the one song that is getting just a …

Joy to the world, the Kennys are here. Kenny Rogers, Kenny G, Klezmer and a stocking stuffed with local rock ’n’ roll fills the holiday calendar. Here’s a list we’ve checked twice for the nicest December concerts. • Merry MeX-mas Tour (Johnny D …

Christmas with Hi and Lo, at Gallery 345, is a comedy cabaret starring John Alcorn and Kyra Millan and written by Jim Millan, Alice Moran and Colin Munch (the creators of Spank! The Fifty Shades Parody.) This scripted holiday cabaret presents the story of …

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, that warm and fuzzy time of year when adults engage in public verbal brawls over whether to call a Christmas tree a Christmas tree. Rhode Island’s governor, Lincoln Chafee, got so fed up with the …

Christmas concerts aren’t all choirs and kid’s stuff. Here’s the run-down of actual concert fare this holiday season … Mannheim Steamroller– Christmas music with synthesizers, extreme dynamics and beat-you-over-head emotions! 7:30 p.m. Dec. 1 at the …

“A Christmas Carol,” Charles Dickens’s compelling story of wickedness, remorse and redemption, has proved among the most enduring and endearing of holiday entertainments in its many incarnations as movie, play, opera, cartoon and musical.

It’s in the way we shop and decorate. It’s in our holiday soundtrack. It’s World War II, says the publisher of AMERICA IN WWII magazine, and it has helped shape today’s American Christmas. You walk into the mall in early November, and …

Three cowboys, Dwight, Darryl and Dub, along with Cookie the chef, are waiting for “Santy Claus.” But how will he find them out on the range? Hearts a-worrying, they sit around the campfire, recalling Christmases past. Full of corn-poke …