The Holly King Read online

THE HOLLY KING

  or, Why Do You Hate Christmas?

  by

  Chris Martin

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  The Holly King;

  or, Why Do You Hate Christmas?

  Copyright © 2012 Chris Martin

  All rights reserved for material original to the author

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  Thank you for downloading this free eBook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form, with the exception of quotes used in reviews. Your support and respect for the original intellectual property of this author is appreciated.

  Contrary to the meta-pleasures intended, this is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, time and space are imagined and in some cases co-opted by the author for fictitious purposes. Resemblances to real persons, alive or dead, exist in some cases in this work but

  are coincidental and not intended to represent, document or portray their

  lives or beliefs in any meaningful way.

  Artists, musicians and the copyright holders of the art referenced here have no association to this work or this author at all. Nor should they be considered as having given their permission to be associated with this work. The author of this ebook does not hold the copyright or title to that referenced work and provides links to them only as a courtesy to ebook readers.

  This is Adult Reading Material, intended

  for reading about adults and their material.

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Part One: A Christmas Office Party

  Part Two: Carson’s Movie Begins

  Part Three: The Animation Sequence (about Christmas)

  Part Four: Christmas in Hosanna Hills, CA

  Part Five: Christmas with Tillie Harm

  Part Six: Christmas in a Monastery

  Part Seven: Christmas in a Monastery Continues

  Part Eight: Christmas Ends

  ALSO:

  Contact

  Biography

  Additional Art

  Additional Work

  Breakfast First, Then Alpha Centauri

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  The holly bears a blossom

  as white as lily flower,

  And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ

  to be our sweet saviour

  The holly bears a berry

  as red as any blood,

  And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ

  to do poor sinners good.

  The holly bears a prickle

  as sharp as any thorn,

  And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ

  on Christmas Day in the morn.

  The holly bears a bark as

  bitter as any gall,

  And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ

  for to redeem us all.

  The holly and the ivy,

  now both are full well grown,

  Of all the trees that are in the wood,

  the holly bears the crown.

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  Part One

  In which I meet Carson Hancock at a Christmas party, and he gives me a

  copy of his DVD, “Why Do You Hate Christmas?”

  Deep into the Christmas season last year, I was at an office party munching a samosa festively speckled red and green, watching animated elves top-rocking and Indian stepping across a cheaply animated winter wonderland. Lolling on their simply drawn, zigzagging tunic shoulders, under simply drawn elves’ hats, were the real-life faces of startled employees, who clearly weren’t told their photo would wind up towering and unavoidably beamed on the front wall of their year end party. Surprise.

  My girlfriend had slipped away to the martini fountain so I was alone, leaning cowboy style against one of the bar tables. We were in a time out. A tense fight over Christmas cards was still lingering.

  Two guys I didn’t know planted themselves on two thirds of this little table and started laughing at each other. They were irritating and I thought about moving but a hand grabbed at my shoulder. This was going to be someone I didn’t want to see. I turned around but no one was there, so I twisted even more. Almost directly behind me, having made no effort to come around and face me, was slight, seasonally scarfed, Keaton-faced Carson Hancock. The flickering light of the dancing elves was all over his hair. He nodded sharply: Hello. A black-shirted waiter dodged him at the last second, hoisting empty glasses. Carson chooses the worst places to stand.

  He is a friend of a friend, a semi-mysterious traveller along the periphery of some social and professional groups I’m in. I produce corporate videos and, occasionally, cheap independent features and reality show pilots. You haven’t heard of any of them.

  Like a lot of people in this business, I try to believe that when I work on the visual equivalent of memos from upper management (“Sexual Harassment is Not an Option”), or desperate reality shows (Interstate Rest Stop Ghosts), it is to pay for the time I keep my heart open for more meaningful projects. I work hard at sustaining this belief, even, or despite, teaching at a local film school. This is why I look forward to seeing Carson. He manages to be a filmmaker without having to make money at it. He knows film, not the business.

  Otherwise, he is just quiet and droll. And also edgily, socially alert. His eyes shift to an offhand gesture you make, or he stops in mid-sentence and waits impassively for a shift in your posture to settle. It’s a habit that makes you feel either important or a fake. Needless to say, uncomfortable lulls always come up with Carson and almost none of them are your fault. He’s never this awkward in his movie, though. On the contrary.

  I’m just a little older than Carson and the people he went to school with, by only a few years. I lucked into some paying gigs quickly after graduation, starting as an executive’s assistant. That turned into a few coordinators jobs on movies people still remember and because of that some think I am successful. In fact, I am a non-starter on my own projects. I can’t shake that crisis of belief I fall into, either over my own ideas or the reasons people should have to fund them.

  But whenever I spend time with Carson I have a feeling he’s taking in every word I’ve said and, after careful internal debate, will decisively dismiss them as industry crap. Something To Avoid. I think this encourages him to keep asking my opinions on every kind of movie. I know I like it when talented people ask my opinion, but I also know, to him, I am a negative pole against which all other virtuous cinematic ideas are measured because, when in doubt, I am snarky, cynical and aggressively dubious in just the ways the industry prefers. And I work on shows like My Mom’s a Gangland Stripper!

  It used to be a favorite social tick of his to quote movies verbatim, explosively and ad hoc. So when he said at this Christmas party, “I thought you’d be here. I have something I want you to see,” I racked my brain: I thought you’d be here, I thought you’d be here... Jules Dassin? Thieves’ Highway? But he quickly produced a DVD and offered it to me. It was titled: Why Do You Hate Christmas?

  Oh.

  I looked at him. The quirky, disjointed Carson Hancock I knew before had given way to a man of purpose and ambition. This was his movie.

  “It’s too big to post on line,” he said. I knew it was a feature, but I wondered if he meant in some self-marketing momentousness. I turned it around in my hands and said I liked the cover: an upside down Christmas tree hanging from telephone wires, like a pair of sneakers.

  “And I don’t really like the title,” he said while I was examining the cover. “But tell me what you think.”

  At the same time he spoke, I was saying, “Right – I’ve heard about this,” and looked up but Carson was already headed away. I
watched him exit with a nimble sidestep around a dancing couple leading with their butts in a party-sloppy Chubby Checker twist. I didn’t see him for the rest of the night.

  But yeah: one of the reasons I was familiar with his movie was the title. I never liked it, but everyone else in our little film community latched onto it right away. They liked to talk to him about it in excited, future tense, like an inside joke about to strike. Then the project somehow got bigger and then Carson disappeared, apparently working on it with windowless, hermetic filmmaker devotion.

  They liked the title, I guess, because it harkens to that viral video a few years ago of Pootie’s mother yelling “WHY DO YOU HATE CHRISTMAS?!?” over and over and over. Over and over so much it became a rolling snowball of derision across the schoolyard internet, a snowball sent down the mountainside towards sleepy, innocent Whoville, collecting spinoffs, parodies, auto-tune tributes, photo memes and lame late night tributes.

  Just in time for Christmas.

  What? Not familiar? Dare to know more? “Why Do You Hate Christmas?!?” comes from A Very Pootie Christmas. Starring the very same Pootie of Beach House fame, the reality show set down the Jersey Shore, who, yes, was such a hot item that the network gave her her own show, Ventnor. As in Ventnor City, the southern capital of the Jersey Shore. Ventnor went nowhere, thank god, though they obviously wanted it to thrive in A Very Pootie Christmas. No doubt an idea that sounded good in the writer’s room soon after Ventnor was greenlit. Only, presto!, it fell into TV infamy.

  It goes like this: Pootie’s mother comes to visit the day before Christmas, arms full of groceries and presents to make up with her daughter after some past act of petulance. Her daughter – Pootie – has been making this big point of saying how much she hates Christmas because “everyone is all like freakin’ happy.” When Mama arrives she finds Pootie all depressed, something about a fight Pootie’s had with her boyfriend because, well, the boyfriend says he likes Christmas because of the rockin’ Christmas sex and Pootie is feeling, like, all betrayed. He should totally know she hates Christmas.

  The rest of the show, surprise, is “A Christmas Carol” updated for the badda-bing generation. But before all the ghosts, there’s this one epic moment of brutacious line delivery, Mama chastises Pootie for her unChristmas-like behavior. They launch into a shouting match over the meaning of Christmas (Mama pro, Pootie con), and Mama, riding the Valkyrian crest of Christmas joy yells, “Why do you hate Christmas!?!” with such unnerving incandescence it takes a while for your senses to settle down. It’s truly unbelievable. Pootie slams the door in her ma’s face and then goes all freakin’ crazy with the triad visitation of ghosts played by the non-actors of Beach House. It never aired. But thanks to pirated copies like mine, everyone who wants it can be touched by Pootie’s Christmas fable for all ages.

  I can only guess that Carson glommed onto the WDYHC!?! culture-gag early on, thinking maybe of adding a layer of his own to the pixel-crusted snowball. Maybe he set out with only a three minute poke at A Very Pootie Christmas in mind and in the end felt committed to the title. I don’t know. Because his movie quickly tosses aside the hipster Xmas parodies and defamations and, instead, seems to take the WDYHC?!? question more and more seriously. As if he went climbing to the roof to show off and make some holiday mischief, capered and tap danced up there for a while until, embarrassed by himself and his behavior, made his way down the chimney and into the memory hole of his family’s home where he rediscovered the shag-carpeted, liquor-drenched living room he left them in with its listing, ignored Christmas tree and the family long gone, even disbanded. Why Do You Hate Christmas? is Carson’s motion picture memoir.

  Before watching it, I only knew a little of Hancock lore. The father lived and worked high in the invisible strata of insurance executives, while the mother was a self-made caterer to the stars. Their two eldest children, Humphrey and Shannon (who used to go by the nom de celeb Tillie Harm; remember her?) flung off whatever legacy their parents meant to bequeath them and hit the road upon graduation, one after the other. Certainly not together. They were – are, still – dueling spirits. Their rivalry during adolescence would only truce up when joining forces against Mommy and Daddy. Carson is the youngest by about 11 years. I’m not surprised to learn he grew up in the peace and quiet behind a closed door.

  Even though I promised Carson at the party I’d get to it right away, or at least promised him to myself, entire months passed by. A fruitless trip to Sundance, the Super Bowl, the Oscars, President’s Day weekend, St. Patrick's Day, Easter, Opening Day, my first swim at the local pool, my annual Earth Day whitewater rafting and cookout trip, an ugly, forgettable Cinco de Mayo, the weekend I dragged tables and chairs up to the roof for summer-nighttime lounging and the spontaneous party that ensued, our local Cherry Blossom and taiko drumming festival, a friend’s wedding in Cabo San Lucas, the breakup with my girlfriend immediately afterwards, Mother’s Day, a Memorial Day pigfest with fireworks, Father’s Day, a Juneteenth street party in my neighborhood – they all passed by before I watched his movie.

  On a rainy day soaking the earth with uncomfortably tropical temperatures, I decided to stay in, watch some videos. At the bottom of a stack of black, pirated DVD cases, I found Carson’s movie. It was a rediscovery: the dyspeptic title, the homemade cover of a lit Christmas tree hanging upside down under a gray winter sky seemed both nostalgic and crotchety. Why not? I thought. Christmas in June sounds fun.

  I hope, but doubt, you’ll ever get a chance to see the movie yourself. After a brief, fitful campaign to get it into festivals, on public television, cable, the internet, Carson said he’s through with it and onto something else. But people fall in love with things, like Pelican Bay lifers and priests and other doomed enterprises, and sometimes their messy devotion spreads and teaches others to open to their own devotions. First it was Carson and his and then it became mine, mine with the four days I spent but will never get back, personally transcribing his movie with one hand on the remote frame by frame, ignoring calls, eating impatiently. I wanted to do it. So here, without the directors permission, is my account of Carson Hancock’s Why Do You Hate Christmas? I just wish you could see it.

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  Part Two

  In which Christmas greetings are explored and the awkward Christmas

  home movies of the Hancocks are enjoyed