I pulled into the Clear Channel parking lot at about 5:30 p.m. on Dec. 14, a full half-hour before our call time. It was already starting to get dark in Downtown Toledo. It’s usually the earliest of morning hours when I arrive at Clear Channel, a quick McDonald’s breakfast in my belly and sleep barely swept from my consciousness. On this day, I was wide awake — in more ways than one.

I turned off the car and saw with a start of surprise that Michael Miller, my boss and friend, was already there as well. He rushed over to me before I could even get out of the car, and I noted with surprise that there were tears rolling down his cheeks.

I had never seen Michael cry before. That unsettled me as much as anything had.

“How are we supposed to do this?”

Michael asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

We’d been planning this show for weeks. A special edition of “Eye on Your Weekend,” our pop culture discussion show on 1370 WSPD, where we would have Santa Claus as our special guest. We would spend the whole hour talking to that right jolly old elf, and kids from all over the area would call in with questions and to tell St. Nick their Christmas lists, live on the air. It would be a fun show, and maybe we’d give some children a beautiful holiday memory.

But mere hours after the Newtown, Conn., shootings hit the nation like a collective punch to the gut, going through with it didn’t seem so cut and dry. How could we maintain our composure? What would the kids ask? How could we do a silly Christmas thing at a time when the world is grieving? Were we being disrespectful by even trying?

There is much discussion in the wake of any tragedy of the media’s role in its coverage. Some things are pretty obviously wrong and disgusting — shoving cameras and microphones in the faces of kids who just survived the attack being one of them. Seriously, dudes, have some humanity.

But there’s a lot of gray area as well. There is much discussion about whether simply by giving the killer and his crimes this much airtime, those in the media are prolonging the pain of those who lost loved ones and perhaps even hastening the next crime of its sort.

“People will hate me,” Lee Harvey Oswald says in the final sequence of Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Assassins.” “They’ll hate you with a passion, Lee,” he’s told in response. “Imagine people having passionate feelings about Lee Harvey Oswald.” To those desperate for attention, committing a horrific act can seem like the quickest route to recognition. The sad thing is, it works.

We remember Oswald, Booth, Sirhan and Chapman almost as readily as we remember JFK, Lincoln, RFK and Lennon. By so thoroughly focusing on the crime and, by extension, glorifying the criminal, are we inspiring others to follow in his wake?

But we can’t ignore that something terrible occurred. We can’t ignore the 26 lives lost at the school. Maybe the solution is to focus on them — to think of the children and adults who will never see another Christmas and not the maniac who denied them

that. All this passed through my head as I looked at Michael.

“I trust your judgment as much as anyone else I’ve ever met,” I said. “And maybe tonight will be a nice rest from everything that’s happened.”

As Jim Beard and James A. Molnar, our partners in crime, arrived at the studio, a course of action became clear. We’d do the show as planned. We’d try to do a fun show. We’d give some wonderful memories to some kids. We’d laugh, that we might not cry.

I hope we did the right thing that night — for ourselves as much as our listeners — by trying to do so. We weren’t ignoring what had occurred in Connecticut that day. Michael’s opening of the show (“This is Evan and Sean’s daddy. I know … I know a lot of parents have heavy hearts tonight, but we have a special show planned for your kids and we’re going to carry it through to keep your Christmas spirits up.”) and when he threw it to me at the end to contribute a quote from John Lennon’s “Imagine” made it clear that the tragedy was not far from our thoughts.

But for the rest of the hour, we tried to live in a world where joy still existed, where the magic of the season lived unabated and where Santa would sit in a studio for an hour to listen to all the children as they called. Maybe sometimes, you have to believe in that world if you’re going to survive in the real one.

Email columnist Jeff McGinnis at PopGoesJeff@gmail.com.

Tags: Clear Channel, Eye on Your Weekend, Jeff McGinnis, Michael S. Miller, Newtown, Pop Goes the Culture, Santa Claus, WSPD

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2012 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Pop Goes the Culture, Star.
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No matter how old you are, there’s always something magical about meeting Santa Claus.

He emerges from behind a door at Westfield Franklin Park, looking resplendent in his red coat and carrying a cane. He walks to a beautiful area that’s been prepared for him in the mall, right in front of Macy’s.

Camille Harmon, 2, tells Santa what she’d like for Christmas.

Between preparing for his trip around the world on Christmas Eve and listening to the requests of hundreds, if not thousands, of children here at Westfield between now and Dec. 25, the legendary Saint Nicholas has his hands full.

And yet, Santa was kind enough to grant Toledo Free Press Star a rare interview in the middle of his busiest month. As he sat in his large and comfy chair, cane off to one side, coat neatly hung next to him, he smiled as he thought of the kids he sees every day.

“It’s just their smiling faces, the beautiful children. They come to see me, and they’ve been coming to see me for a long time. I’ve become accustomed to children, and I get to see them grow up through the years. And it’s just the love they have.”

He said his daily routine at Westfield is only part of a much bigger month of activity.

“I come in and meet with the children, then at breaks, I call the North Pole and check on the toy production, make sure the elves load the sleigh in the correct order and I review the naughty and nice list to make sure kids are staying on the nice list. At night, Mrs. Claus and I drink hot cocoa and rejoice at all the toy production.”

The elves must certainly have their hands full this year — kids aren’t asking for a wooden horse or jack-in-the-box much anymore. Santa said his most requested gifts this year are an iPod Touch or a Nintendo DSi. Quite a far cry from the traditional gifts one imagines Santa’s helpers crafting.

Sometimes, though, the children don’t ask for anything at all. “It is exciting when the children are so excited in line to see me, then when they come around the corner and see me, they sometimes scream bloody murder and go running back to Mom and Dad,” he said. “Often I can soothe them and calm them down enough to get a picture with me. Sometimes, the pouting faces are the best memories.”

It’s not just kids who visit Saint Nick at Westfield, however. “I also have a brother and sister who visit me every year even though they are well into their 30s, as well as a group of breast cancer survivors who celebrate each Christmas with a picture with me. A child is never too old to see Santa,” he said. “Earlier this year, a couple that had been married for 60 years had their photo taken with me.”

And kids don’t ask just for presents, of course. Any child who meets Santa is sure to be loaded with questions. “My favorite request was when a foster child asked for his foster parents to adopt him during Christmas,” he said.

Do any of the kids ask if they can pull his beard? He smiled. “No, they don’t ask, they just do that.”

And an answer to the question that everyone has wondered — what does Santa do Dec. 26, when everything is finally done?

“Rest. Just rest and take it easy. Reminisce, think about the things that have happened. And make plans for next year.”

Tags: Jeff McGinnis, Pop Goes the Culture, Santa Claus

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 23rd, 2010 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Pop Goes the Culture, Star.
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Holiday music is one of the great delights of the Christmas season. From big bands to boy bands, from Bing to Sting, from Rosemary Clooney to Lady Gaga, songs secular and sacred make the season bright.

After 40-plus years of exposure to the classics, the lyrics of most treasured carols fit with the familiarity of a favorite T-shirt. But with two boys under age 5 in the house, every word and image now comes under TSA-level scrutiny. While decorating the Christmas tree this year, one of the songs filling our living room was the Andy Williams standard, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” and this refrain caught the ear of our 4-year-old, Evan:

“There’ll be parties for hosting/Marshmallows for toasting/And caroling out in the snow/There’ll be scary ghost stories/And tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.”

Anything about marshmallows and snow gets Evan and his brother Sean’s attention, but Evan was most interested in the line, “There’ll be scary ghost stories.”

“Daddy, why are there scary ghost stories at Christmas?” he asked.

As happens more frequently with Evan and Sean’s questions lately, I did not have an immediate answer.

“Halloween is over,” Evan reasoned. “Does Santa fight scary ghosts?”

An image flashed through my mind of Santa Claus addressing Lee Majors in the Bill Murray movie “Scrooged,” proclaiming he would take on terrorists who captured the North Pole with a bravado-laced, “This is one Santa who’s going in (sound of gun cocking) the front door.”

“No,” I said, “but some Christmas stories have ghosts in them, like the one about Ebenezer Scrooge with the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, remember?”

Evan, who first experienced the immortal Charles Dickens tale “A Christmas Carol” as told by Disney through Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Scrooge McDuck, seemed to understand, and changed the subject back to marshmallows.

But the thought continued to resonate in my pop culture-addled brain. There are a lot of ghosts and scary things that have woven themselves into the Christmas season. It is human nature to take even the most blessed and sacred silver lining and attach a dark cloud to it, so even the birth of Jesus has acquired secular shadows throughout the decades. The adult knowledge of the baby Jesus’ ultimate fate and sacrifice certainly adds gravity to the hope and miracle of the Christmas story. (In my childhood, I thought Jesus went from being a baby in December to being grown and crucified by Easter, an incredibly short life span. To be fair, there aren’t a lot of stories about the savior’s time between about age 7 and his mid-20s.)

Dickens’ story is the starting point for a discussion of ghosts and Christmas. The very first words of the story are “Marley was dead, to begin with,” and that cheery start is followed by passages such as, “But how much greater was his horror, when the phantom taking off the bandage round its head, as if it were too warm to wear in-doors, its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast!”; “The figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness: being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body: of which dissolving parts, no outline would be visible in the dense gloom wherein they melted away,”; and “It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand.”

From Dickens through the 2009 Robert Zemeckis/Jim Carrey 3-D adaptation, “A Christmas Carol” reigns supreme as the scariest of haunted Christmas tales, but it is far from alone in presenting goblins, monsters and other holiday beasties.

There is the 1953 Louis Armstrong song, “Zat You, Santa Claus?” which manages to make waiting for St. Nick feel like surviving the night in the Salem’s Lot Marsten House:

“Oh there, Santa, you gave me a scare./Now stop teasing cause I know you’re there./We don’t believe in no goblins today./But I can’t explain why I’m shaking that way.”

In television shows, there is the Abominable Snowman in “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” who threatens to eat the story’s heroes until he is reformed by a well-timed bounce and some quick dentistry.

The Heat Miser and Snow Miser from “The Year Without a Santa Claus” aren’t technically monsters, but they are definitely villains and bad examples for two brothers learning to get along and share.

The king of holiday monsters, The Grinch, is scary in look and deed.  He is also reformed at the end of his story, but not before he commits enough atrocities to keep PETA, the FBI and Homeland Security busy for months.

In more modern fare, “The Nightmare Before Christmas” effectively combined Halloween’s ghouls with Christmas yules. Jack Skellington and his henchmen kidnap, tie up and torture poor “Sandy Claws” while unleashing a swarm of scary presents under kids’ trees.

Even during the season of birth and promise, mortality has its say, wearing bogeyman masks of varying degrees of fright. So, Andy Williams was right, not that I’m ready to fully explain that to our children. For now, we’ll stay focused on snow and marshmallows.

Michael S. Miller is the editor in chief of Toledo Free Press and Toledo Free Press Star. Call him at (419) 241-1700, Ext. 223 or e-mail him at mmiller@toledofreepress.com.

Tags: Charles Dickens, Christmas, Grinch, Lighting The Fuse, Michael S. Miller, Santa Claus

This entry was posted on Friday, December 17th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Lighting The Fuse, Opinion.
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