Mike O'Connell

Okay, we’re putting ourselves on alert: 20 years from today is going to be like the coolest date ever: 12/3/45.

I wanted this noted to say that I thought of it first.

Today on Math and Musings you’ll hear me and Franklin discuss our Christmas Schedule, 2025 edition. Only a couple minor modifications between this year and last, proving, well, maybe we’re homing in on finally getting this thing right.

Enjoy.

Things to do between Thanksgiving and Christmas, 2025 edition.

1. Listen to Frank Sinatra’s A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra. Recorded in 1957, it set the bar high for holiday albums. Preferably listened to on long-playing record, where one can easily note the change in mood from contemporary (side one) to traditional (side two), I like to listen to this album in its entirety late on Thanksgiving evening.
2. Put up Christmas lights in the den. Nothing looks better than the glow of your television backlit by multi-colored bulbs.

Speaking of your TV… watch these Christmas specials.

3. A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)
4. It’s Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown (1992)
5. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964)
6. How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966)
7. Frosty the Snowman (1969)
8. Frosty Returns (1993). I recently learned the correct date of this one.
9. A Garfield Christmas (1987)
10. “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” (first full episode of The Simpsons; original airdate: December 17, 1989)
11. “The Strike” (the “Festivus” episode of Seinfeld; original airdate: December 18, 1997)
12. “Classy Christmas” episode of The Office (original airdate: December 9, 2010)
13. “The Night of the Meek” episode of The Twilight Zone (original airdate: December 23, 1960)
14. “Road to the North Pole” episode of Family Guy, original airdate: December 12, 2010
15. “Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo” episode of South Park (original airdate: December 17, 1997)

16-19. Four episodes of The Wonder Years, Christmas-themed episodes from Seasons 2 and Seasons 4-6 (1988 and 1990-92)

20. The BBC broadcast of Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman. (One of those rare circumstances in which the movie is better than the book.) Double bonus if you watch the American version with an intro from that famous American, David Bowie!
21. Mickey’s Christmas Carol (1983). Dickens got nothin’ on this one.
22. Mickey’s Once Upon a Christmas (1999). Now more than 25 years old, this one qualifies as classic.
23. “Phineas and Ferb Christmas Vacation.” First airing in December 2009, this is the first of two Phineas and Ferb Christmas specials. This is the one you want to watch, as Phineas and Ferb save Christmas as only they can.

And the full-length movies one must watch.

24. Home Alone (1990)
25. Home Alone 2 (1992). Yeah, it’s not the first one, but damned if it hasn’t grown on me the last few years. Watching it with my son has helped, and it’s going to make the second edition of 365 Movies. My highest praise.
26. A Christmas Story (1983)
27. A Christmas Story Christmas (2022). Also a 365 addition.
28. Elf (2003)
29. Holiday Inn (1942)
30. White Christmas (1954)
31. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
32. Bad Santa (2003)
33. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989). Every year I think this movie is so silly I’m going to take it off the list, but then December rolls around and I just have to see it.
34. Vegas Vacation (1997). It really has nothing to do with Christmas, but I watched it one year at Christmas time and it just made sense.
35. Hook (1991). Sort of a Christmas movie and should be watched once a year anyway, so why not?
36. 8-bit Christmas (2021). This one’s going to make Top 365 too.
37. Single All the Way (2021). Possible 365 addition.
38. Happiest Season (2020). Further proof that the new ones are growing on me.

Certain things you’ll want to eat or drink…

39. Coca-Cola (the beverage of Christmas)
40. an old-school regular peppermint candy cane
41. those white nougat candies with the tree image in the center
42. Roasted chestnuts. Roasted.
43. those cheap shortbread cookies that are dyed pink or green and are surprisingly delicious, not to be confused with the ones that come in the blue tins
44. those cookies that come in the blue tins
45. a chocolate orange (now available in several flavors, I go for the one with pop rocks; and why do they not sell these all year?!)
46. chocolate bar wrapped to look like a hundred-dollar bill (same question as above)
47. Martinelli’s sparkling cider
48. cinnamon rolls for breakfast (Christmas Eve or Christmas Day)
49. crescent rolls for dinner (same)
50. S’mores. Homemade. Preferably prepared outside, but inside if you must.
51. one of those Reece’s peanut butter “trees”
52. stovetop popcorn. Strung up, eaten, or both.
53. hot chocolate
54. Chips and dip. My only childhood memory of my father’s parents’ house is eating potato chips and sour cream and onion dip on Christmas Eve from a garish ’70s-era green chip-and-dip bowl set. In your recreation any bowl will do.
55. Wendy’s Peppermint Frosty (tell Wendy to bring this back every year)
56. eggnog (I recently learned it is one word, not two)
57. grown-up eggnog
58. Peppermint Bark
59. One (or more) of those “holiday” pies from McDonald’s. Yeah, “holiday.” They can’t even say what kind of fruit or cream or whatever it is. It’s just holiday deliciousness.
60. Little Debbie’s Christmas Trees. Oh, snack of my youth… where ya been the last few years? Thanks, Debbie, for bringing this one back.
61. Peppermint cocoa goldfish crackers. “Goldfish.” “Crackers.” Presented by Snoopy. New this year, how this is in any way related to old-school goldfish crackers is beyond me. Classic Oreoification.
62. gingerbread cookies (not gingerbread man shaped but actual gingerbread) 
63. Perry’s White Christmas ice cream (this has eclipsed peppermint stick as the new ice cream of Christmas)

Things to hear…

Other than Sinatra’s album (see #1) there are a few that must be listened to in their entirety.

64. Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)
65. Tony Bennett’s A Swingin’ Christmas. Recorded with the Count Basie Big Band in 2008, proof that at 82, the man could still swing.
66. Ella Fitzgerald’s Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas. Recorded in 1960, it took nearly a half century for another Christmas album to swing as hard.
67. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, full album that accompanied the movie including instrumental bonus tracks.
68. A Christmas Story (Music from the Motion Picture). Same basic idea as above, it’s the musical from the movie you’ve seen a million times and can therefore picture exactly what’s going on as you hear the audio cues.
69. My own Christmas playlists on Spotify, now totaling nearly six hours of holiday music.
70. Speaking of my own: I paid for this Christmas party! Listened to in its entirety.
71. Dr. Suess’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas studio album. Yeah, it’s really just the audio track of the TV special, but worth 25 minutes of your time. Radio theater at its finest. 
72. Christmas Cocktails–A Jazz Lounge Holiday Collection by a group called Candy Cane Trio. I can tell you nothing about who or what Candy Cane Trio actually is. AI robots? This collection, though, has grown on me the past few years and warrants a place among Guaraldi and Rudolph.

Places to go…

  73. The mall. Every community has a place simply referred to as “the mall.” Go there and experience the true meaning of Christmas.

74. A giant decorated tree in a shopping plaza (again, everyone has one… or in Loudoun County we have about a dozen).

75. Big Lots… trust me, weird off-brand Christmas stuff.

76. Dunkin’ (Donuts)… best Christmas menu of your standard commercial food operations.

77. Starbucks. Credit where credit is due.

  78. Visit “the intersection” in Great Falls, Virginia. This is where Georgetown Parkway meets Walker Road, basically the only intersection in town. Highlighted by the Village Centre shopping mall (classy enough to warrant the British spelling of centre), this corner is pretty much 360 degrees of holiday cheer. Drink in the holiday awesomeness.

Other things to see, hear, taste, read, do, or experience.

79. Red stripes on my front porch pillars? Nope, don’t have pillars any more. But I do have a giant tree out front… which has been wrapped like a 20-foot-tall candy cane. I get to do it because I was the one in my neighborhood who thought of it first.
80. Take a journey out to the Meadowlark Botanical Gardens in Vienna (Virginia, not Austria) and walk through the “Winter Walk of Lights.” Worth the walk.
81. Drive through the Bull Run Festival of Lights (Centreville, Va.), amazingly even better than the walk-through at Meadowlark, seen from the comfort of your car.
82. See a performance of The Nutcracker, or at least listen to the “soundtrack” in its entirety.
83. Enjoy an evening at home watching that yule log image on your television.
84. Find a Christmas party at someone’s house (preferably way nicer than your own house) and go there. Bonus points if you’re playing the piano and getting paid to be there.
85. Donate toys to charity.
86. Get one of those fancy cheese calendars from Aldi and enjoy delicious foreign cheese every day in December.
87. Deposit money in one of those Salvation Army red kettles.
88. Read Truman Capote’s “One Christmas.”
89. Read Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory.” Double bonus points if you pair it with #90.
90. Have Jack Daniel’s on Sinatra’s birthday (December 12). This really has nothing to do with Christmas but it does fall in the season. You should have Jack Daniel’s from time to time anyway just to be reminded of what a real drink tastes like, before the world was overrun by girly cocktails and macchiatos with skim milk.
91. Recite Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” You know it as “The Night Before Christmas.” First appearing in a Troy, New York, newspaper in December of 1823, it still plays in 2024.
92. Read Mercer Mayer’s Merry Christmas Mom and Dad.
93. Watch one of your old home movies filmed at Christmastime. Double bonus points if it’s on VHS.
94. Make a new home movie. Triple a million bonus points if you’re recording it on VHS. Minus a million points if you’re recording on your phone.
95. Handwritten Christmas cards. The day I can’t handle sending personal handwritten notes to my friends at Christmas… that’s my last Christmas.
96. Get a real Christmas tree. No shiny aluminum ones.
97. Bring in keyboard and sing Christmas carols with students on the final day before Winter Break. Two reasons. One, show off a bit, and two, who’s really doing schoolwork on this day anyway?

And finally, everyone has his or her own unique Christmas toys or games that have special meaning. For me I have two from my childhood and one from adulthood.

98. The mouse Advent calendar. Back before Advent calendars were ubiquitous (and could set you back 20, 50, or 100 bucks depending how adult you wanted them to be), I had a simple cloth calendar that hung on my bedroom door. There were 24 pockets, and each day a little toy mouse moved from pouch to pouch, producing a toy, money, or treat each day. I’ve now given Franklin the calendar and he’s brought the tradition into the 21st century. I’m also on the third generation of cats who like to steal that little mouse.
99. The dancing Coca-Cola bear. Purchased in about 1993, this item always makes me smile. It’s a stuffed bear, about a foot tall, holding an upright bass and wearing sunglasses. It sits on a pedestal adorned with the Coca-Cola label, and dances to a medley of “Jingle Bells” and “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.”
100. Also from the world of Coke memorabilia… a Holiday 2005 glass bottle which sits on my bookshelf 12 months a year. The beverage was consumed 20 years ago but the bottle looks like it just came off the factory line. It was the last thing my father ever gave me. (Well, last physical thing.)

At the top of my newsfeed Saturday was an article from WTOP (that’s radio for those of you from this century) headlined “Loudoun County schools see a major increase in the number of students unable to pay for school lunches.”

Alarmism always sells, no?

Sharon Willoughby, chief financial officer for Loudoun County Public Schools, is quoted in the article that “our unpaid meal date (I’m pretty sure the intended word was debt) has increased year over year,” and that requests to be included in the Free and Reduced Lunch program are up 180%.

Apparently my employers, who once hired me to teach economics to the youth of its community, did not attend even one day of Econ themselves, for this is what they teach ya in like the first 10 minutes.

Decrease the price of something and more people will buy it. Make the price zero and A LOT more people will.

Frankly I’m surprised it isn’t an infinite percent. Pride is the only thing keeping suckers like me having their kids pay the sticker price at the lunch line.

And the meal debt?

Make debt costless and people will ignore it.

This is like being threatened by a mafia crime boss… who’s six inches tall. If there are no consequences to the “debt,” and it disappears at the end of the year, does it really make a sound? So I can’t get the “fancy” school lunch if I’m in “debt.” Is one of the options caviar? Truffles? Kobe beef? I’ve been in plenty of school cafeterias; it’s all pretty much standard fare.

Here’s a thought.

Go full communist on the thing.

Seriously. I’ve been the most right-wing person in every school I’ve ever been in, and I’m saying here’s a better way to do this. Scrap the line and the money and the “charging” and bookkeeping and everything. Let all those expenses disappear, and just have a big pile of grilled cheese sandwiches or whatever the “basic” lunch is and let kids take whatever they want. How much could this possibly cost? You could even go a little exotic if you wanted to; it’d still be pennies on the dollar compared to everything else in the budget, lunch-related or not. If nothing else you’d erase the stigma and the recordkeeping of who gets a “free” lunch and who doesn’t.

Would people take advantage of this freebie? Sure, that’s the idea. You’d need someone to at least casually monitor whether kids were throwing things out or stuffing them in their pockets, but if that was the worst thing that happened I think we could live with it.

William F. Buckley, patron saint of right-wing opinion the second half of the 20th century, actually proposed something similar in a 1970 article. Replace all federal welfare programs related to eliminating hunger and what would later be called “food insecurity” and instead have grocery stores just give away staple food products in addition to selling their other fancier wares. Buckley (and others) argued it would be much more efficient and overall less expensive to the taxpayer, noting it wouldn’t even be worth trying to catch anyone who was taking the free food that didn’t “need” it (my quotes).

Let’s at least try a little outside-the-lunchbox thinking. If it doesn’t work out I’ll cover everyone’s meal debt at the end of the year…

when it rolls back to zero.

Last week I noted a few curiosities regarding this year’s mayoral race in Seattle, Washington.

(I say Washington as to not confuse it with other Seattles. Or other Washingtons.)

Among other things I observed the “progressive bias” to late-arriving ballots.

More than observed, I suppose, but rather questioned a bit why such a bias exists. The Kindergarteners they have counting these things feel bad for the person losing and lean into the horserace? The whole thing is a bit bizarre.

Oh, and bizarre? Yeah, one of my childhood friends is now the socialist mayor of Seattle.

But if 25 years ago you’d given me a prop bet on which of my friends would be the socialist mayor of Seattle in 2026, smart money would have been on Katie Wilson.

Today on Math and Musings: Part Two of last week’s episode recreating a 20-year-old broadcast of Politics After Dark, the most talked about episode of PAD that ever aired.

Highlights include a series of somewhat inane questions directed at my son, and some gentle ribbing (in both directions) concerning our answers.

Enjoy.