Nah, no grumpy Christmas for me. The blog will be off tomorrow while I bake a Merck’s Cake, smell deep drafts of pine, and give an array of pop-culturtastic presents to the people I love the most. But I’ll leave you with my new favorite Christmas song, courtesy the lovely and talented Amanda Mattos:

May all your Christmases bring such happy surprises. I’ll see you all on a reduced schedule next week, and we’ll continue with Cryptonomicon then.

I find Love, Actually about as effective as emotional crack, but if I had to pick my favorite holiday movie of recent years, I’d probably actually name the unfairly overlooked The Family Stone:

The movie’s somewhat forgotten as part of Sarah Jessica Parker’s efforts to find a role other than Carrie Bradshaw to carry her into the future. And there’s an extent to which it’s a goofy, fish-out-of-water movie. But it’s also a surprisingly raw movie about the complicated emotions we all have about the holidays and our families, a movie that insists that mastectomy scars can be beautiful, and that isn’t afraid of the ugliness and sadness inside of all of its characters. As a bonus, it features quite a fine performance from Rachel McAdams playing somewhat awful, and I think it’s good for her. Anyway, highly recommended if you need to sneak away from your own family a bit, or if you could all use a good laugh and welling-up together.

I think we can all agree that a show about a group of gay sci-fi fans is a fairly niche product, even in an era where The Big Bang Theory is a significant hit. I also think, even given its niche nature, that it’s a reasonably good idea for a television show. Identity, these days, comes not just from race and church and sex and nation. We define ourselves based on our politics, our interests, our places of education, our groups of friends, our sports teams.

What’s interesting is less any individual thing we choose to define us, and how the disparate pieces of our identities come together and clash. It’s fascinating that we live in a world where it may be more socially acceptable to be gay than to be a very serious and committed fan of science fiction, that fantasy sports can be the basis for an entire social network. Exploring affinities and how they affect our lives, friendships, marriages, and families is important work for understanding the power of our popular culture, and for understanding ourselves.