As the holidays near, you may find yourself split between jadedness and optimism as you ponder whether you loathe or love the fact that your mouth has tasted of peppermint for weeks, that your nose stings with the freshest of pine, and that your favorite musicians are suddenly all so damn cheerful. Fetty Wap is the latest musician to release a Christmas song — “Merry Xmas” — and if you need a case for completely giving into the season of minty, cozy debt, well, here it is.
However, if even Fetty Wap can’t get you into the spirit, perhaps the anti-spirit spirit is the spirit for you. Earlier this year, Hulu brought a “Seinfeld: the Apartment” exhibit to New York — allowing visitors to walk through a replica of the Seinfeld apartment set, and to rekindle their enthusiasm for iconic objects known only to Seinfeld — including the famous Festivus Pole, Frank Costanza’s cynical antidote to the Christmas tree. Now, the exhibit has been installed in Los Angeles, as Indiewire notes, just in time for Festivus.
Star Wars: the Force Awakens spirit is just as pervasive as holiday spirit, and as reviews for the film begin to pour out (sans spoilers!), late night television has been doing its own rounds of symbiotic excitement-building/benefitting through the inevitable viral-factor of anything Star Wars themed. Compulsive viral video master Jimmy Fallon got most of the cast of the new movie to sing an a cappella version of the Star Wars theme with the Roots on The Tonight Show. (And if you can’t tell whether to be thrilled or slightly perturbed by the unavoidable nature of Star Wars, imagine how the cast must feel: they were just jetted from the film’s Los Angeles premiere to the London premiere in a Boeing-787 painted to look like R2-D2. Okay, they must feel pretty good about that.)