Secrets of the City

Bob Dylan has put out a Christmas album, and Ross Raihala reviews it: With all the subtlety of a neighbor’s snowblower at 5 a.m., Minnesota’s famed rock ‘n’ roll poet barrels through 15 yuletide favorites in a manner that’s both terrifying and hilarious.

That’s right: Chinese food and a movie. Where do you go for Chinese, what do you eat, and what movie are you looking forward to?

Here’s a space age Santa. Christmas tree retailers saw a drop in sales this season. David DeYoung from How Was the Show sings O Tannenbaum. Family’s holiday tradition preserved in song. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Hot buttered Christmas Zombie. Coal in Your Stocking. Jingle Bell Rock sung using only the words “jingle” “bell” and “rock.” Merry Christmas!

You probably heard about the Burnsville apartment fire that left 200 people homeless just a few days before Christmas. An anonymous donor has contributed $1 million to help them get back on their feet — that’s $17,500 per displaced family.

Not a ton of exclusively local gift guides out there this year, but here are the ones we found. First, the shameless plug for our Secrets of the Season guide by Kate Iverson (who also wrote a great guide for l’etoile magazine). MN Monthly’s got a short Minnesota Made guide and another for local arts.  MetroMix runs down the list of holiday stage performances. Liberal thinktank MN2020 has a long categorized list of MN-made gift ideas.  Finally, Metro lists (mostly) local guormet foods and some tips for holiday parties.  Let me know if I missed any and I’ll update the post.

Joining the ranks of  the Zombie Pub Crawl, the Atheist Pub Crawl,  the Robot Pub Crawl, and the, um, IRV Pub Crawl, we now have the Santacon Pub Crawl, this saturday. Sounds like a certain somebody is having his thunder stolen by a group of sodden imitators.

MPR reports on singer Ruth MacKenzie, who will be looking at the life of the Virgin Mary through song this Sunday. MacKenzie may be best known in the Twin Cities for an extraordinary recording of Finnish folk tunes called Kalevala: Dream of the Salmon Maiden. For those who haven’t heard it, you can preview the songs from it through iTunes by follwing the link on this page; it’s really powerful stuff, with strange, haunting harmonies.

Former Miss America and current Fox & Friends co-host Gretchen Carlson has a few words to speak on the subject of Christmas, which seems to be extra-special to her because she grew up in Minnesota and spent an awful lot of time in church. Her message: “I’m all for people to have their rights of free speech. Just don’t choose December 25th to do it.”