(The randy elves of 12/22/23 are engaged in 3-way man-on-man sex, described here by its makers in street language, so this part of the program is unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest (IF THAT’S YOU: DO NOT READ); the rest of it is about a variety of seasonal customs, some of them off-beat but none requiring policing (PLEASE READ AND ENJOY))
In my title: highlights of the first day of the three-day run-up to Christmas 2023.
Each day provides two occasions to celebrate:
— 12/22/23: CAYF (the gay porn movie Cum All Ye Faithful) climax day, with that Christmas-elf 3-way sex as the centerpiece of the final scene in the movie and the title of the movie distantly connected to the Christmas carol in Latin, Adeste Fideles; and Festoonus (celebrated at my house with that Korean feast)
— 12/23/23: Last day of Saturnalia; and Festivus
— 12/24/23: Fourth Sunday of Advent; and Christmas Eve (finally, two well-known holidays — though how Christmas Eve is celebrated varies enormously)
Notes on the first two days, on which fall four occasions of minor rank (at least in the modern world).
12/22/23: CAYF climax day. Earlier scenes from the Falcon movie Cum All Ye Faithful have been announced on this blog (while two were skipped because their studio photos were way too penis-heavy for WordPress), and then on 12/22 came the release of the fifth and final scene (which climaxes in a Christmas-elf 3-way, with this mailer ad, showing Dean Young, Dylan Hayes, and Damian Night, who portray the three elves in this scene):
(#1) Not, as it turns out, a photo posed for this ad, but instead a composition pasted together from pieces of three different earlier p.r. photos, so that DY and DN appear here in Santa caps (from earlier p.r. shots) rather than the elf caps they wear in the actual scene; and the image of DY, sucking impudently on a candy stick, has been reversed from its earlier appearance
But on the Falcon site you can find a new posed p.r shot of the three actors, wreathed in smiles, in their elf costumes:
(#2) Elf caps, glittery green elf shirts, and the sheerest of red and green elf-panties; woo, woo, get on the elf-sex train! The sequence of the men should probably be DN (who’s insertive, both orally and anally), then DY in the middle (versatile), and finally DH (receptive, both orally and anally)
Now, a brief digression while Falcon breaks out the dirty porn-talk to sell this climactic scene to subscribers; this is the bit where kids and the sexually modest need to go away for a moment; you’re all welcome back for notes on the puns in the English title (which are merely a bit on the raunchy side) and an excursion into some details of the Latin text of the Christmas carol O Come, All Ye Faithful — adeste fideles … venite, venite — with two Latin imperatives translated into English with come; but one is a verb of location at (‘be here’) while the other is a verb of motion to (‘come here’).
Dirty talk (restricted section). The Falcon summary of the action in routine dirty talk (big dick, suck, fuck), supplemented by some figurative variants on fuck (pound, drill), and what amount to colorful technical terms for three-man sexual acts (spit-roast, fuck train):
horny elves Dean Young, Dylan Hayes, and Damian Night have all gathered to be part of a charitable photoshoot to help their favorite drag queens, Sherry Vine and Ethylina Canne, raise money to save Sherry’s house. When left alone, though, the holiday helpers show off their naughty side with Damian breaking out his big dick for the other two to suck as he sits on Santa’s throne. Dylan soon finds himself getting spit-roasted by Damian and Dean before the trio forms a bareback fuck train that has Damian pounding Dean while Dean drills Dylan.
CAYF puns. Puns in the title of the Falcon movie (which will be released on DVD on 1 March): from my 11/24/23 posting “Cum All Ye Faithful”:
The basis for the title pun is the Christmas carol “Adeste Fideles”, aka “O Come, All Ye Faithful”, an exhortation to all faithful Christians to metaphorically come to Bethlehem and adore the Christ child.
Come All Ye Faithful would be a dirty pun on the carol’s title, with the motion verb come replaced by the sexual verb come (and Christian faith replaced by some sort of sexual faithfulness, or perhaps a faith in the power of orgasm); from NOAD:
verb come: … 6 informal have an orgasm.
Come All Ye Faithful would be a perfect pun — with the pun identical to its basis — both phonologically and orthographically. But apparently that would have been too subtle for the Falcon pornsters, so they used the [vulgar] spelling variant cum instead; Cum All Ye Faithful is unmistakably a pun.
And then the minor pun, a sexual play on the adjective faithful. From NOAD:
adj. faithful: 1 [a] remaining loyal and steadfast … [b] (of a spouse or partner) never having a sexual relationship with anyone else …
Not that the characters in Falcon porn flicks are actually monogamous; they just happen to have a number of partners at once — see the three-way frolicking in the finale of CAYF — and they’re true to them all, in their fashion (as the song goes). (Oh hell, I’ve given myself a terrible earworm.)
Coming in Latin. In my 1/5/12 posting “Portuguese Hymn”, discussion of the hymn tune (whose name is Portuguese Hymn), with the hymn text in Latin (as customarily printed):
Adeste fideles … Venite, venite in Bethlehem … Venite adoremus
and its customary English translation:
O come, all ye faithful … O come ye to Bethlehem … O come, let us adore him
(Note: as the Wikipedia article makes clear, every aspect of the history here — of the tune name, the customary Latin text, and the customary English text — is clouded in controversy, but the bare facts, about the tune name and the two customary texts, are straightforward.)
Now, my observations on the Latin text, which nicely juxtaposes two different ways of conveying (non-sexual) ‘come’ in Latin:
— adeste is the imperative plural of adesse ‘to come’ (literally ‘to be at (a place)’, hence ‘to be present, to be here / there’), present indicative 1 sg adsum ‘I come’ (literally ‘I am here’); that is, adesse is not actually a motion verb, but is instead a verb of location at, so that adeste directs the addressee to be at a place (that place understood in context to be ‘this place, here’), this instruction conveying that they should change their location to be at that place, to be here, that is, that they should get here, that they should come (it’s very indirect in its effect, but what the form conveys is the welcoming message ‘be here, be with us’)
— the hymn then goes on to use the imperative plural venite (actually venīte [vowel length is a crucial phonological feature in Latin, but is customarily omitted in Latin texts in English-language publications]) of the ordinary verb of motion to(wards) venīre ‘to come’, present indicative 1 sg veniō ‘I come’
— fideles (actually fidēlēs) is the nominative plural of the masculine noun fidēlis ‘faithful one’ — a noun use of the masculine sg adjective fidēlis ‘faithful’
— adoremus (actually adōrēmus) is the present subjunctive 1 pl of adōrāre ‘to beg’, present indicative 1 sg adōrō ‘I beg’ — but in a special sense in religious contexts; from Wiktionary on adōrāre, with five senses:
1 to speak to, accost, address; negotiate a matter with; 2 to bring an accusation, accuse; 3 to speak to someone to obtain something; ask, entreat, pray to, beseech, implore, plead; 4 (religion, of gods or related objects) to revere, honor, worship, adore; 5 (in a non-religious sense) to admire, esteem highly, marvel at, revere
12/22/23: Festoonus. From my 12/21/18 posting “22-festoon!”:
[Festoonus, a holiday of my own devising, — with special thanks to Kit Transue and Adrienne Shapiro — is] a secular and non-commercial holiday, every year on December 22nd, to celebrate the victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance — like Diwali, Hanukkah, St. Lucy’s Day, Walpurgis Night, and the Chinese Lantern Festival all rolled into one, but without the baggage.
(#3) AS and KT with their 2018 Festoonus light displayFestoonus and Festoonus Eve are both occasions for elaborate light shows, decorating your bodies, sharing exotic food, dancing, and making public and communal art and music.
A Korean feast for Festoonus. (And, as it turned out, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as well; one order goes a long long way.) This year my Festoonus focus was on exotic food (my life is entirely solitary, and I will never be able to dance again, but food, I can do food). The plan developed in steps.
Step 1. I had a craving for roasted chicken. I had discovered a few years back that the rotisserie chickens available from so many groceries are pretty decent, especially if you can get just the dark meat pieces (thighs and drumsticks), which are both tastier and moister. I knew that such things were available from Safeway, where Instacart does my grocery shopping. Then I discovered at Thanksgiving that you had to get the order in at just the right time of day: too early, and the machines were not yet producing fully cooked chickens; too late, and they’d all been sold, and Instacart would replace them with fried chicken pieces, which I can eat but would never choose to buy. (This happened at Thanksgiving, so my Thanksgiving chicken was not the chicken I was looking forward to.)
Step 2. I went to Grubhub, my source for restaurant food, to look for roasted chickens at restaurants they deliver from. Vons Chicken outlets (offering both roasted and fried chicken) popped up early in the search, and then it turned out that they offered plain roasted chicken but also a bunch of more exotic styles of roasted chicken — because they’re, whoop whoop, Korean.
From the Vons Chicken “About” page:
Our history: Since the opening of the first store in April 2007 in South Korea, we operate franchises all over the World. In the overseas market, we are [a] roast and fried chicken brand with 70 stores in the United States, Guam, China. Vietnam, Guatemala, and Cambodia.
Bingo: exotic food for Festoonus! From a Vons restaurant not very far away.
(#4) Vons roasted chickens; I was immediately attracted to #6, soy sauce and black vinegar chicken
You can get whole chickens, or half chickens, or assortments of pieces. I chose drumsticks. In the smallest number available, which turned out to be 10 in print, but 12 (all amply sized) in the package that came to my door. Which is how the Festoonus feast turned into three feasts. Non, je ne regrette rien.
Step 3. I browsed the Vons site on Grubhub. I have since tried to browse Vons sites via Google, and I have to say that they are phenomenally badly designed and hard to use. But on the Grubhub version I came across an old favorite, a Korean dish I hadn’t had for, like, two decades: (vegetarian) japchae. So I had to get that too.
Spread a bed of japchae in a big bowl, arrange some drumsticks on top, with some of the black soy-vinegar sauce, nuke in the microwave to bring it all up to speed, and you’ve got a festival dish.
From Wikipedia
:
(#5) Vons japchaeJapchae (Korean: 잡채; Hanja: 雜菜) is a savory and slightly sweet dish of stir-fried glass noodles and vegetables that is popular in Korean cuisine. Japchae is typically prepared with dangmyeon (당면, 唐麵), a type of cellophane noodles made from sweet potato starch; the noodles are mixed with assorted vegetables, meat, and mushrooms, and seasoned with soy sauce and sesame oil.
Great stuff. Delicious eaten cold on a summer day. Eaten hot as a celebratory meal. Or as a side dish. Makes a good breakfast. Possibly better reheated than freshly made. Cellophane-noodle dishes are like that.
12/23/23: last day of Saturnalia. From Wikipedia:
Saturnalia is an ancient Roman festival and holiday in honour of the god Saturn, held on 17 December of the Julian calendar and later expanded with festivities through to 23 December. The holiday was celebrated with a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn, in the Roman Forum, and a public banquet, followed by private gift-giving, continual partying, and a carnival atmosphere that overturned Roman social norms: gambling was permitted, and masters provided table service for their slaves as it was seen as a time of liberty for both slaves and freedmen alike.
12/23/23: Festivus. From Wikipedia:
Festivus is a secular holiday celebrated on December 23 as an alternative to the pressures and commercialism of the Christmas season. Originally created by author Daniel O’Keefe, Festivus entered popular culture after it was made the focus of the 1997 Seinfeld episode “The Strike”, which O’Keefe’s son, Dan O’Keefe, co-wrote.
The non-commercial holiday’s celebration, as depicted on Seinfeld, occurs on December 23 and includes a Festivus dinner, an unadorned aluminum Festivus pole, practices such as the “airing of grievances” and “feats of strength”, and the labeling of easily explainable events as “Festivus miracles”.
Now all this has past. It’s Tuesday, December 26th: the first of the 12 days of Christmas; St. Stephen’s Day; Boxing Day; and Kwanzaa too. Chilly (for here) and overcast, threatening more rain tomorrow. My body is working reasonably well, all things considered. Utterly alone since Saturday morning, managing that ok. Won’t see anyone until the next Saturday. My internet connection has been down three times in the last few days, for hours at a time, and that really hurts: can’t work, can’t write, can’t chat with friends on-line. Now to post this thing and get on with housework.