Christmas

It helped, of course, that Sim's was the version I had grown up with and the version that, with its chiaroscuro stylings, seemed closest to the dark spirit of Dickens' rather unsentimental original (and John Leech's original drawings). Best of all, it had Sim himself, whose magnificently expressive face could, as needed, explode toward heaven or sag to the very pits of hell. (Surely, Dr. Seuss took a good hard look at the Scottish actor's puss before sketching the Grinch.) For many Dickens lovers, it's impossible to hear a line like "There's more of gravy than of grave about you" or "You were always a good man of business, Jacob," without hearing Sim's inflections, delivered in a voice that reminded one colleague of "a fastidious ghoul."

Yes, I was a Simmian down to my sinews, until I sat down last year to watch the film in the company of my 8-year-old son — and experienced a rude shock. There was no question that Sim's work held up, but — how do I say this? — for the first time in the film's nearly 60-year existence, I felt I was watching an old movie.

The print was muddy. The supporting cast abounded in the Old Vickery that characterized so much postwar British acting: that rather plummy relish in the thespian's craft that, in the case of Kathleen Harrison's housekeeper or Miles Malleson's Old Joe, becomes too much of a not-always-good thing. Scene after scene, from the Cratchits' Christmas dinner to the flashbacks of Scrooge's youth to the scroungers trolling through Scrooge's clothes, seemed troweled on just a bit too hard, as if the filmmakers were afraid we'd miss the point. (As if we could miss the point.)

But what troubled me the most, I think, was that my son, a movie lover, was left unmoved by the whole enterprise. That hit me where I lived. As a writer who drew enough inspiration from Dickens' story to write a novel in homage, I've always believed that "A Christmas Carol" must, above all, entertain. If the vehicle is reduced to no more than its message, we might as well boil it in pudding and bury it with a sprig of holly through its heart.

So it became a point of honor to find a version of Dickens' classic that would resonate for my son and his generation, just as Sim's film had once done for me. I won't say I searched high and low, exactly, but there's a lot of both high and low in the Scrooge canon. At least a dozen stage productions of "A Christmas Carol" sprang to life within a year of the book's 1843 release. The first film version was a 1901 British silent called "Scrooge; or, Marley's Ghost." Eight additional films appeared between 1910 and 1928, starring once-esteemed theatrical actors like H.V. Esmond and Russell Thorndike and Seymour Hicks. Hicks, in particular, made something of a career of Scrooge, trotting him out more than 2,000 times on the stage, then convoying him to the silent screen in 1913, then dragging him back 22 years later for a talkie version.

It's easy to see Scrooge's allure as a part. Given the chance to be both villain and hero in the space of 90 minutes and to leave an audience gulping on its own humanity, most actors will slay every grandmother they ever had. Which is to say that on television, radio and stage, Scrooge has been essayed by the likes of Lionel Barrymore, Ralph Richardson, Fredric March and Basil Rathbone. More recently, Shakespearean veterans like Derek Jacobi and Simon Callow and Michael Hordern have had their crack at him, and with producers now spinning out endless gender- and race-based variations, James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson, Vanessa Williams and Susan Lucci have stepped nervously into the old template. Did I mention Vic Damone and Buddy Hackett?

In short, "A Christmas Carol" has spawned a thick tangle of camp and classicism. And who would have guessed — and who could not be pleased — that the actor to emerge most gloriously from the morass would be a West Virginia native and Marine Corps veteran best known for playing homicidal U.S. generals?

An actor, moreover, who came to Scrooge at a peculiarly vexed moment in his own career. In the late '60s and early '70s, George C. Scott rode films like "Petulia" and "Patton" and "The Hospital" to a position of lonely and bitter pre-eminence. He was, like Brando, a force of nature disguised as an actor. And like Brando, he had a genuine and visceral loathing for his own gift. To make matters worse, he had a fondness for alcohol, a knack for antagonizing directors and fellow cast members, and a volcanic persona that made him nearly impossible to cast.

And so, after his glory years, Scott's filmography descended with alarming speed into the bizarre ("The Day of the Dolphin," "The Savage Is Loose"), the hokey ("The Formula," "Firestarter") and the occasional bit of indentured servitude ("The Hindenburg"). By 1984, his greatest triumphs were more than a decade behind him, and even his truest and bluest fans could scarcely imagine him salvaging his career by climbing into Ebenezer's old nightshirt. Certainly not at the behest of a hack director like Clive Donner, whose recent oeuvre had included the likes of "The Nude Bomb" and "Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen."

I actually remember groaning when I read that long-ago TV Guide listing: George C. Scott IS Ebenezer Scrooge, or some such nonsense. I knew, or at least I thought I knew, exactly what I was in for. "A very special television event," in which Scott would swallow every scrap of scenery within reach and would himself be swallowed by oblivion.

But something else happened. At some point in preproduction, Scott and Donner and adapter Roger O. Hirson decided they were going to make not "A Christmas Carol" but "The Christmas Carol."

Whereupon fact gives way to speculation. Did the filmmakers go straight back to Dickens? To the book that so many people think they've read without actually having read it? Did they realize how shadow-laden it really was? Did they set out to show us that what we "knew" about Ebenezer Scrooge was wrong?

Well, here's what we can say about the makers of the 1984 "Carol." They trusted Dickens' language to carry the story. They drummed up enough financing to create a persuasive depiction of early-Victorian London, right down to the bonnets and fenders. And they chose an uncommonly fine supporting cast. Edward Woodward, soon to be a transatlantic star courtesy of the network drama "The Equalizer," makes possibly the sexiest-ever Ghost of Christmas Present. Roger Rees, fresh from Dickens duty in the miniseries of "Nicholas Nickleby," brings winningly shy accents to the historically bland role of Scrooge's nephew Fred. And David Warner, too often cast as a slot-eyed villain (like the manservant-thug in "Titanic"), transforms Bob Cratchit into a true proletarian, a man who doesn't so much espouse goodness as depend on it.

Thanks to the work of these players, we grasp something of what Dickens was trying to get across, that virtue is eternally at war, that it can give way at every point. As a result, scenes that were once soppy-saggy with tears turn strangely bracing. In the hands of Susannah York, for instance, Mrs. Cratchit's lament for Tiny Tim becomes a plain, true, helpless expression of grief, all the more moving for its restraint.

Well, Cratchits and ghosts come and go, one might argue, but every "Christmas Carol" must rise or fall with its Scrooge. And on this point the 1984 version most emphatically ascends.

We can talk, if we must, about George C. Scott's technique. Start with the accent: not an immaculately Streepian production but an internalized Englishness that commands from the first note. There's the lovely underplaying of Scrooge's villainy, which has lured many an actor into the slough of hamminess. The charm of the closing scenes, in which Scrooge's newfound joy seems to be stealing up from behind him and grabbing him by his collar.

But in my mind, this particular Scrooge rises to greatness in the graveyard scene, where the sight of his name on a gravestone prompts the famous cri de coeur: "I am not the man I was! I will not be the man I must have been! ... I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me … Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!"

Here it is: the dreaded "moral," in which all of Dickens' didactic chickens come home to roost. But in the hands of the classically trained Scott, it is the wail of a wasted soul. And not just a soul. With due respect to the motion-capture technology of Jim Carrey's 3-D theme ride, what makes this scene so riveting is that we're watching a real face — a face like a ruined abbey — and a lived-in body and a burnt-out voice. A human being with a history of passion.

Scott, unlike Alastair Sim, was a tragedian at heart. And perhaps it's not too much to suggest that, at some half-conscious level, he used Scrooge's dilemma to relive the tragedy of his own life: the missed opportunities, the squandered potential. Hadn't he once supped at the table of the gods? Hadn't he once had the force and imagination to play King Lear, Prospero, James Tyrone, Willy Loman? Where had it all gone? And how?

Charles Dickens wrote "A Christmas Carol" quickly — in six weeks, in a fever of inspiration. He said afterward that he felt the Cratchits "ever tugging at his sleeve, as if impatient for him to get back to his desk and continue the story of their lives.' And it is because the Cratchits and the other characters were so real to him that they remain so real to us. "A Christmas Carol" succeeds not because of its message (which Dickens recycled to markedly less effect in his later Christmas tales) but because, through all its supernatural agentry, we feel ourselves in the presence of flesh and blood. And that is just what George C. Scott, in his last great performance, gives us. An Ebenezer Scrooge with hands, organs, dimension, senses, affections. A Scrooge who, when you prick him, bleeds.

We brought her to New York in time to catch the big Christmas snowstorm, and she got to see the Radio City Christmas show in which one Rockette kicked off a shoe and kept dancing though off-kilter. Priceless.

We parents don't teach delight. We try to cover the basic stuff such as Please and Thank You and why you should take turns. You browbeat your kid into sticking with a job and finishing it and you praise the results, whether brilliant or only above average. You teach your child that there is a time to come home, and it's sooner than you think: that nothing good happens after 1 a.m.

This is a hard lesson to learn. The world looks rather magical after all the working stiffs have gone to bed. The stars twinkle through the trees and around 2 a.m. you're feeling like the law of gravity may not apply to you. By 3 a.m., you're ready to quit the day job and become a famous movie star.

We try to save our children from wild, unreal expectations. And now here is Christmas, a wild story of 3 a.m. miracles if ever there was one. It surely isn't about good manners or good work habits. We teach it to our children, each in our own version, and God alone knows what they make of it all.

My own Christmas vision appeared three days before Christmas, in a deli on 10th Avenue in New York, where a rather elegant young woman was managing a herd of eight teenage boys, ordering their breakfasts from the lady behind the counter. The boys spoke Spanish, which the young woman translated into English for the counter lady. I'm standing there, waiting my turn, observing. The boys are docile, cautious, soft-spoken, and then it dawns on me that they are so because of brain damage, mild retardation, however you want to put it, and the young woman is their hired shepherd. A teacher's aide, perhaps. Probably minimum wage. She is lovely, green-eyed, dark hair spilling down on a puffy parka, red wool scarf, and her English sounds very Midwestern to me.

The boys want muffins for breakfast except one boy who earnestly desires a sesame bagel, toasted, with cream cheese, but the deli is all out of sesame, and this is a cruel disappointment to him. He really was counting on it. When you are 14 and so desperately vulnerable in the big city, you do pin your hopes on certain small pleasures. His face crumples and he is about to melt, and the elegant young green-eyed woman puts her head down next to his where he sits slumped on the deli stool. Her pale cheek against his cheek, she murmurs to him and a string of his enormous tears runs onto her face and she wipes it away and says something in Spanish that makes him laugh. And then I notice at the end of her red scarf, the word "Nebraska." Nobody would wear this in New York except a Nebraskan.

I might've asked her a few questions, but she had turned her street face toward me, and so I didn't bother her. A girl from the prairie using her Spanish to care for damaged boys in a callous world where, contrary to everything the Savior said, the poor and powerless get short shrift -- in the U.S. Senate and elsewhere -- and she is sharing the tears of the sesame boy and making him laugh. She's my Christmas angel. I hope she gets to go to a party and sing and dance until 3 a.m.

(Garrison Keillor is the author of "77 Love Sonnets," published by Common Good Books.)

© 2009 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

It was the indulgent start to an excessive decade: 1980, and who knew that wild arugula and padded shoulders were just round the corner? So nice that only one of those endured.

We were working to open a new outpost of the legendary Oakville Grocery, and a small group of us gathered in a Napa Valley farmhouse to rob the very larder we were stocking.

I’d arranged for geese to be raised for us nearby, secured major quantities of Italian white truffles, and gathered quail eggs and a slab of illegally imported foie gras large enough to clog international arteries.

We rendered the duck, gathering and straining the fat so we could pan fry sourdough crostini, scramble the quail eggs (kept overnight in a jar with the truffles to absorb their aroma) to go on top, then gilded that lily with a slash of foie gras and generous scrapings of more white truffle.

We were well into our third or fourth or fifth bottle of Champagne when Rick slipped and dropped the pan, sending the goose flying across Joe's pristine show kitchen, only to be returned to the oven, forgotten in the haze and profoundly overcooked. We abandoned it. It was all of course far too much, but it felt just right.

I do remember a salad and a delicious, pedestrian poached egg the next noon, but that’s another story.

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From Greg Higgins, Chef-owner, Higgins Restaurant and Bar:

No offense to the founder of Festivus or any other feast days, but the winter solstice is primordial, predating all organized religion. It's also the normal peak of truffle season along the 45th parallel.

There are many food memories brought on by the abbreviated days around the winter solstice, but I'm most moved by the scent of dank earth, the kind coming from a freshly dug Oregon black truffle. These things are precious, and the hunt for them is shrouded in a mystery that feels appropriate for the misty, dreary days of the Northwest winter.

There are secrets and pacts, and my band of rogue foragers never talks about the whereabouts of our forays. We take our experience and intuition and a bit of luck with us into these eternal forests, and we dig under thick moss and broad ferns. Occasionally, we get a waft of their unmistakable perfume, hovering elusively in the wet air. We gently rake back the duff of conifers and leaves, finding black nuggets encrusted in forest clay. The hunt continues until we're content to return, chilled to the bone but charged by the aroma in our gunny sacks -- spices, rich earth and exotic fruits.

Back in the kitchen, we spray away the tenacious clay to reveal the velvety black trophies. Preparing a simple risotto, it's easy to forget the numbing cold and our sore knees and backs from the day's adventure. Some fresh chevre, a leek or two pulled from the kitchen garden, a bit of patient stirring and all that remains is the celebration at the table with fellow foragers and an ample supply of dark and pungent pinot noir nurtured in that same red clay.

We, like many other mycophages, celebrate this auspicious day rather than some of the more religious or spiritual holidays, celebrating the return of the light. 

Twenty-five years ago, when I was not yet a JewBu (a Jew listing toward Buddhism, a bubbaleh for Buddha), I celebrated Hanukkah with a latke party fraught with scandal and miracle.

Getting the Champagne was easy, but making the latkes was hard. I wanted them to be thin, almost crepe-like, but a thin potato batter fried in a very hot Griswold is a recipe for burning. I added more potato, more matzo meal, more onions and more eggs to bind it together, and soon the latke batter just laid there in a lump.

In a subdued panic, I called my mother, who told me the secret to making the lightest latkes was to use seltzer in the batter. The bubbles, according to my mother, would "open the pores of the dough, unlike flat water, which just makes things wet." I had no seltzer, but a couple of bottles of Gerolsteiner fizzy mineral water in the fridge. My mother was dubious, even scornful: German mineral water for Jewish latkes was her idea of a shandah -- a scandal.

I added the Gerolsteiner, and suddenly the batter was perfect; the pancakes were transformed into potato pillows. Idaho spuds, Italian extra virgin olive oil, Hudson Valley eggs, apple sauce and sour cream, and that German mineral water conspired to produce hot, crunchy, oily, rich, light, sweet, savory delights all to be enjoyed with French Champagne. My friends enjoyed themselves immensely -- all smiles and shiny, oily lips.

The symbolism of latkes is really about the oil they're fried in: During the revolt of the Maccabees, the story goes that there was only enough oil in the temple to provide light for one night, but by some miracle it lasted eight. On that Hanukkah 25 years ago, in a small way, I discovered more than I realized I had, too. And now I always have seltzer in the house; it reminds me of my mother. 

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

From Tara Q. Thomas, senior editor at Wine and Spirits magazine:

My sister married a Thai guy. Super sweet, with a mom who's even sweeter. That first Christmas when she joined our family for the holidays, we wanted to do whatever it would take to make her feel welcome.

In our house, that means we cook.

My husband and I had just returned from a month in Laos; the flavors still fresh in our memories, we figured we could whip up an Isaan feast, where the Laotian and Thai cuisines come together. We planned to make piles of larb and find thumbnail-size crabs to pound into our papaya salad. We conferred with her son, who consulted with his mom.

The verdict was immediate: No Thai. “I want eggplant parmesan! I eat Thai all the time!”

Christmas came. The 96 courses we’d planned were already in process by early morning, when we sat around opening presents. So what was Tia doing in the kitchen?

Preparing dinner. Thai dinner.

We panicked. How could we tell her we’d already planned every bite of the evening? That we had so much food there was no way we’d have room for more? That we weren’t really sure how sour soup would play against eggplant parmesan?

She dished up noodles for lunch and we murmured something about maybe saving the eggplant parmesan for tomorrow ... "Noooooo! I want eggplant parmesan," Tia insisted. So we made it -- while she prepared sticky rice to go with a papaya salad and deveined shrimp for summer rolls. Somehow, we even all got along in the kitchen. Tia tried to teach us how to whack the bamboo steamer against the side of the pot just right to flip the sticky rice over; we let her sneak slices of eggplant after they were fried.

By dinnertime, we realized that there was nothing to do but set everything out together; courses made no sense. It wasn’t what we imagined, but we figured we could do it our way next year.

But it was amazing. The Thai food was, of course, far better than anything we could have prepared; the eggplant parmesan made Tia positively giddy. And the mix of dishes actually read like so many Laotian meals we’d eaten with large groups: an impossible number of dishes, all set out to dip into as often or as little as one wished, the little bites teasing the palate, keeping it entertained.

Now, it’s how we do it every year. 

Bad enough, but now what if I told you that my friend is an airline pilot? Well, he is. On the day this happened, he was heading out of town on a short vacation, and his wife and daughter were going with him.

When he told me this story, all I could answer was, "I know, I know." It's right up there with the time that I had a butter knife confiscated from my roll-aboard crew bag. My own story is even more absurd, actually, since I was on duty in full uniform and the butter knife was no different from the ones given out to passengers during meal service. Not to mention, would an airline pilot at the controls of a jetliner really need the help of some dull-edged cutlery if he wanted to crash the plane? Just asking.

Mike pleaded his case at SFO, just as I had done in New York, but the guard wasn't the least bit impressed by his Federal Aviation Authority certificates or his airline credentials. In other words, common sense wasn't allowed into the picture. Simple common sense. That, perhaps above anything else, is what is so acutely missing from airport security.

There are, of course, two fundamental flaws in TSA's screening philosophy: The first is that it considers everybody who flies -- the old and young, fit and infirm, domestic and foreign, pilot and passenger -- a potential terrorist. The second is a foolish fixation with the tactics used by the terrorists on Sept. 11, and the subsequent fixation with weapons -- particularly knives and other sharp objects -- rather than the people who might use them. TSA will not acknowledge that the success of the 2001 attacks had nothing to do with the hijackers' ability to sneak weapons past airport security. For one thing, even a child knows that a sharp object as lethal as a box cutter can be fashioned from virtually anything. But more to the point, the attackers were exploiting a weakness in our mind-set -- that is, our expectations of how a hijacking would unfold, based on numerous earlier incidents -- rather than any weakness in airport security. The element of surprise, not box cutters, is what took control of those four aircraft. And even before the first of the twin towers had fallen to the ground, that element of surprise -- as well as the box cutters that went with it -- was no longer a useful tool. Paradigm over.

Combine these fundamental errors and you've assembled what is basically an impossible and unsustainable task: keeping any and all "weapons," from hobby knives to hair gel, out of the hands and luggage of 2 million travelers every day of the year. I'll remind you that tough-as-nails prison guards cannot keep drugs and knives out of maximum security cell blocks, never mind the folly of TSA guards trying to root out liquid-filled baby rattles at overcrowded airports.

(Apologies to my regulars. I've made these points numerous times in past columns, I know, but remember that a percentage of my readers each week consists of newcomers. This is a grass-roots effort and, dammit, one has to be tenacious.)

The proper course of action, need it be said, would be for TSA to overhaul its entire approach. For several reasons -- not the least of which is the traveling public's apparent eagerness to be subjugated, harassed and humiliated -- this is not going to happen. Is it too much to ask, in consolation, for the agency to exhibit a little common sense instead? How about a policy whereby a TSA inspector, encountering a fully credentialed airline pilot traveling with his young daughter, is able to, well, like, you know ... just let it go.

What TSA desperately needs is a bit of flexibility in its protocols. If we're to believe that TSA screeners are indeed well-trained professionals, can they not handle the responsibility of making an occasional judgment call, some on-the-spot decision making? "Our screeners are allowed to exercise leeway in some cases," says a TSA spokesperson. "They have the training, and the obligation, to exercise discretion in some cases."

I asked if those cases might include an airline employee and his child's playthings, but the spokesperson wouldn't get into specifics. As it stands, I'm not seeing much leeway and discretion. I'm seeing blind adherence to nonsensical rules. I'm seeing a draconian obsession with the exactness of container volumes and the precise dimensions of harmless objects. When that knife was taken away from me, a guard and supervisor actually took it aside to measure the size of its miniature serrations, as if they alone were the difference between unsafe and safe. Enforcement of this kind transcends mere tedium. Not only does it do nothing to improve safety, but it is also a national embarrassment.

Now, the reason I bring all of this up is because of the recent brouhaha over certain TSA "secrets" having been accidentally revealed to the public. Through an improperly redacted document that was posted online, we have learned, for example, that the nationalities of a traveler could be grounds for yanking that person aside for a more thorough secondary screening. If your passport happens to be the property of Yemen or Syria, say, rather than Iceland, you may be looked at more carefully. Profiling, you might call it. We also learned that airline crew members, with proper ID and in uniform (that was Mike's problem; he wasn't dressed the right way), are exempt from having to take their shoes off, and from some of those annoying restrictions on liquids and gels.

Is there anybody who didn't already know this?

Predictably, certain politicians and pundits are on the warpath, calling this lapse a "giveaway to terrorists." To me, what's worrying isn't that our enemies are suddenly privy to useful information that will help them bring down planes. They're not. What's worrying is the idea of a government agency that is unable to keep confidential data confidential. It's a bureaucracy issue, and potentially a privacy and civil rights issue, more than a public safety issue, per se.

Beyond that I have little to take away from the scandal, other than a feeling of extreme annoyance that this, out of all the things that airport security gets wrong, is the best that the general public and media can rouse themselves to be shocked about. We're reading headlines like, "Leaked TSA Guidelines Reveal Confidential Procedures." Here's a better headline: "Billions Wasted in Pointless TSA Screening Methods."

The agency promises to investigate and assures us that our safety has not been compromised. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, there's a new TSA sheriff in town. Erroll Southers, a former FBI agent, was appointed by President Obama earlier this year. He replaces Kip Hawley, under whose tenure there was little in the way of clear thinking. Both industry and passenger groups seem to be fond of Southers, calling him a likely advocate for reform. We'll see.

But enough of that. Here we are a week before Christmas, and I'm going all Scrooge on you. I'm grumpy this holiday season and I can't help it. First, I had to work over Thanksgiving, and now it turns out I'll be working over both Christmas and New Year's Eve as well. Not all pilots get roped into flying on the holidays -- only we seniority-list bottom feeders. But I suppose I shouldn't mind holiday flying. The lines are longer, delays are longer, planes are more crowded ... I mean, what's not to like?

I'm joking. I really do enjoy it. Last year I spent Christmas in Egypt. The year before it was Hungary. Before that, Ghana. As I said, what's not to like?

My favorite holiday flying memory dates all the way back to Thanksgiving, 1993. I was captain of a Dash-8 turboprop heading to New Brunswick, Canada, and my first officer was the always cheerful and gregarious Kathy Knight. Kathy was one of only a few pilots I've known who'd been flight attendants before learning to fly. She'd spent a few years serving peanuts to passengers at Delta. Today, she was serving me. Literally, for she'd brought along an entire cooler packed with food -- huge turkey sandwiches, a whole pie, and plastic tubs of mashed potatoes. We assembled the plates and containers across the folded-down jump seat. Just one of those sentimental oddities a pilot files away in his mental logbook.

The real reason I'm grumpy this year, maybe, is because Peter Hughes, bassist from the Mountain Goats and an Ask the Pilot aficionado, neglected to remind me of his show here in Boston a few weeks ago. Instead of a guest-list invitation to see one of my all-time favorite bands, I got to sit home and watch Bill Moyers. Hughes did send me a Christmas present a few years ago. It was a flea market find, and here's a picture of it. It is what is appears to be: a small plastic doll, about 3 inches tall, encased in a transparent shell, like a miniature trophy case, adorned with '60s-era airline logos, including those of BOAC, Pan Am and the beautiful old JAL crane. The doll is supposed to be a stewardess, possibly. Beyond that, I'm hoping that somebody out there can explain where it originally came from or what its purpose might be. It says "Cragstan" across the bottom, which I take to be the name of the company that produced the item.

OK, staying on the Christmas theme, how about a stocking stuffer recommendation for the frequent flier on your list? Something funny, because travelers out there need a little take-along humor to keep from going berserk at the X-ray machine or renouncing their citizenship and moving to Denmark. And because I'm so tirelessly allegiant, and because there aren't any other funny travel gifts around, I'll make the same recommendation I made here in 2006: That'd be a copy of SkyMaul, the in-flight shopping parody magazine created by the San Francisco-based Kasper Hauser comedy troupe. It's 3 years old, but so what? I dig out my copy pretty regularly, and it gets funnier every time.

SkyMaul is the perfect sendup to a concept -- in-flight catalog shopping -- that was screaming to be sent up for a long, long time. The real SkyMall, which assumes that every American has an insatiable hunger for necktie organizers, remote-control pool toys and mail-order steak, is always just half a step away from self-caricature. The K.H. gang give it that last little nudge. With 120 pages of fodder, it's hard to pick a favorite "product," but I’m partial to, among many others, the bee thermometer ("There is only one way to know the true temperature of your bees"), the How I See Myself Stoner Trophy, and the Three Veterinarians of Nazareth figurines ("In ancient times, these beast-healers gamboled about the countryside, laying hands upon sick flocks. Here we see Japeth and Magog looking on as Tomargah nurses a lamb back to consciousness with his own man-breast"). And I've been known to use the pseudonym "Blaine Cardoza" when ordering Chinese food or signing for a FedEx package. (Get a copy and you'll understand.) My only gripe is that whoever designed the cover collage managed to cull some of the book's least funny highlights.

That SkyMaul hasn't been a staple at airport bookstores, where it surely would sell hand over fist, is impossible to explain. My own book was victimized by a similar exile. It was written explicitly for airline travelers, who by and large never saw a copy. To help us through our suffering, why not get a copy of each? Order "Ask the Pilot" through my home page, and get a complimentary autograph, which is sure to increase the book's value when you pawn it off on eBay or leave it on the sidewalk somewhere. Really, what could be a better under-$20 gift for a frequent flier than a signed copy of "Ask the Pilot"?

OK, to be honest, you might notice that I've lowered the price. And that's because, while I wish that I could tell you that my book has aged as well as SkyMaul has, I'd be lying. At 5 years old it's a little behind the times in the facts, stats and figures department. The bulk of the content dates to circa 2001-02, and it shows. How bad does it get? In a discussion about the use of electronic devices during flight I make reference to a Sony Walkman, and I refer to the Boeing 787 by its long-discarded preproduction name, "7E7."

As it happens, I've recently begun the process of updating and revising "Ask the Pilot." A fresh new edition should be out by summer, packed with loads of new information. There's a lot of work to do, and if this winter I'm occasionally absent from Salon on my normally allotted day, this is why.

By "loads" of information what I really mean is "some." That's how the publisher wants it, anyway. For reasons I don't fully understand, they aren't looking for a major overhaul, only a here-and-there update. I'm trying to abide by their wishes, but there's quite a bit that needs changing. I've been working on the thing for a month, and I'm yet to make it past Chapter 2. I think my editor is going to hate me.

Ah, that's right, the Boeing 787. Is it really true that the 787 made it into the air on Tuesday, Dec. 15, for its long-delayed maiden flight?

Don't ask me. I was traveling. I managed to catch some snippets on the CNN monitors* at the Atlanta airport, but at that point things were uncertain. The plane was taxiing around, testing its flaps and landing lights, but there were questions as to whether it would fly. Eventually I lost interest and went to Chik-fil-A.

(*Such every-so-often usefulness does not justify the existence of these infernal chattering devil-boxes, all of which deserve to be destroyed.)

The plane's inaugural is fairly exciting, though hardly on the scale of, say, the 707 or 747. Those aircraft essentially redefined air travel. The 787's advances, by contrast, are strictly technological. It is the first commercial airliner fashioned mostly from high-tech composites, and it promises remarkable operating economy for airlines. Passengers will appreciate such innovations as higher humidity levels, lower cabin altitudes, and (my favorite) larger windows. Airlines already have placed over 800 orders for 787s -- the most ever for an aircraft yet to carry a passenger.

I have to say it's a sharp-looking plane. It's not as distinctive as past Boeings (727, 747), but they don't design 'em like they used to, aesthetically, and we need to keep it in context. The tail is a little impotent, but I dig the scalloped engine nacelles, the sharply tapered wings and raked landing gear doors.

I'm joking again. I'm well aware that the 787 successfully completed its maiden voyage -- a three-hour loop from Paine Field outside Seattle on Tuesday afternoon.

Boeing's shares fell 38 cents.

And finally, speaking of falling stock ... I was a little dismayed by some of the comments posted in response to last week's column about Northwest 188 -- the flight that went AWOL over Minnesota back in October. I fail to understand some of the angry accusations that I was justifying, exonerating or otherwise excusing the flight crew's lack of attentiveness. I was doing no such thing. The point of the story was only to show that the incident was, in all likelihood, more complicated than people think; I was trying to give you insights into how such a thing might happen.

The pilots have openly admitted responsibility. For me to suggest they were not as blatantly negligent as is commonly assumed, and to advocate that they be allowed to fly again at some point in the future, is by no stretch giving them a "free pass," as one e-mailer inexplicably put it. Neither does it square with many of the posted comments, a few of which were downright hostile.

Other criticism was more measured and, I think, fair...

"To suggest that a loss of situational awareness does not put a flight in peril is simply wrong," writes Christine Negroni, New York Times correspondent and the author of "The Crash Detectives." It is important not to fall for the notion that simply because no one was hurt, the event is not serious. For years now air safety experts have been trying to underscore how important it is that events be investigated with as much attention as accidents, because only a single factor might separate such an episode from a disaster. Pilot inattention over a period of time, as occurred on flight 188, is a serious safety issue. Though I agree with you these pilots have learned a lesson they won't forget. Complacency is not going to be their sin in the future."

I've always had mixed feelings about the one-way nature of Salon's comments forum. Not all writers review their feedback, but I do, and it can be a frustrating exercise, especially now that Salon closes the letters thread a day earlier. Answering a simple question or providing a rebuttal is often impossible.

As a reminder, you can always write to me directly.

Happy holidays!

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Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his Web site and look for answers in a future column.

If you can't get them a gift, says Ritholtz, "just give them the damned cash."

Now, before I launch into a defense of gift cards, let me acknowledge that I am fully aware that they are essentially a scam. The creators of gift cards count on the fact that they will be left in drawers, or lost, or incompletely cashed out. What can you buy with that 89 cents remainder left on your card? Nothing good. When you buy a gift card for someone, you are essentially forking over some portion of the purchase price directly to the corporation selling the cards. This is sleazy and underhanded.

However, there are also efficiency gains from properly distributed gift cards. I don't buy into Joel Waldfogel's "Scroogenomics" thesis that decries winter gift-giving for its "billions of dollars in value destruction" as people give each others gifts that they don't want and don't need. But I am all too aware that a 12-year-old boy is a much better judge of what games he wants for his Nintendo DS or Xbox 360 than I am.

So why not just give the boy cash? Surely cash would allow an even more efficient allocation of resources? But cash is inferior, I think, because cash, like it or not, carries with it some assumption of responsibility. You don't want to waste your cash frivolously, or you might feel compelled to save it for some greater goal. You might end up, horror of horrors, being forced to use it to buy some other kid a birthday present! But a gift-card to, say, GameStop, is a ticket to freedom. Go be frivolous! Buy a game! Buy whatever game you want! It's better than money because it comes with an explicit, unignorable directive to use it in a way that gives you pleasure.

If you gave me cash for Christmas, I'd probably save it to pay for groceries. But if you gave me a gift card redeemable at my local bike shop -- I'd be utterly delighted to splurge on new gloves.

The same goes for an iTunes gift card, or a bookstore gift card. Sure, the gift-card issuer is taking its slice off the top, but the combination of a more efficient process of gift-giving along with the direct mandate against fiscal prudence means there is real value in the present.

Maybe I'm biased because my own 12-year-old son has made it clear that he considers gift cards to game stores or bookstores acceptable and desirable. Which is not to say that he would be pleased if that's all that was under the tree on Christmas morning. That would be upsetting and disappointing. He also wants to be surprised, and enjoys having some proof that people understand him and what he wants and can demonstrate that by giving him a cool gift. I certainly would rather pull off such a magic trick than just give him a gift card. But let's not to be so quick to condemn -- and instead appreciate that almost everything has its evolutionarily useful niche, if correctly deployed.