🎄
Before we dive in to this week’s Three Things Weekly, I wanted to start this Christmas post by thanking you. For allowing room in your inbox each week for the things that this community has to share, for contributing your own pieces, and for inviting creativity for yourselves and others.
With love and gratitude,
Raphy Mendoza
1.
A Christmas Elf Who Didn’t Quite Belong — Photography by Raphy Mendoza feat. Saul Bateman
From the Community
The focus of this Substack is creativity in all its forms. Sometimes, creativity looks like having your mate come over to unleash your entire make-up artillery and the Christmas decor brigade - camera and spotlight (a lamp) at the ready.Â
I would also like to take this opportunity to publicly acknowledge my long and ridiculous friendship with Saul Bateman. We’ve journeyed on this life together since we were but 13 years old, bonded by a love for all things elaborate and outrageous.
🖤🖤🖤
2.
What an awful time of year this is! — a letter from Philip Larkin
From another Substack
This letter, courtesy of
, has given stockings full of joy each time I read it in preparing this post for you - ironically. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have, and I also include a link below to the original newsletter that has given me this gift.What an awful time of year this is! Just as one is feeling that if one can just hold on, it won’t get any worse, then all this Christmas idiocy bursts upon one like a slavering Niagara of nonsense & completely wrecks one’s entire frame. This means, in terms of my life, making a point of buying about six simple inexpensive presents when there are rather more people about than usual, and going home. No doubt in terms of yours it means seeing your house given over to hoards of mannerless middle-class brats and your good food & drink vanishing into the quacking tooth-equipped jaws of their alleged parents. Yours is the harder course, I can see. On the other hand, mine is happening to me.
Philip Larkin
Letter to Judy Egerton
17th December 1958
3.
Christmas with the Addam’s Family — an episode from the 1964 series
From the Internet
Please enjoy this wonderful episode of The Addams Family, Christmas Special. It's something of a tradition in our house to watch an episode or a movie of the Addams Family over the Christmas period, usually on New Year's Eve, or New Year's Day. Why? Because.
ON CHRISTMAS RITUALS
What are you holiday or solstice rituals?
I love the elf pictures! I have two friends that I still get up to hijinks with that I met as a youth/ young adult. One I've known since we were 11 and we got our 6th grade class kicked out of a planetarium show on a field trip. One I've known since i was 20 and we were two Americans living in Taiwan. Now I'm 46 and all of us have changed so much. But there's something magical about old friends.