I had heard of The Prairie Home Companion, and Garrison Keillor, but I had only seen the movie trailer and wasn't interested, but I thought that the radio show had the popularity was proportional to Americans that Stewart McLean and the Vinyl Cafe held in Canadians. So when I saw the Christmas shelves still standing in the library, after I had finished celebrating the twelve days of Christmas, and saw this red, green, and gold gem called A Christmas Blizzard, I had to pick it up. It did not disappoint.
This is a quirky story of a privileged man who has a crazy compulsion that he avoids by escaping to his second home in Hawaii, but he finds himself flying a Christmas to his home of North Dakota to say goodbye to a dying uncle, where he gets predictably snowed in. Escaping his crazy family in an ice shack, he hallucinates his way to mental health. It was a perfectly exaggerated sweet Christmas story.
Small town wisdom, page 137: "Man's got to live his own life and not somebody else's... That's the whole problem with marriage. Trying to maintain your course and not get sucked into the gravitational field of someone else."
Despite the exaggeration, some truths, page 152: "You are the benefactor of great kindness. And you have no idea how much goodness is lavished on the world by invisible hands. Small selfless deeds engender tremendous force againts the darker powers. Great kindness pervades this world, struggling against pernicious selfishness and vulgar narcissism and the vicious streak that is smeared across each human heart- great bounding goodness is rampant and none of it is wasted. No, these small gifts of goodness - this is what saves the soul of man from despair, and that is what preserves humanity from the long fall from the precipice into the abyss."
No comments:
Post a Comment