Sooo many people put this on Must Read and Annual Holiday Tradition lists, so I was excited to finally get my hands on it. Unfortunately I found most of the vignettes to be at best mean spirited, at worst pretty offensive. This is similar to how I felt about the last DS book I read. But for whatever reason, I’m still not ready to give up on him yet.

Mildly entertaining at times.

A spotted child visited Santa, climbed up on his lap, and expressed a wish to recover from chicken pox. Santa leapt up.

David Sedaris' collection of essays partly set in winter or around the holiday season, partly also loosely connected to other holidays like Easter, was short and a rather quick read, but not my kind of humour most of the time. Apparently it's his signature style to exaggerate wildly and to not be PC (I would call it offensive and insensitive), which is just not for me.

I could've (should've?) known better. At uni, I read a few of his essays from the collection Me Talk Pretty One Day which I disliked, finding his observations and descriptions of people insulting and just not funny (call me a party pooper alright). But since I love everything Christmassy, the cover and the concept of the introductory piece, “SantaLand Diary”, made me buy the book.
I liked a few stories and parts of others, but overall I wasn't impressed and more often left irritated.
The first essay, also being the longest and thus the main one of the bunch, is Sedaris' cynical and acerbic account of his experience of working as an elf at Macy's department store in the weeks leading up to Christmas. This story I found mostly amusing. Apart from blundering bits like “These people were profoundly retarded. They were rolling their eyes and wagging their tongues and staggering toward Santa.”, I enjoyed the author's account of grumpy Santas, bewildered foreign tourists, pestering 'elves' chatting up moms waiting in line for Santa, and perfectionist parents trying to get the perfect holiday photo:

Vanity and Damascus, look over here, no, look here.”
“Santa, can you put your arm around Amy and shake hands with Paul at the same time?”
“That's good. That's nice.”
I have seen parents sit their child upon Santa's lap and immediately proceed to groom: combing hair, arranging a hemline, straightening a necktie. I saw a parent spray their child's hair, Santa treated as though he were a false prop made of cement, turning his head and wincing as the hair spray stung his eyes.

But already in this story it became apparent to me that Sedaris often goes overboard with his essays to be entertaining and thus makes it too implausible for me to believe. I got rather annoyed by his over the top style.

Admittedly, the exasperated and appalled article about some grade schoolers' Christmas plays, “Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol”, had me chuckling a lot, since I too consider those productions dull at best and traumatising at worst:

To those of you who enjoy the comfort of a nice set of thumbscrews, allow me to recommend any of the crucifying holiday plays and pageants currently eliciting screams of mercy from within the confines of our local elemantary and middle schools. I will, no doubt, be taken to task for criticizing the work of children but, as any pathologist will agree, if there's cancer it's best to treat it as early as possible.

I found fat-shaming an on-stage kid offending, though (“The false beard tended to muffle his speech, but they could hear his chafing thighs all the way to the North Pole.”), but, well, I guess, it was the 1990s?

This book has been described as being a collection of essays, which I found puzzling, because obviously some of the pieces were short stories (you don't even have to look as far as to the last one about speaking farm animals doing Secret Santa). This confused me a bit when reading. But even if they were labelled as fictive stories, I still would have had problems with the tone and exaggerated style.

I never want to be a Macy’s Elf

In case you aren't aware . . . .

n  n

Yep. My Christmas situation has escalated to the point where every year when the clocks strikes 12:01 on November 1st I channel my inner Linda Belcher and am ready to get my freak tree-trim on. Along with the dragging, carrying, yanking, pulling, swearing and crying that goes with getting my hoard from the basement to the various areas of my house also comes the annual re-listen to my Darling David telling me tales of Christmases past. The opinions written in my original review below still stand, but I can't imagine a time when I won't have this on audio while I decorate . . . .

n  n

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

If you follow my reading, you’re probably wondering what the hell could have happened to make me rate a Sedaris selection less than every Star. Well, lemma tell ya.

Although I was aware that this is a collection of items pulled from other Sedaris books, many may not so it will appear to be a money grab . . . which it totally is. I don’t really care, though, since (1) I got it from the library so it cost me zero dollars and (2) David Sedaris could take a dump on paper, bind it up, and I’d still buy a copy so I could really give a rip whether this was material I was already familiar with.

I put a hold on the audio version of Holidays On Ice in order to hopefully keep me in the Christmas spirit. You see, usually around the week before Thanksgiving I look a little something like this . . . . .

n  n

I want to put Christmas trees in every room of the house and bake and place myself firmly on The Good List. But then December rolls around and I am faced with the daunting task of shopping combined with the busiest time of year at work and I completely lose my mojo and just want to hibernate until the new year. I thought listening to David would at least help me fake it ‘til I make it à la Clark Griswold . . . .

n  n

And for the most part it did. David’s tales of his experiences as a “Little Elf” in the “Santaland Diaries” are not to be missed, and the ever present “Six to Eight Black Men” never gets less funny. The problem this time was the inclusion of some fictional shorts in addition to the riotous autobiographical entries. To be fair, even some of them started out funny. Sadly, it seems David doesn’t know when to stop when it comes to fictional works and takes the joke to the point of it being the literary equivalent of a beaten dead horse. Still, those “meh” selections can easily be skipped so you can get to the real gems like those mentioned above, or another favorite of mine: Jesus Shaves. You can read that essay for free HERE or take a listen/look HERE.

Maybe I’m just suffering from Christmas fatigue, but I just don’t find this very funny. The first story about Sedaris’ time as a Christmas elf at Macy’s is mildly funny.

One nice thing is that the paperback version I have is small, approximately 5 x 7” and will fit nicely in an adult’s Christmas stocking. Elves believe in recycling.

I only found one of these stories to be really funny. The others were just the kind of humour that gets on my nerves.

I finished this a few days ago, and I already can't remember all that I wanted to say about this collection of short stories and essays by David Sedaris. I was not familiar with David Sedaris when I got this audio book. I think I must have picked it up on sale last year at some point, and because I'm a fan of all things Christmas I thought I'd give it a go. My two star rating probably makes it seem like I didn't really enjoy listening to this, but that's not exactly true. It was okay. There were some stories I laughed out loud for. There were several where I knew that I was supposed to be laughing out loud, but it didn't quite hit me as funny enough for that. And then there was one that I'm still scratching my head about. There is this genre of comedy/jokes that ... well, I don't even know how to describe it ... I guess it is something so over the top and inappropriate that the humor is that it is absolutely nothing that anyone would joke about. Seriously, I can't describe it. It's not like stupid middle school humor where emerging adolescents giggle over talking about sex jokes or stuff like that, but maybe it's more of the adult version of that. I hesitate to say more because I seriously am not sure that I totally understood what I was listening to. I'm going to share it with my daughter and son-in-law to see if this short story was saying what I thought I was hearing. So, anyway ... the verdicts out on that one.

Here's what I'll say ... I can see why there are lots of people out there who are David Sedaris fans. I wonder how old some of these stories are because he uses words like "retarded" pretty liberally in some of these stories, and that is highly inappropriate these days. It was jarring to hear it spoken so casually in a way it was when I was in school. It made me think some of these stories must have been written in the 70s and 80s and not more recently. I couldn't quite get into them enough to find it all that enjoyable, but there were some moments of keen social commentary and touching humor to keep me engaged until the end. Like I say ... two stars. It was okay.

It's been a while since I read David Sedaris, and I remember really liking 'Me Talk Pretty One Day' and 'Naked,' so I figured, hey, it's the holidays, perfect time to crack open this one, right? I couldn't have been more wrong. Maybe Sedaris grew and changed a bit as he got older, or maybe it's me who has grown and changed, but I hated this book. It was mean-spirited and downright cruel multiple times in the early going, and as the parent of a special needs child, I took great offense to his liberal use of slurs against developmentally challenged people.

And look, I get it, it was written a long time ago, cultural attitudes have shifted, fine. But that doesn't make it okay or enjoyable to read. I'm not suddenly going to write off David Sedaris forever, but I definitely won't go back to the well of his older stuff, and this one is going in the trash where it belongs.

It is truly difficult to overstate just how bad this collection of stories is. I've heard the name David Sedaris and long found the titles of his short story collections to be, well, strange. I really should have stopped at the titles.

This was an Audible Daily Deal just the other day. It was two bucks or something, and I can safely say that that's the worst two bucks or something I've ever spent. I do not exaggerate.

A thief would have more right to my two dollars than David Sedaris' pathetic collection of truly awful short stories. To be fair, I only listened to one of them all the way through, "Santa Land", and then listened to the first five minutes or so of a handful of others. Even that was too much time spent.

This is one of those books that really does make me look through the positive reviews and wonder, "what was George H. smoking when he rated this a five? Really George?"

Yes, a sense of humor is a very personal, even peculiar, thing. After all, there are people out there who find killing people funny. There are other, possibly wackier, people who find David Sedaris funny.

But who are they? One of these stories, "Six to eight black men", sounds like it was recorded in front of an audience. And, yes, people are actually heard ... laughing. Like, several people. What nutty convention had they all just come from?

But really, if you are one of the people who find David Sedaris especially funny, I'd love to hear from you. People are fascinating particularly because they are such odd creatures. My guess is that Sedaris fans are among the oddest.

me when the ONLY job Indeed has recommended to me is as a Santa despite the 50k of debt I acquired to get a degree

4.5/5 - David Sedaris' take on the holidays, need I say more???