No, really, who is the Santa, and who are the critters? And what are they taking turns at?
(And is this one of those “It would be perfectly clear to you if you just had the first clue about popular culture” cases?)
Yes, this appeared on Christmas Sunday. Yes, I know there is a performer named Mariah Carey. Is this what she looks like?
Comics I Don't Understand 
The critters are a groundhog and an Easter bunny, so in a few months it will be “their turn” to be pressed into service as the leads on Groundhog Day and on Easter, and then they will come home exhausted like Mariah (? maybe pun/variant for “Merry,” as in Merry Christmas??) is doing today.
That is Mariah Carey, because she can be ubiquitous at Christmas, depending upon your listening/viewing habits. The critters are the groundhog (of Groundhog Day) and the Easter Bunny. Other than that description and the assumption that it is a reference to their “working” certain holidays, that’s all I have.
And the heading reminds me of one of my favorite short song parodies:
Folks out here, they got a name,
For storm and wind and fire —
The storm is ‘storm,’ the wind is ‘wind,’
And they call the fire ‘fire.’
@ Targuman – “Other than … their “working” certain holidays, that’s all I have…”
That’s good, because that’s all there is.
For those who haven’t heard it, Mariah Carey’s 1994 seasonal hit “All I Want for Christmas is You” is one of the top 10 Christmas hits.
It looks like her. She is the “Queen of Christmas,” here song, “All I want for Christmas is You” is played non-stop all season. So she is exhausted from performing all season and is passing the baton to the next holiday.
It’s hard to believe anyone hasn’t heard it.
Okay, Tom Falco also featured this Six Chix cartoon, and expressed surprise akin to Powers’s that anybody could fail to get it all. https://tomversation.com/2022/12/26/mariah-is-exhausted/
But his surprise is founded on noting that a lot of people were not getting it either, so I will let myself feel a bit vindicated.
And how are the groundhog and the bunny the next two in line in the green room? I guess only MLK beats the groundhog, but before we even get out of February there are Washington, Lincoln, and Cupid (or perhaps St. Valentine himself).
I’m a social recluse who shuts out the world, and even I recognized her right off. I want to know what cave you live in, and is there room for one more?
No room in my cave – sorry. And no, I’ve never heard the song, altho I’ve heard OF it. I play my own Holiday music, mostly ‘New Age’, so you can hardly tell that it really IS Holiday music, and I have it interspersed with my everyday music, so none of it is overwhelming.
@ Mitch – In this comic, Mariah has been awarded the omnipresent attributes of Santa Claus, and the groundhog and Easter bunny have similar powers. In contrast to that, the namesakes of all the other holidays are ordinary, real (dead) people, none of them go visiting all over the world.
I’ve heard of Mariah Carey, but had no idea what she looked like; I’ve vaguely heard of the “Queen of Christmas” moniker and that she had that song that I’d vaguely heard of but never actually heard. I’m quite happy in my cave, thankyouverymuchtoday’spopculture.
When I was employed as a reference librarian I felt some guilt at being out of touch with various aspects of contemporary culture, especially music, but after nine years of retirement the guilt has transformed into smug indifference. . . .
P.S. @ Andréa – I happen to live in a country in which the tune does not get any noticeable airplay, so I’ve neither heard it, nor of it. However, her identity was not necessary to enjoy the comic, since the identities of the two couch potatoes was clear.
Speaking of staying in one’s cave . . .
https://thenib.com/office-gossip-from-my-home-office/
Having worked in an alternative high school library, I was subjected to many pop cultural references, but after 16 years of retirement, I’ve left all that behind.
Even if you recognize the song (as I do) and recognize the attempt to render her (as I do), it’s still kinda weak and I wouldn’t have gotten it without y’all.
There’s a little TV network called CBS had a show last Tuesday..
https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/ORpu3FDfPl5ZERdQwxRarbTl5r0H1A6e/
Thanks Andréa, I miss seeing her cartoons regularly.
Here is a picture of my cat Gemma with a bonus item from the cartoonist
There’s a little TV network called CBS
Oh yeah, aren’t they some sort of offshoot of Paramount Plus? Or is it Peacock?
I thought they were a drugstore? Oh, wait, that’s CVS, not CBS. Well, two out of three isn’t so shabby.
Nobody going to mention that it would all be a lot clearer if the ground hog actually looked like a ground hog, and not some kind of stunted beaver? I had to double take the whole thing, because my initial reading of her talking to a beaver didn’t make much sense; only then did I take in the bunny with the egg, and get where it was going.
It’s funny that sometimes old people complain that they younger generations don’t get their pop culture.
According to the Wikipedia entry on the song “They Call The Wind Maria” Mariah Carey is named after the song!
I grew up with the Kingston Trio rendition of this song, and didn’t know of its origins until reading the Wiki article.
Thanks Grawlix! I also knew the song from the Kingston Trio hungry i version, and was not familiar with the history, in particular that it was a Lerner & Lowe composition!
I had not read that Wikipedia article but oddly had the impression that I had. I guess that’s because I not too long ago was trying to track down some history and lyrics for a different song, also from that album — “Something something the south coast is lonely, you may win at a game at ??Poulong, but the lion still rules the veranda, and the nights there are something something “.
Harve Presnell was the only pro singer in the Paint Your Wagon cast.
larK: A beaver has a large, paddle-like tail. But I had to look twice.
Like many, I couldn’t pick Mariah Carey out of a lineup, nor name any of her songs, but I’m aware of the name as that of a singer, which is enough for the comic.
JJ McCullough recently had a video on his YouTube channel about how most US Christmas songs and traditions either come from Victorian England or postwar US times, with very few newer additions. One thing he mentioned was that Carey’s Christmas 1994 hit was the last major song to make it into the Christmas song canon.
Okay, so we’ve established the identity of the three figures here. It still doesn’t make any sense to me. The mascot for Ground Hog Day is of course a ground hog. The mascot for Easter is a bunny. And the mascot for Christmas is Mariah Carey in a Santa suit? I’m well aware of the song and yes, it does get played a ton. But so do a couple dozen other songs. She has had quite a career singing mostly non-Christmas songs. It could just as easily have been Bruce Springsteen since his version of “Santa Claus is coming to town” is well known. Maybe, as one commentator said, it’s just a weak comic.
I’ve certainly heard the song. I had no idea it was Mariah Carey (in fact, I have no idea what any of her songs are – not something I pay attention to much, who sings what), nor have I found it more ubiquitous than the many many other Christmas pop songs that I hear in stores. At home I listen to my own music – mostly 60s singer/songwriters, some classical, and some more modern folkies – very little pop.
Would the comic have made more sense if it was the standard (Clement Moore) Santa coming in the door? And I also thought the groundhog was a beaver – the buckteeth was enough of a marker that I didn’t look at the tail.
Mariah just broke another streaming record.
https://www.vulture.com/2022/12/mariah-carey-all-i-want-for-christmas-spotify-record.html
“Mariah Carey might not legally be the Queen of Christmas, but her reign over the festive season is undeniable. On December 24, she set yet another record with “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which is already the longest-running holiday No.1 song of all time. The hit track now also boasts the most single-day streams on Spotify’s global chart, having received 21.273 million streams this Christmas Eve. Carey has broken this particular Spotify record four times. …”
No wonder she’s exhausted in this comic. She’s been everywhere.
But, yeah. This comic isn’t the funniest I’ve seen.
It took me a long time to figure out that the beaver was actually a ground hog.
Thanks for reminding me. Now that Christmas is finally over I have to do it all over again buying Groundhog Day presents for everyone. Well, I’m glad I retired from my church job or I’d be rehearsing the choir for the Groundhog Day cantata.
@jjmcgaffney: The joke would have been a lot clearer if it was Santa Claus instead of Mariah Carey, although still not that great.
I’m well aware of the popularity of Mariah’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” — currently in its 10th week as the #1 single in the U.S., spread out over the last four Christmas seasons.
And yet, the cartoonist seems to have skipped a step here. “Okay, I’m going to have various characters representing different holidays living in the same house and complaining about their workloads. I’ll have the Easter Bunny represent Easter, and a groundhog representing Groundhog Day. Who can I get to represent Christmas? Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? An elf? Frosty the Snowman? No, it’s got to be the person who goes around in a red suit with white trim … Mariah Carey.”
Joshua, I’m not sure they’re living in the same house. (Not a big part of your point, I realize,) I think it’s just a backstage area; or “green room” as I mentioned earlier.
Yeah, the tail is why I said “stunted” beaver — it’s generally paddle shaped and beaver like, just way too small and fuzzy. And not really “ground-hog”.
Maria! I’ve just met a wind called Maria…
For several years she was a fixture on the Disney Holiday Parade broadcast, always the last of the acts lip-syncing in front of the castle. This year didn’t spot her, but I was fast-forwarding in search of the actual parade.
I liked Mariah Carey when she first started. Then her music turned into more screeching then singing. I would not have recognized her; would have thought this was a character from the comic talking to two other characters from the comic that were talking animals.
And I didn’t recognize a ground hog. I think Cupid, the cherub, not the god also known as Eros, or maybe baby new year. And the Easter Bunny could have been commenting, so the “furball” response could still be used.
It’s not like a ground hog has to do much on its day. At dawn, it pops its head out of its burrow, then goes back to bed if it sees its shadow. Not sure what it does if it doesn’t see its shadow.
I don’t understand all the complaints about this groundhog’s appearance; I thought the rendition was perfectly acceptable. They vary in color, so the chocolate brown shown here seems to be an acceptable compromise between scientific accuracy and the logistics of comic coloration. While groundhogs walk on all four paws, the sitting position shown here is very typical for when they are eating, or on lookout.
Maybe the “groundhog” is preparing to do double duty impersonating a beaver? Oregon (the beaver state) has its statehood day on February 14.
So, I’m curious now about the “Miriah” pronunciation, where did it come from? And where did it go? Mariah’s parents, even if they did do it as a tribute to the song, felt it necessary to change the spelling. The spelling being “Maria”, what we would now pronounce “Muh-ree-uh”, which is in line with the latin / romance pronunciation, but which apparently in generations past was pronounced Mariah — things that surprised me when I saw written down, like the Black Maria cop cars, or the Wind in the song. So what’s the deal? Is it just inexplicable, like how they used to pronounce “robot” “robit”? (The Goldbergs highlighted that, and now that I’m watching the complete Twilight Zone boxed set, it is very noticeable — people really did pronounce it “row-bit”!) Or is it ignorance and isolation from other languages, which has generally faded away with exposure?
From the Wikipedia entry:
” In the 1941 novel Storm, George Rippey Stewart names the storm that is the protagonist of his story Maria. In 1947, Stewart wrote a new introduction for a reprint of the book and discussed the pronunciation of “Maria”: “The soft Spanish pronunciation is fine for some heroines, but our Maria here is too big for any man to embrace and much too boisterous.” He went on to say, “So put the accent on the second syllable, and pronounce it ‘rye'”. …”
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Call_the_Wind_Maria
Wow, thanks Grawlix! That directly answers my question in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible!
The only thought left, now, is did Stewart invent this pronunciation out of whole cloth, or was it already extant and he was merely saying in this case, use this pronunciation?
larK, as somebody pointed out earlier, there is a term “Black Maria” with the Mariah pronunciation, slang for a police prisoner van; also known as “Paddy Wagon”, though I think that has become a discouraged usage.
Yes, there is an ethnic/national reference in “Paddy Wagon”. But in Boston or New York it would be the police who were thought of as Irish, not so much the arrestees. And thus it was a “Police Wagon” not a “drunk / rowdy Irish lads wagon”.
The Zoidberg character in Futurama also said, “ro-bit”. Even though he was an alien, he had a bit of a Yiddish accent. So with the reference to The Goldbergs, perhaps that’s common in certain accents.
In The Goldbergs, it was the father Murray who pronounced it that way, and he has no ethnic accent (he barely seems Jewish, really), though of course it was an affectation, the actor didn’t really say it that way, though maybe the real Murray Goldberg did; in the Twilight Zone, though I can’t remember the specific actors, these were 1959 McCarthy era actors appearing on Network TV, so very white bread American for the most part, especially in the stories dealing with ro-bits.
(I looked up one episode, The Lonely, but I can’t remember who said “robit” and who didn’t — the cast includes Jack Warden and Ted Knight.)
Hmm… I just read something that makes the case that the “ro-bit” pronunciation is actually the “correct” Czech pronunciation of the word, citing the very same Twilight Zone episodes I’d noticed as examples of Rod Serling being details oriented in making sure everyone used the proper pronunciation. I’m not sure about that, but I do like the idea that initially the word was pronounced like in the Czech it came from before being mangled by the illiterate masses who just pronounced it like it was written……
So Mariah had to go everywhere singing her song. What song will the groundhog sing? I know what song the Easter Bunny would sing, but it’s been decades since I heard “Here Comes Peter Cottontail.” Or maybe he sings the Halleluia Chorus by Handel.
Come to think of it, the groundhog should sing “Pop! Goes The Weasel.”
Google “Groundhog Day carols”.
I know who Mariah Carey is and there is a possibility I might recognize her in a photo/video, but did not recognize her in the cartoon.
I also know that her recording of “All I want for Christmas” is a big deal, but same is somewhere in the back of my head and I associate the song instead with the movie “Love Actually” rather than with Mariah Carey.
I just figured that Santa was female for the comic and used to signify Christmas along with the groundhog and bunny signifying their holidays. (And what about Valentine’s Day before these holidays?)
(Then again – my little village of teddy bear figurines is still not switched to Christmas and the poor bears are still celebrating Easter, so my association with holidays has been off for most of the past year.)
Ms. Carey’s attempt to register a trademark for “Queen of Christmas” was denied.
I know people who say “ROW-bit”. As for the original pronunciation, my dad was fluent in Czech and I seem to recall him saying it was more like “rah-BOT” in the original. He passed in 2006, alas, but I’ve written to some friends of his in Prague who will know, if their email addresses are still valid.
The American-English word “robot” traces ancestry to the Czech word “robot” but is not the same word and thus does not necessarily have the same pronunciation for English speakers. We’re Americans, we take words from other languages and make them our own. Once they’re our words, they’re OUR words.
James: Certainly. Good point, obvious to those of us whose parents were linguists, but not to everyone I’m sure!
Once they’re our words, they’re OUR words.
Very true. But I still try not to say “chaze lounge”.
But do you say “lahn – zhe – RAY”?
But do you say “lahn – zhe – RAY”?
Probably would… if I ever had the occasion to.
“English doesn’t borrow from other languages. It follows them down dark alleys and takes what it wants.”
Well, if we’re going to bring up J. D. Nicoll’s saying, I insist on a near version (not sure if the exact one would cause a problem with the filter):
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse [lady of the evening]. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.