Rantmas: The Return of Slim Tinsel

Adored by some, acclaimed by even less, eight years ago The Rant heroically completed The Twelve Days of Rantmas at great risk to our personal well-being and national eggnog supplies. Full disclosure: we abandoned the nog around day eight for an IV drip delivering a steady stream of rye old-fashioneds. That’s how much The Rant cares about delivering holiday magic. You can see the inspirational story in the soon-to-be Hallmark Holiday classic, Jingle Soused. Paul Rudd plays all the parts in a thespian tour-de-force, including the charming widow that wrings the hooch from his soul by delivering the immortal line, “My love is 100 proof.” We’ll pause and let you gather your emotions.

So much has changed since then: a pandemic that reset large swaths of American brains to Permanent Crazy; a mania for electing the oldest, whitest, most senile President available (get ready for your moment Mitch McConnell. Mitch? Can you hear us, Mitch!¹); the creation of Wicked movies that are also eight years long. They should rename the song, “Defying Brevity.”²

The Rant assumed we had left Rantmas and rehab behind forever, but then on our annual trip to Vegas for Thanksgving³ we beheld the wondrous site of rapturous fans leaving the Mariah Carey: Christmastime in Las Vegas show. So joyful, so dressed in their Christmas best, so gay.

While The Rant appreciates Carey’s stunning voice, other than “All I Want for Christmas is You,” the greatest holiday song ever recorded after Nat King Coles’ version of “The Christmas Song,”⁴ we never found the Carey oeuvre that compelling. But here’s what we do find endlessly compelling: Carey’s off-kilter take on being a pop icon. Her fans are known as Lambily, a mash-up of Lambs and Family, often just shortened to Lambs. This immediately makes her the Jeff Goldblum of Divadom. Quirky yet endearing, fostering intense devotion or a baffled “I don’t get it.” Like all divas, she finds showing up for her performances strictly optional, but when she does some bizarre malfunction seems to follow, including her child, Moroccan (of course she has a child named Moroccan), putting a bag over head during a performance. I’m still convinced her baffling appearance on New Year’s Rockin’ Eve⁵ in 2016 was an elaborately staged piece of the Theater of the Absurd in homage to Samuel Beckett.

As The Rant watched the jubilant throngs, we thought, if Mariah can squeeze herself into those fur-trimmed costumes and show up nearly half the time to warm the hearts of her Lambily, who is The Rant to deny the world a little holiday cheer? So Rantmas is back, baby. And like all holiday entertainment, we’ll feature the classics with new material thrown in as we desperately attempt to kindle an evergreen holiday cash cow. Wish us luck Mel.

1. The Rant has already trademarked the term, The Mitch Twitch, the subtle neurological flinch that will soon control the nuclear arsenal. Get those Ts and hoodies now
2. Calm down Ariana fangirls. Fun fact: Cynthia Erivo likes to read while getting tattoos. We’ll spare you the 362 riffs on Ink we formulated upon learning this information
3. Look, eating gourmet food, watching NHL hockey on The Strip, and listening to other families’ dysfunctional outbursts over the noise of slot machines is a Rant bespoke vacation without the American Express Black Card fees. Favorite moment: A huge family gathered at the Valet stand of a casino. Daughter: “What the plan? I’m drunk.” Utterly defeated Father: “We know.” It was two in the afternoon. Viva Las Vegas!
4. You want to fight about it, meet us at the grave of Mel Torme any time, any day. If you don’t know who Torme is, you’ve already lost
5. For legal purposes, we are required to give the official title of the show, Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest and Featuring Faded Pop Stars Realizing During their Performance that this Truly is the Nadir of their Career! It would all be so sad but the exclamation point at the ends saves it from despair. Thanks punctuation!