A Thanksgiving Salmonel-Lu Outbreak: Viva La Diva's Christmas Carol
On food safety, A Diva's Christmas Carol, and making new holiday traditions
I love the holiday season more than almost anything. I spend all year looking forward to a relatively short twelve-week stretch that I always think will be a neat little denouement, wrapping all the muck of the prior ten months up with a festive little bow. Historically, it has never been that easy. But if there’s one thing I’m aptly capable of, it’s shoving the cares and concerns that trouble me for most of the year to the back of my head in favor of immersing myself in the holiday merriment, the festivity, the time with family, and the traditions I’ve kept since I was a kid. But one thing I’ve found that I look forward to more and more with each passing year is the opportunity to be nosy. I’m a huge snoop, always have been. Not necessarily because I’m looking for anything in particular, but because I just love filling in the details of other people. I like to see how they’re living, what they’re eating, what they act like with family, how they celebrate in intimate gatherings. It’s like people-watching through social media. So, in a year when I could barely do any of the casual surveillance I’m used to doing on subways (I haven’t been on NYC public transit since March), I relished the opportunity to see how people would be spending Thanksgiving – even if the celebrations were smaller than usual I figured I’d have enough to stick my big Norwegian nose into.
But the powers that be blessed me with a gift, the magnitude of which I could have never expected and would have never even thought to ask for. The night before Thanksgiving, while tapping through Instagram stories, I stopped dead in my tracks upon seeing Real Housewives of New York OG, bestselling author, and Grammy-snubbed songstress Countess LuAnn DeLesseps with her hands deep in an uncooked turkey, the long sleeves of her black cashmere turtleneck grazing the bird’s raw skin. At this moment, I knew not only that there is a God but that I’m their favorite. I had been blessed with something special.
“Certainly, she’ll realize what’s happening and pause to wash her hands and push her sleeves up,” I told myself. After all, any logical person would realize their sleeve had brushed against uncooked meat and immediately imagine all of the thousands of levels of bacteria that would reside on the fibers of the clothes. And you know, I’m no stranger to narrowly avoiding a rolled-up sleeve coming undone while cooking, myself. But time continued to pass in 15-second increments, and it seemed Luann was completely unfazed. It felt strange to see this from a woman who wrote a book on etiquette and manners, but I didn’t dare complain. Instead, I watched in horror as Luann doubled down on her poultry faux pas. After cleaning her holiday bird, Lu proceeded to wrap it in a brine bag and wheel out a cooler. “Oh no,” I said breathlessly. I looked on, aghast, as Luann told whatever unlucky personal assistant filming her that there wasn’t enough space in the fridge in her kitchen, so her genius, MacGyver-esque solution was to pack the turkey loosely in its brine bag, shove it haphazardly in a cramped cooler, and leave it outside overnight. As if the poor bird hadn’t suffered enough already, there was another problem at foot: it was going to be in the high 50s (that’s about 15 degrees Celsius) overnight in Sag Harbor, where Luann lives when she isn’t filming RHONY. It wouldn’t take an expert to deduce that the ice in the cooler would surely melt in that kind of balmy weather, and what Luann would be left with was spoiled meat and a Thanksgiving she wouldn’t soon forget.
I closed my phone and said a prayer for Luann’s poor quarantine pod. But the horrors weren’t over.
While making my own perfectly-prepared Thanksgiving meal the next day, my boyfriend updated me on the situation: Luann had taken the turkey and removed it from its temperate prison. And now, while still raw, Lu was proceeding to stuff the bird before it went in the oven to cook, something that experts strongly recommend against unless you can be sure all proper food safety precautions are in place. With the odds already against her after leaving her food in the yard all night like a serial killer abandoning a project halfway through, things weren’t looking good for Ol’ Lulu. There was nothing I could do, Brooklyn is 100 miles away from Sag Harbor, nevermind the fact that Luann and I don’t know each other personally. I could have tried to frantically DM her to stop her before it was too late, but you know what? Far be it from me to take something away from someone in a year where we have all had so much taken away from us already. It’s like that one Tame Impala song says, “let it happen.” Luckily, I think it all turned out alright. Does this look like the faces of three people slowly realizing they’re experiencing a foodborne illness as they take holiday photos to you?
This week, as I was reflecting on a Thanksgiving passed and wondering what had become of the woman whose breathy baritone was featured on the forgotten hit of 2020, “Viva La Diva,” I began to think about another infamous holiday Diva who remains firmly lodged in my prefrontal cortex for eight weeks a year. I’m speaking, of course, of Vanessa Williams in the 2000 made-for-VH1 film A Diva’s Christmas Carol.
I’ll never forget the moment I was first introduced to this timeless classic. While visiting my friend Gina in Philadelphia in 2013, we had a Halloween party where I got rip-roaring drunk. The next day, Gina and her roommate made us pancakes and insisted that we all watch a film that they told me would “change my life.” Understatement of the fucking century. Within minutes of pressing play on the film on YouTube, where it has lived comfortably for years without copyright strike, I felt any remaining hangover start to lift. By the time Vanessa Williams chokes on fake plastic snow in the opening credits, it had dissipated entirely.
A few minutes later I had a galaxy brain revelation upon realizing that our main character, the infamous miser who hates Christmas because it gets in the way of making money, had been updated in this modern iteration to a Whitney-like pop star named Ebony. Scrooge. It was possibly one of the single greatest decisions in filmmaking history. I can imagine what it was like when they cracked that in the writer’s room: hooting and hollering, bottles of champagne popped, the knowledge that no matter how the screenplay progressed from that point that they had already managed to unlock something so powerful that this film would be left behind centuries after humans no longer walk the earth. The rational part of my brain knows that Ebony’s character’s name was surely already a lock when the film was pitched, but Christmas is about believing in magic and true good in the world, and that’s what I want to do here.
The movie itself is a revelation. “Masterpiece of cinema” would be putting it lightly. And I know you’re reading this right now thinking that this is, to some degree, a joke. And it is. But also it’s not. AT ALL. A Diva’s Christmas Carol is fucking packed to the brim with absolutely brilliant updated twists on Dickens’ classic tale and a set of perfectly-dated cultural references from 2000 that only get more delicious as they’re further removed from relevance with each passing year. I cannot give you too many spoilers, because if you haven’t seen this movie I implore you to watch it as soon as possible, but what I can tell you is that the Ghost of Christmas Future is just simply a premonition of a posthumous VH1: Behind The Music special documenting how much better the world would be without Ebony Scrooge after her untimely demise. And if you weren’t convinced yet, here’s a kicker: Ghost of Christmas Past? Kathy fucking Griffin. And the Jacob Marley character? Played by TLC’s Chili and now called Marli Jacob, a former bandmate of Ebony’s. Before her death, their girl group had a number one hit called “Heartquake,” which is a dastardly little earworm that always stays in my head long past New Year’s.
Watching A Diva’s Christmas Carol has been an annual tradition for me since 2013. This will be my seventh year with it, and each year it just seems to get better. I love looking forward to it and settling into its cozy comforts, but I love the opportunity to show it to others even more. As someone who has celebrated Christmas for two months straight every year for their entire life, I thought my holiday traditions were pretty set by the time I left my childhood home in North Dakota and moved to New York. But when I saw this beautifully insane VH1 film, I knew instantly it would be in my life until I die. Like its brilliance was passed onto me, I have felt the need to pass it onto others. And now you have it if you didn’t already and can do the same.
That’s a thing about this year – among all the horror and pain of 2020, I’ve found it particularly restoring to revel in the beauty of little things whenever possible. This is the first Christmas since I left home that I won’t be returning to celebrate my favorite holiday with my family. After a year of separation from them, multiple major losses of those close to me, months spent stuck in my apartment, and post-college plans not going as I had hoped, not having the joy of coming together was getting me down. But as I stood in my kitchen last week simultaneously making six family-sized dishes for two people and thinking about A Diva’s Christmas Carol, I remembered that I would have never had this seven-year tradition if it weren’t for life taking me out of my comfort zone, far from my family, and to new friends and possibilities.
We’re all doing things differently this holiday season. We’re separated from our loved ones, confined in our homes, and counting every penny. So my advice to you is this: watch A Diva’s Christmas Carol (it’s readily available if you just click here) and bathe in its mind-bending cleverness and laughable stupidity. Find anything you can to hold onto that will give you a much-needed laugh. Be thankful you weren’t in Luann’s quarantine pod at Thanksgiving, eating the same turkey that deer had nipped at overnight when they managed to open the Igloo cooler with their noses. And with that mix of love, laughter, and reflection, we can make it through the final month of the year together.
Thank you for being here.
Your support for this newsletter mean the world to me. I haven’t felt this passionate about something all year. If you thought the first edition would be anything other than something festive, you don’t know me! I am that Rich Juzwiak compilation of Mariah Carey being festive. If you have any ideas, prompts, or recommendations for me to cover that you’d like to send my way, please do! You can email me at cspilde@gmail.com or reach me on Instagram or Twitter. On Monday the letter for paid subscribers will be going out, where I’ll be talking about the fuckability of David Fincher’s leading men, this year’s Christmas music selections, and rating the events of the last week from top shelf to low brow. If you can’t currently afford a paid subscription but would like free access to the premium letter for three months, please email me! I’d love to get it to you.
Thanks again for reading this. I love you. Have a great weekend and I’ll see you Monday.