GoneTrending

Change comes in many forms. We can protest, we can vote, we can call out our racist relatives in the middle of holiday meals, and we can consciously use our dollars to support BIPOC businesses. Because it’s easy to say you want to be part of fixing the racial wealth and equity gaps but it’s another thing to be that change by seeking out Black-owned businesses. Especially when mega-corporations are ready to prey on our desire for convenience and will have their house brand hot sauce dropped via drone 45 minutes after you click.

So let’s make a collective resolution. 2022 is the year we’re going to make real effort to shop ethically and in line with our values. Not as a short-term fix but as part of a bigger, more inclusive mindset. Or, as Indy Officinalis wrote in her essay to kick this series off, “I hope that supporting Black-owned businesses won’t be thought of as a trend born of guilt or even a temporary solution to a centuries-long problem, but rather a continued celebration of the Black community.”

In that spirit, here are some of our favorite Black-owned food brands to support now and into 2022. You’ll be glad you did when you taste these flavor-rich gems!

LilaLue Sweets

Named after Nashville-based baker Ashley Bouknight’s grandmother and uncle, LilaLue Sweets are based on old family recipes and infused with whiskey to honor her grandmother’s legacy. Born in rural South Carolina in 1917, Lila worked as a cook at the University of South Carolina during the week, and on the weekend, sold baked goods and moonshine whiskey to support her family. You can order Bouknight’s insanely delicious baked goods — like Harvest Spice Cake and Whiskey snickerdoodles (made with premium, small-batch whiskey) — and pretend you, too, are as cool as her grandmother (just remember you’re not though — cause she’s verrrrrry cool).

Shaquanda Will Feed You

A Black and queer-owned brand, Shaquanda’s hot pepper sauce was developed as part of a performance by creator Andre’s drag alter ego Shaquanda CoCa Mulatta. And people loved the spicy sauce, made with fresh ingredients, so much during the show — that a business was born. Now, there are several different flavors of Shaquanda’s Harlem-made hot sauce that you can order. So do it and be, as Andre says, the queen of your kitchen.

The Parker House Sausage Company

Parker House Sausage started in 1919 when Judge H. Parker came from Tennessee up to Chicago to sell sausages using his mother’s recipe door to door. The business may have started off small but it grew to become the first African-American-owned and operated meat processing plant in the midwest. And it’s still Black and family-owned — making Parker House one of the oldest Black-owned businesses in Chicago.

That’s amazing by itself. But there’s a reason this brand has thrived for so long. The hot links — which are incredible.

BCakeNY

Started in Brooklyn by Miriam Milord, BCakeNy does incredible custom cakes (and other baked goods) that are truly works of art. They can basically turn anything into a gorgeous million-dollar-looking cake, and as such, have a robust celebrity clientele that includes Jay-Z, Rihanna, and Cardi B. But even if you’re not rich and famous (but also, why aren’t you? Get on that.), you can buy their yummy cake jars, cookies, and a couple of stunning signature cakes shipped right to you.

EssieSpice

Essie Bartels fell in love with spice while watching her mother cook in her kitchen in Ghana and has since traveled the world coming up with concoctions that blend West-African cooking with flavors from all over the globe. Her signature sauces and spices at EssieSpice are mind-blowingly good (try the coco-for-garlic!) and are sold on her website.

Zach & Zoe Sweet Bee Farm Honey

This New Jersey-based honey brand is a family business — started by Summer and Kam Johnson when they were looking for natural remedies for their son who was suffering from severe allergies. In their quest, they found honey helped him a great deal. Then they fell in love with bee-keeping themselves — producing their own brand of pure, raw honey without pesticides or additives. The result is wonderfully delectable honey with flavors like lavender, pumpkin spice, and blueberry.

Zach and Zoe honey is so good that last year they landed on Oprah’s list of favorite things. So you better go get some. You know what Oprah does if she shows up on Christmas morn and you haven’t gotten all the favorite things. She won’t be pleased with you.

Phillip Ashley Chocolates

Called the real-life Willy Wonka, Phillip Ashley Rix is known for his gorgeous and highly imaginative chocolate designs (and not for luring children into his factory to turn them into blueberries…we think…). These candies are art meets chocolate and the Memphis-based Phillip Ashley Chocolates are as delicious as they are beautiful. Plus, these have been served at the Emmy’s, Oscar’s, AND Grammy’s — so look, this might be your best and only chance to EGOT and we think you should take it.

EXAU Olive oil

This absolutely perfect olive oil was founded by husband and wife team Skyler Mapes and Giuseppe Morisani when Giuseppe, who is a 3rd generation Calabrian olive oil producer, came to the U.S. and was shocked to see that Calabrian olive oil, while a huge part of the olive oil industry in Italy, was really hard to find in the U.S. Mapes saw a gap in the market (and also fell in love with the taste and intricacies of olive oil production) which led to the founding of Exau. A company bringing the good word of Calabrian olive oil to the people. So far, they’ve been wildly successful. And Mapes, as one of the few women of color in the industry, is busting open a few doors in the process.

Vicky Cakes

This fluffy, vegan pancake mix company was created in 2019 by Christian Sargent based on her mother’s recipe. People can’t stop raving about how it creates the perfect pancake and we agree — it’s absolutely delicious (and we’re pancake lovers!). You can find Vicky Cakes’ mix in some grocery stores, but they also offer it online. And if you can find it, snap it up — they sell out quickly!

AubSauce

This artisanal barbecue sauce company by wedding dress designer turned barbecue sauce master, Aubrey Lenyard, started like many great food stories do. With a family-instilled love of cooking and a sauce that people kept telling him he just had to try to sell. So he started with a Kickstarter campaign and now has an award-winning small-batch bbq sauce, AubSauce, that includes innovative flavors like Spicy Peach, Strawberry Balsamic, and Rosemary. It’s a must-try for those who want to up their food game.

It’s been quite an interesting few years for Grimes. Of course, she dropped her fifth album, Miss Anthropocene, but attention was distracted from her music releases by a chaotic, much-frowned-upon-by-fans relationship with tech billionaire Elon Musk. Elon and Grimes even had a child together during the course of their partnership, but have since reportedly split. Her comments about his hair in Musk’s Time‘s Person Of The Year article seemed nice enough, but her latest song tells a different story.

Now that they’ve parted ways, Grimes is back to writing music, dropping “Love” in September, and her latest song, “Player Of Games,” which seems to include at least a few lines that fans think are be about Musk. Today, she’s shared the video, and it definitely doubles down on those assumptions. It begins with a naked Grimes grasping onto a faceless knight in armor, and the pair end up facing off over a chess game, and eventually battling with glowing neon swords. Check out the visual up top, and keep an ear out for more from Grimes because she’s definitely launching a new era. She’s previously declared her most recent work as some of the best she’s ever done, and thinks her new album will be her greatest yet.

Seth Rogen severed his personal and professional relationship with James Franco after his Freaks and Geeks co-star was accused of sexual misconduct in 2018 by five women, four of whom were his students. “What I can say is that I despise abuse and harassment and I would never cover or conceal the actions of someone doing it, or knowingly put someone in a situation where they were around someone like that,” he said, adding, “I also look back to that interview in 2018 where I comment that I would keep working with James, and the truth is that I have not and I do not plan to right now.”

Franco spoke about the allegations during an interview on SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Podcast this week. “Over the course of my teaching, I did sleep with students, and that was wrong. But like I said, it’s not why I started the school and I wasn’t the person that selected the people to be in the class. So it wasn’t a ‘master plan’ on my part. But yes, there were certain instances where, you know what, I was in a consensual thing with a student and I shouldn’t have been,” he said. Franco also discussed Rogen’s comments:

“I just want to say, I absolutely love Seth Rogen. I love Seth Rogen. I worked with him for 20 years and we didn’t have one fight. For 20 years, not one fight. He was my absolute closest work friend, collaborator. We just gelled… What he said is true. We aren’t working together right now and we don’t have any plans to work together. Of course, it was hurtful in context, but I get it, you know, he had to answer for me because I was silent.”

Franco paid $2.2 million to settle the class action suit against him. “While Defendants continue to deny the allegations in the Complaint, they acknowledge that Plaintiffs have raised important issues; and all parties strongly believe that now is a critical time to focus on addressing the mistreatment of women in Hollywood,” the statement read.

You can listen to a portion of the podcast above.

(Via People)

It’s the holiday season, which means there are a whole bunch of movies that don’t get a lot of love 50 weeks out of the year that will show up on TV non-stop for a few weeks. Unless you like to watch Christmas Vacation in August or something (which is totally fine!), saving Christmas-themed movies for this time of year is a fun way to kill some time as we count down the final days of the year.

The fine folks at TNT decided to lean into this with the help of Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inductee Shaquille O’Neal. A guy who knows a thing or two about being in movies, Shaq recreated some famous scenes from a handful of Christmas movies: Elf, Christmas Vacation, A Christmas Story, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Love Actually, and Home Alone.

All of these are pretty good — the animated Shaq dancing to “Linus and Lucy” with the rest of the Peanuts is terrific, as is Shaq filling in for Keira Knightley during the cards on the doorstep scene from Love Actually, complete with a bunch of photoshopped dialogue on the cards that lead to Andrew Lincoln thanking Shaq for a bunch of things he endorsed. Let’s get Shaq singing some Christmas songs next.

After exciting fans with a series of live performances at Brooklyn Steel, a significant underplay for the band, LCD Soundsystem had to bring that run to a halt due to the spread of Covid-19’s new variant, Omicron. Hey, they tried to soldier on despite the risk due to fans traveling out of state for the special shows, but in the end, canceling was the right decision. So disappointed fans might be happy to remember that the band also partnered with Amazon Music, Eric Wareheim, and Macaulay Culkin for an upcoming holiday special, The LCD Soundsystem Holiday Special.

The sitcom portion of the Christmas special, dubbed All My Friends (because of course), debuts on Amazon Prime tonight, December 22, at 9 PM EST. After that brief show, which was directed by Wareheim and stars him as James Murphy, Christine Ko as Nancy Whang, Macaulay Culkin as Pat Mahoney, and cameos from Aparna Nancherla, Rex Lee, and a puppet called Korey (after synth player Korey Richey), the band will be performing a career-spanning set with hits from their entire catalogue. In advance of tonight’s debut, the band has shared a small clip from the performance section of the special, their rendition of the song “Tonite.” Check it out up above, and make sure to tune in, ahem, tonite.

If you’re drinking an IPA craft beer right now, you have Ken Grossman to thank. Grossman and Paul Camusi founded Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. back in 1979 in Chico, California. From a small 3,000 sq. ft. warehouse, they fired the first shots that began the modern craft beer revolution. And one of the most resounding volleys in that early era was a beer so outside of the box that people didn’t really get it at the time: Celebration IPA.

Celebration IPA was first sent out into the world in 1981, just in time for the holiday season. The dry-hopped IPA was such an aberration that Grossman and Camusi had to spend a fair amount promising beer drinkers that, yes, malty ales were allowed to be hoppy too. Fast-forward 40 years and the idea of convincing a beer drinker to drink a hoppy IPA — in any season or form — almost sounds like a joke, thanks to the over-abundance of the style in multiple forms. It wasn’t always that way, though, and Grossman still remembers the effort it took to turn the tide.

With the holidays approaching, we were lucky enough to catch up with Grossman over the phone to talk about his iconic holiday IPA, the history of Sierra Nevada, sourcing hops, and finding a true balance between the hoppiest and maltiness of ales. It’s an illuminating conversation about one of America’s most iconic holiday brews ever.

Let’s go all the way back to when you started making Celebration IPA. What was your instinct to create a holiday-themed beer way back in 1981?

I had a homebrew shop in the mid-’70s, and I started buying hops directly from Yakima Valley farmers back then. Even as a homebrewer, I made a lot of beers that were dry-hopped, that were more intensely flavored. When we were designing our first commercial beers [at Sierra Nevada], which ended up being Pale Ale, Porter, and the Stout, we also played around with an IPA. We had old recipes from our test batches going back into the late ’70s.

So when we decided to open Sierra Nevada, we made the decision that people are probably not quite ready for a fairly intensely hoppy, multi-dry-hopped beer as our main offering. So we decided to do it the following year.

Okay, wow. It was such a different world.

I made a little less than 100 cases of beer for our first year for Celebration I have distinct memories of actually going and finding the hops I wanted to use in that beer. I picked out a specific lot from a baby Cascade field. In the United States, or at least in the Yakima Valley, you could plant the vines and get a partial crop your first year. And then, normally, the second year you’d get 100 percent of the crop. That’s not the case in many hop-growing regions. Even a little further south in Oregon, the first year after they plant, they don’t harvest those hops.

But at the first-year mark, the baby field of Cascades just smell beautiful and they were tight, little cones just packed full of lupulin. It seemed like really a great hop to feature in a dry-hopped beer.

Back in those days, we didn’t make a lot of beer. I bought one bale of this very special lot of hops and then used that to dry hop the Celebration Ale.

What’s fascinating to me is that back when you were doing this, there were really only the old-school European winter warmers that were either amber ales or dark German lagers or Belgian beers layered with winter spices. IPAs were a complete outlier. Was there ever a thought like, “Well, maybe we can layer in some of those more classic holiday winter warmer flavors” or were you focused solely on getting the most out of the hops that you could?

At that time, I did go and sample all the Christmas beers that I could get my hands on, which ranged from the ones you mentioned — Belgium, some German, and certainly Fritz Maytag at Anchor had started brewing his series, which was spiced. After that, we made the decision that we wanted to really focus on hops. So our decision was “Let’s not use any additional herbs and spices. Let’s really find hops that could deliver really unique and interesting flavors and couple that with malts that were toasted and roasted to sort of balance that hoppiness.”

Celebration was an intentional non-spiced Christmas beer.

This is long before the huge IPA boom that we’re still living in today. When did you see IPA start to catch on? Was it surprising when it finally did or was it something felt coming?

People back in the late ’70s weren’t accustomed to drinking intensely hopped beers. The people who enjoyed them were outliers, for sure. There was no real craft beer seen. Back then, if you were a beer drinker and you tasted one of our beers, the likelihood was our Pale Ale was probably pretty intense for you.

Right.

And that’s the feedback we received regularly, “Man, it’s so hoppy and bitter.” People probably didn’t know hoppy as a term so much back in the late ’70s or early ’80s, but they knew it was intensely flavored and had a lot of bitterness. And so we consciously realized it was an educational process to get the consumer to embrace and enjoy hops the way we did.

I mean, you can go back to our Pale Ale being an extreme example at 37 or 38 bitterness units back in 1980. That took a bit of warming up for a lot of consumers. But once they really started to enjoy the flavors that hops could deliver, I think there was a shift in the consumer behavior and drinking enjoyment of beers that are flavorful and hoppy.

I think one of the things we always kept at our forefront when we were designing beers was to try to make sure the beers had drinkability no matter how many hops they had. And so coming up with the way to balance those malted-sugars and the sweetness with the bitterness and flavor of the hops was something we focused on.

How do you find that balance?

You can have a pretty big influence over the residual body and sweetness by paying attention to your mashing temperatures and the grains you use. And so the modern IPAs tend to be less malty and sweet and more sort of in your face with hops. The Haze Craze has probably started to change that back a little bit to beers with lots of flavors, but not necessarily lots of bitterness and a balanced malt bill that helps counter the intensity of the hops.

We went through an education period with the drinker where they learned to appreciate hops more. Then when the West Coast IPA craze started to take off in the 2000s, I think the consumer was already drinking hoppier beers and so it was sort of a natural evolution to focus more on the hops and less on the malt backbone.

But when we first started, we felt that that balance of malt sweetness and hops was necessary to get people to think they were drinking a beer they could have more than one of.

That’s the staying power of Sierra Nevada, especially with Celebration or your Pale Ale, is consistency in that balance. Let’s talk a little bit about your shift from bottles to cans. Is that a practical issue so you can ship further and wider? Is it a supply issue?

The majority across a lot of channels are cans, mostly by consumer demand. Actually, right now, cans are not easy to get. It’s been a challenge across the can supply chain and across the world right now. But it seems like the consumers are embracing cans more. They have some benefits from certainly shipping to weight and recyclability.

They also do a better job of blocking light and resisting oxygen ingress from the bottle cap. Cans tend to be a little bit tighter seal, but it’s really been driven by consumer demand. Our Hazy Little Thing is a hundred percent cans, and it’s done very well with the consumer. But a beer like Celebration Ale will probably always have some availability in glass as well as cans.

I was a huge fan of the big three-liter magnum bottles. I’ve been trying to find some again…

We just found a whole bunch of those this last week!

They’re fantastic for sharing this time of year, or finding that bottle wrapped up under your Christmas tree and you know you’re in for a good time.

Tell us a little bit about how you choose who you are going to collaborate with? You’ve done a lot with German brewers like Bitburger and others. What’s the process there?

Well, they’re sort of all been different. The Oktoberfest collaborations, for instance, were really us wanting to do something globally with the brewing industry. Over the years, I’ve traveled a lot to Germany, the U.K., and Belgium and have created friendships with brewers from over the world. Part of us wanting to do the Oktoberfest collaboration was really to meld the minds of what the American craft brewing was doing and what the historical German brewers had been doing.

So it was a fun way for us to exchange brewing ideas. And in all cases where we partnered with these German breweries, we offered to assist if they wanted to produce something that was more in our wheelhouse with hops or dry hopping with styles that some of them hadn’t really explored much. And so it was a fun exchange of brewing concepts and beer styles and the camaraderie that existed in the brewing industry across most of the U.S. breweries, we were able to extend that out to our brewing friends around the world.

Trends come and go in beer. How do you parse those and look ahead to create a new line of beers?

Well, every Thursday morning I’m tasting new beers with our pilot brewing team. The ideas come from a variety of places from what we’re seeing in the beer world. We look at the trends. We also just think out of the box and do stuff that’s just really fairly wild as far as what we brew with.

How so?

We’ve brewed with a wide range of non-traditional brewing ingredients. We’ve done styles that are both historic and we’ve re-interpreted them. We’ve also created new stuff ourselves.

I’d say the inspiration comes from a whole bunch of different places and a lot of different people, not just one concept we have and we run with it. We try to pay attention to where the consumer is or where they may be going as well as sort of pushing the boundaries of brewing and beer making in the science of brewing.

Is there a beer style that you brewed, that you really love, that you wish would catch on but the public isn’t quite ready for yet or just won’t accept it?

There are two of those. Yeah. We made our Kellerweis, which is big in Germany. It’s very popular throughout parts of Germany, and there are different styles that have distinctive characteristics. I traveled to Germany a lot over the last 35 years, and it was the style I wanted to brew even over 30 years ago … to do a true Bavarian Keller wheat beer.

At the time, my sales manager said, “Nobody’s going to like that. The flavors are way too different than what people are used to.” There’s clove and very distinctive flavors you get from the yeast. The wheat is not a typical style that a larger beer-drinking audience would embrace. So I got sort of shot down. We ended up making a wheat beer but using conventional yeast. We didn’t quite meet the sales numbers at some of our distributors and retailers. And so, unfortunately, it slowly faded away.

Smoked beers are another one. We’ve been doing smoked beers on and off for 25 to 30 years. But we haven’t distributed them widely, but it’s a style that shows up on our radar every once in a while and so we brew it.

What’s your favorite memory of Celebration IPA through the years?

It’s a beer that we’ve always taken very seriously about how we brew it. So we do wait for the hops to all mature and get picked, and then start brewing. So those beers are brewed with hops that are just days out of the field. Right now, we send people up to Oregon and Washington a few weeks ahead of time to start identifying fields that we want to brew with. That connection with us and the farming community has been an educational process for both us and the growers.

So I’d say just developing that connection with the growers and identifying farmers that we think really produce stellar hops for that beer has been a fun learning and evolving experience over the last 40 years. That’s what really stands out for me.

Like that impossible-to-buy-for person on your holiday gift list, it’s hard to know how to keep a QAnon cultist happy. When a bunch of them flocked to Dallas in November to witness the resurrection of John F. Kennedy, Jr. (and possibly his dad and mom) and he didn’t show up, they didn’t bitch and moan—they simply decided that the former George publisher, who died in 1999, had instead decided to reemerge at a Rolling Stones concert. When—gasp!—that didn’t happen either, they opted to hang around Dallas a little bit longer, sing “We Are the World,” and drink from a communal bowl of disinfectants to keep from getting COVID. Meanwhile, they haven’t been willing to give the same sort of leeway to another one of their heroes, former President Donald Trump.

As Newsweek reports, followers of Q are really pissed that the former president has not only been vaccinated against COVID, but gotten a booster shot as well. Trump made this now-controversial admission on Sunday while chatting with former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly on the final stop of their ill-fated “History Tour” at Dallas’ American Airlines Center. Upon hearing this seemingly devastating news, some members of the audience began booing the former president. While he played it off in true Trump style, noting that it was “a very tiny group” that was jeering him, O’Reilly apparently had to later console him.

Still, as Newsweek writes, the message boards of conspiracy theory-heavy social media site Telegram were flooded with reactions to Trump’s admission. As Anders Anglesey wrote:

Newsweek found several comments on Telegram from QAnon followers who had turned on Trump and were left frustrated by his comments while others who claimed to be unvaccinated proudly called themselves “pureblood.”

One major QAnon influencer with 58,800 followers attempted to reassure their followers and explain Trump’s comments to them.

In a Monday Telegram post: “We don’t always understand everything. I love President Trump. I disagree here. I think we may find out something about this soon imo [in my opinion] either way, think for yourself. You are in the right spot here. Just don’t cuss up a storm, we have so many twists and turns already.”

The influencer continued: “I believe the end will explain the middle. But, we are all to think for ourselves and most of you guys are still with me on this vax crap. If we are confused by Pres Trump’s comments, I’m sure Deep State is. Maybe he would be a danger to society arrested otherwise idk [I don’t know] but I’m gonna continue locally and here doing what we all must every day.”

Still, it doesn’t seem as if Trump’s willingness to get a booster has influenced others to act as he did. Newsweek shared the results of a Telegram poll of more than 18,000 people who answered the question: “Now that President Trump had a booster, are you comfortable taking the vax and boosters?” A whopping 97 percent of respondents answered with an outright no, while one percent said yes and two percent weren’t sure.

Cultists gonna cult.

(Via Newsweek)

Walking into the supermarket these days is more anxiety-inducing than it has been for decades. Shoppers are now taking second looks at the prices of everyday items before dropping them into their carts to make sure they haven’t skyrocketed since their last trip to the store.

The meat and dairy aisles have been especially daunting. Over the past year in the United States, the average price of eggs has gone up 11.6% and chicken is up nearly 9%.

A recent national survey for Bankrate found that 71% of Americans say they’ve had to pay more at the grocery store.

The cause is a perfect storm of events: the pandemic, supply chain disruptions, and rising food prices.

---

While we’re all feeling the impact in one way or another, the situation has been overwhelming for people facing food insecurity. The good news is that the Feeding America network of more than 200 food banks, 21 statewide food bank associations, and over 60,000 partner agencies have continued to serve people experiencing hunger, even though there’s a huge strain on the system.

See on Instagram

First, the increase in demand at food banks has risen so much over the past fiscal year they have had to purchase 58% more food.

Second, snags in the supply chain have led to higher transportation costs, increasing overhead and further reducing the amount of food that food banks can afford.

Freight costs to move donated food are up 20% over this time last year. As a result, Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization, has subsidized millions in transportation-related costs to food banks since April 2020.

When the price of food and transportation goes up, the amount that food banks can supply goes down.

How We Work 2021 – Feeding America

www.youtube.com

According to the USDA 38 million people, including nearly 12 million children experience food insecurity in the U.S.

It’s hard for many to grasp the enormity of the hunger issue because it’s an invisible problem that’s hiding in plain sight.

It’s when a co-worker calls in sick because they haven’t eaten enough nutritious food to have the energy to come to work. You see it when an eighth-grader can’t focus in algebra class because they haven’t had enough to eat.

New challenges may arise around winter when free meal programs at schools are closed, and many people with low incomes must choose between paying for heat or buying meals.

By visiting FeedingAmerica.org/TakeAction you can learn how to help ease the strain on the network of food banks that help provide food to millions of people facing hunger.

Jennifer Coolidge came roaring back into our consciousness this year with a boozy, career-best turn in The White Lotus, which you really should watch if you haven’t already because, among other spectacles, the show features the most disgusting yet gratifying own of a truly loathsome character. That scene doesn’t involve Coolidge, who’s so hot right now that Netflix’s new Single All The Way might find a place in your queue.

As it turns out, Netflix also pulled her aside to give a fabulous reading of The Night Before Christmas. No liquor is involved here, at least, not on camera, but she drinks her milk straight out of a wine glass, so you get the point.

The reading itself is full of gusto and punctuated with Coolidge-esque revelations about wearing a cap and throwing back a sash. Each line arrives as though she’s discovered it for the very first time, which makes it new for anyone who’s watching. Somehow as well, this feels both G-rated and R-rated at the same time, which is a difficult vibe to pull off and one that eclipses any other reading, including from the likes of Sam Jackson.

Jennifer Coolidge is bringing back Christmas, y’all. The pandemic tried to take it away (again), but she will keep us safe, and tuck us in with a nice cocktail.

There’s probably no figure more ubiquitous this holiday season than Santa Claus himself (sorry, Jesus.) You know that Christmas is around the corner when every store in town puts its mannequin of the big red guy in the window, or when every TV channel starts showing its regular rotation of festive movie classics. Everyone has their favorite film, the viewing of which is an annual tradition. For those who aren’t fans of Elf or A Christmas Carol or the PG coziness of the Hallmark Channel cinematic universe, there are plenty of alternative Christmas movies: Die Hard, American Psycho, and Tangerine, to name but three. But maybe you want some of those well-worn chipper tropes put through the wood-chipper for a bloodier, more frenzied Christmas. Enter the serial killer Santa.

Holiday-themed horror movies are par for the course for the genre. The merriest season has its fair share of terror, thanks to the likes of Black Christmas. So, it’s no surprise that there are a plethora of movies featuring either the real Jolly Old St. Nick on a murder spree or the killer of the week dressed in bloody red with snow-white trim. It’s one of the simplest yet most effective ways to flip the merriment and childlike optimism of the season on its head.

While it wasn’t the first film to make Santa a killer, 1984’s Silent Night, Deadly Night is undoubtedly the primary influence of this curious genre. Directed by Charles E. Sellier, Jr., making his feature debut, the grimy horror centers on a disturbed man who witnessed his parents being brutally murdered by a criminal dressed as Santa. As an adult, he struggles with disturbing thoughts and a deeply skewed sense of good and evil, which leads him to don the red costume and go on a vengeful murder spree. It’s a pretty bland film, clearly cut from the same cloth as the cheaply-made slasher titles that had oversaturated horror cinema in the ’80s. Yet Silent Night, Deadly Night became the most controversial film of the year because of that image of a killer Santa wielding an ax.

Swaths of concerned parents’ groups across America protested the movie, largely inspired by ad campaigns that ran in-between family-friendly TV series such as Little House on the Prairie. Protestors picketed theaters in The Bronx that screened the film, loudly singing Christmas carols in protest. These groups had some big names on their side too, including the legendary film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. Siskel went as far as to read names of the film’s production crew on-air, telling them, “Shame on you”, as he accused the filmmakers of profiting from “blood money.” Eventually, the distributor, TriStar Pictures, withdrew the film from cinemas. It would eventually be re-released by an independent distributor, Aquarius Films, in May 1985, and that early controversy didn’t hurt its initial sales.

An editorial in Variety described the controversy: “Most protests were generated by the feeling that the depiction of a killer in a Santa Claus suit would traumatize children and undermine their traditional trust in Santa Claus.” As the movie’s producer, Ira Barmak, noted, Santa isn’t real and this R-rated film certainly wouldn’t ruin any kid’s Christmas unless their parents took them to see it. It didn’t seem to dawn on many critics or protestors that this bastardizing of an intrinsically good thing was basically the entire point of Silent Night, Deadly Night.

Silent Night, Deadly Night managed to milk an additional four sequels out of its concept, and by then, the genie was well and truly out of the bottle. Films in this sub-genre share a lot of tropes, particularly in the focus on children as targets or the utilizing of familial abuse and related trauma as an impetus for the violence. The French film 3615 code Père Noël features a precocious young boy being terrorized by a murderous vagrant dressed as Santa while fending him off with booby-traps. Christmas Evil, a seriously nihilistic thriller that predates Silent Night, Deadly Night by four years (it received none of the backlash of that movie), follows a deranged man obsessed with Santa Claus in part thanks to seeing his mother be groped by Santa, not knowing that he was just his dad in a costume. He, of course, also dresses in red and starts killing people. O’Hellige Jul!, a Norwegian slasher, features a Santa-disguised killer who engages in full-on torture porn and rape. The twist here is that, rather than being a mentally ill vagrant or the like, the killer is a happy family man who decides to target a group of friends out of a demented need to rectify their terrible futures.

And then there are the murderous St. Nicks who have their roots in well-worn mythology and the twisting of it. Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale comes to us courtesy of Finland, the actual home of Santa. This revisionist history sees the figure as a foreboding figure with horns and violent tendencies (he’s also introduced naked, which is a very blunt way of stripping away the familiar mythos of Santa!) Futurama’s year 3000 take on Santa is a robot whose standards for naughty and nice are so misbalanced that everyone is likely to face his wrath on Christmas Eve, usually with a missile launcher of some kind. In the Netherlands, where the festive icon is Sinterklaas, a figure inspired by the real Saint Nicholas, the 2010 film Sint portrays him as a ghost on a full moon rampage. His bishop’s staff is a blade, his gang is looters, and the black Petes (Niklas’s companions who are typically portrayed by white people in blackface) were actually blackened by an act of murderous arson. Much like Silent Night, Deadly Night 26 years prior, Sint’s advertising led to concerned parents’ groups’ protests. The more things change…

The subversion of childhood innocence is at the heart of many a great horror story. Stephen King is legendary for his unnerving depictions of the not-so-secret darkness of youth, especially the all-too-familiar notion of growing up in a bleak world where your pain and fears are either ignored by adults or outright exploited. As many creators have shown, it doesn’t take much to turn the most seemingly innocuous parts of our childhood into something haunting. Consider how the Chucky franchise got so much mileage out of proving adults correct over those weird-looking dolls that had no business being marketed to kids, or how little effort it took to turn clowns into everyone’s worst nightmare. So, of course, there’s terror to be mined from the notion of a strange man breaking into your house every year to exchange milk and cookies for gifts on the basis of a binary notion of naughty versus nice. Honestly, it’s kind of a surprise that kids aren’t scared of Santa from birth.

Nowadays, Santa is big money. Coca-Cola’s annual holiday marketing campaign is a multi-million-dollar branding exercise that the company started in the 1920s. They hired artist Fred Mizen in 1930 to paint a Santa drinking a bottle of Coke for a campaign and that image of the festively plump and jolly rosy-cheeked Father Christmas helped to shape the iconography for decades to come. This Santa is so ubiquitous that some people think Coca-Cola wholly invented him. Couple that with continuing bad-faith right-wing culture war campaigns over the so-called war on Christmas and fake outrage over men of color playing the character and it’s no wonder that some of us crave that lump of coal in our stockings.

With a reboot of Silent Night, Deadly Night reportedly in the works, it seems that we won’t be short of killer Santa movies in the future. For whenever there is cheer and a societal requirement to be happy, there will be a need for someone to provide a bloody alternative.