O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, thy candles shine so brightly! From base to summit, gay and bright, there’s only splendor for the sight. O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, how beautiful thy branches—and just so you know, those prelit, white branches on Mamma’s 6.5 foot pine from Martha Stewart’s holiday collection for Kmart has served us very well over the years! Now over the last year, we Biscuits have blogged relentlessly about the plethora of vintage Christmas ornaments that we have picked up from flea markets and antique shops all across the eastern seaboard—and now, you finally get to see where they all end up!

Now set before you is a menagerie of hundreds (literally) of hand blown glass ornaments (mostly made in eastern Europe) mixed in with flocked and plastic ornaments (mostly made in occupied Japan) alongside paper and fabric ornaments—all to create Mamma Biscuit’s glorious Christmas tree! It’s a rarity for anyone to decorate this intensely in a New York City apartment but you all have to understand that our little gremlin feels compelled to go all out for the holidays in an effort to make up for all of those years of enduring one hard candy Christmas after another at the puppy mill in Atlanta, Georgia!

Mamma Biscuit is such a graceful and dainty pug lady around this entire Christmas display and although she manages to fit nicely under the tree, her tail has a tendency to curl up high and brush up against some of our low-hanging ornaments from time to time. With that said, she can usually be found in her toile donut bed gazing at her glorious tree with delight as the Bing Crosby spins on our record player!

Now Mamma’s Christmas tree is not the only show-stopper at the pug palace. Just take a look at her grand entryway that leads into the office (where Mamma’s Christmas Metropolis resides) and tell me if this display couldn’t rival anything those folks have put together at Rockefeller Center?!

Festooned with vintage ornaments from around the world and lit with multicolored Art Deco lights, this entryway makes an impressive Christmas statement! It also doubles up as an annoying obstruction for Mamma Biscuit when she makes a quick turn-style run out of our office to see who’s at the front door!

Standing beside this garland, to the right, is a blow mold Christmas masterpiece of Frosty the Snowman and a traditional noel candle. A french artist has created this blasphemous plastic concoction by combining these two iconic Christmas symbols with a blow torch and finishing it off by melting black and pink latex all over their surface—just what we have in mind when we think of Christmas, melted latex!

At any rate, Mamma has put on her cozy red Christmas pajamas and her fuzzy Santa hat and will curl herself up like a loaf of bread in her donut bed until the big day—after all of this exhaustive decorating, our bitch is on cruise control!

3 more days until full blown, mass hysteria—the battlefield being any local mall across the United States of Shopping!

Enjoy

Mamma and the Biscuits may be totally infatuated with the Christmas holiday and the general hysteria surrounding it but it would be incredibly remise of us to not wish our Jewish friends a very Happy Hanukkah—afterall, the giant irony behind our entire mess of a holiday is that we decorate for and celebrate Christmas by going into personal financial ruin all to honor the birthday of a Jew! Yes, it’s high time we give our Jewish brothers and sisters the respect they deserve because Mary, Joseph, Jesus and everyone at that damn inn in Bethlehem were Jews—and Santa, well he’s just a jolly yet judgmental man who refuses to accept the fact that he’s gay—don’t give me the side eye, why else would a grown man coop himself up in a workshop (away from his wife) with a bunch of dwarfs? Ok, so there isn’t anything flashy or downright distasteful and gaudy when it comes to a menorah or one lonely dreidel begging to be spun by a pile of gold-foiled chocolate coins but these folks have eight days to obligate others for gifts, not one like us—so Santa, take a fucking hike because you suck with your one-day-delivery! According to Mamma’s bastardized Hebrew calendar, for eight days and nights, Mamma will receive a special soft-chew treat after lighting a candle on our unkosher menorah furnished by Lee’s Art Supply in NYC! So I have been told by a good friend (many of our friends are Jews) that in order for a menorah to be kosher, the candles all need to be at the same height (aside from the Shamas: the extra light in the middle) and well, this tree-like menorah breaks the rules. Oh whatever, we are an Atheist household so it’s inevitable that aesthetics would trump rules and religious accuracy—especially since Mamma puts up a dog Nativity scene at the pug palace!

So decked out in her blue with white polka dot apron dress (it was the only blue garment in her wardrobe) Mamma will light the first candle with you all to usher in the Hanukkah week and to say thank you! Yes, thank you for giving us Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand, Barbara Walters, Bobby Zimmerman A.K.A. Bob Dylan, Bea Arthur, Barry Manilow, Bette Midler and for converting Madonna into a stale Kabbalist with a dry sense of humor. Mamma would have thrown Danielle Staub, Chandra Levy, Bob Saget and Ron Pearlman in that list but then she thought that the Jews have suffered enough! The Bisuits would especially like to thank Irving Berlin, Johnny Marks and Mel Torme for practically writing the entire score for modern Christmas as we know it today. Standards such as White Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire, The Christmas Song, Rudolph, A Holly Jolly Christmas, Silver Bells, I’ll be Home for Christmas and Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree would not exist without their appreciation and contribution to our crazy, Gentile holiday! So Happy Hanukkah everyone—and don’t forget to order us a few vegetarian spring rolls from Tai Fang’s on the 25th of December—there is only so much lasagna we Italian boys and our pug can eat in one day!

Only 4 days left to purchase happiness!

Enjoy

As we enter the final week before the most important holiday on Mamma Biscuit’s calendar, we want to stop, take a deep breath and take in the seasonal scent of pine to relax and calm our anxious nerves. Now we Biscuits are all about a fake tree at the pug palace but that doesn’t mean we haven’t had our fare share of experiences at a Christmas tree nursery during the holiday season! Shoot, I can pick a perfectly-shaped tree blind-folded off 8th avenue any day of the week—and since I actually take requests from special friends to help decorate their real tree, I’m afforded the experience of how to handle the lighting and decorating of one.

At any rate, this year, Tommy and I and the Biscuit Lady got caught up in the wreath section of a nursery out in New Jersey while our friends were off strapping their tree to their car. Now doesn’t Mamma look precious framed by all of this pine? She practically defines Christmas here—and quite frankly, this could be the album art to yet another collection of Bing Crosby’s Christmas standards on LP.

If memory serves me right, the pine scent on this wreath was so strong that Mamma Biscuit’s snout was on permanent sniff mode! I’m surprised that her muzzle doesn’t look like a giant blurry spot from all of that nose movement! I guess the next best thing is pine-scented incense for the apartment because there is nothing real about any part of our Christmas display!

The Christmas insanity STARTS NOW!

Enjoy

Mamma Biscuit and family understand that the fabulousness of Christmas doesn’t only exist within the confines of the dirty and over-crowded streets of an urban metropolis. Just ask Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers and they’ll both sing you an entire albums worth of Christmas songs from and for the rural smoky mountain folk who actually burn a real yule log instead of playing it digitally on the TV screen—like us! So to honor those folks out yonder, Mamma Biscuit has put together a small and humble paper village of vintage goods and accessories that will surely make you yearn to live in a small town like Chevy Chase in Funny Farm, or worse, Diane Keaton in Baby Boom. It’s amazing what people will do to experience that Norman Rockwell/Americana Christmas that is displayed all over those damn greeting cards—alongside Santa guzzling a bottle of Coca-Cola before stuffing his wide ass back up your chimney!

Now this paper village is a budding new obsession of mine—as you can see, we only have three buildings but might I warn you that this is exactly how Mamma’s Metropolis got started back in the day, and I have no doubt this will triple in size come Christmas 2012! I really got into collecting those vintage pines in different colors—hey, Mamma needs a variety of tree trunks to pee on, I was only thinking of her! This small vignette of a town is the perfect Christmas getaway from Mamma’s Metropolis—the deer can roam free without the threat of being run over by an SUV with skis attached to the roof—there are no paved roads YET!

So now that Christmas Village Week is coming to a close, the Biscuits will be preparing to unveil Mamma’s grand tree and the overly-decked halls within the pug palace next week—so brace yourself, because Mamma’s tree makes a Christopher Radko showroom look like Christmas in a Swedish household—tasteful yet full of too much negative space!

And lastly, the best gift this world has ever given us all is Dolly Parton and her unyielding love for Christmas—that and a bust that would honestly make me go straight!

8 days left, if your credit cards aren’t maxed out then you are a cheap slob, end of story!

Enjoy

City sidewalks busy sidewalks, dressed in holiday style. In the air, there’s a feeling of Christmas. Children laughing, people passing, meeting smile after smile—and on every street corner you’ll hear: Mamma’s bells, Mamma’s bells—it’s Christmas time in Mamma’s city. Ring-a-ling, hear them sing, soon it will be Christmas day! Actually, the only thing ringing off of Mamma Biscuit is her damn noisy dog tags as she prances around this big, bright and festive Christmas city. It’s either that or me dropping my keys when she runs circles around me—and by default, mummifying my body with her leash! At any rate, when most people think of Christmas, they think of the giant Christmas tree and skaters on the ice at Rockefeller Center, the windows at Saks 5th Avenue and the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall but we Biscuits are here to let you all know that there is another special display uptown at Mamma’s pug palace that should be on everyone’s holiday itinerary—and that’s Mamma’s Christmas Metropolis!

Christmas wouldn’t be complete without flexing some of my urban planning skills across a foldable banquet table, a computer desk and a hobby desk—yes, I actually have a hobby desk so stop giggling at me—be thankful I don’t have a gift-wrapping station. . . . yet! Anyway, this gigantic collection you see before you is 20 years in the making—and quite frankly, built into my Italian-American-love for-Christmas DNA. During this time span, I have managed to collect more than 40 buildings and hundreds of accessories from both Department 56 and Lemax to create this wonderfully bustling Christmas-in-the-city extravaganza—and every year, it keeps growing! Now I know you all are wondering where in the hell do I store all of these goodies and well, I have the most amazing mother in the world who not only houses my houses off season but encourages the madness! My mother-in-law is also responsible for contributing to this mess throughout the years that Tommy and I have been together so she’s just as much to blame for this insanity as anyone else!

Now you all will notice an economic divide between neighborhoods in Mamma’s Metropolis. Our 5th avenue (where Mamma Biscuit lives and shops and where most of the Department 56 is positioned) is the road furthest to the back where the Flat Iron building resides! People are very wealthy on this strip—so wealthy that I was very close to assembling a peaceful, Occupy Wall Street demonstration of figurines walking towards City Hall at the end of the block—but they lost their permit last minute (that’s code for I ran out of figurines and needed to place them elsewhere.) Now if any of you decide to walk along this strip, make sure you head to the Little Italy Ristorante—they make a great vegan eggplant parmesan, and as you can see, the head chef gets his fruits and veggies freshly delivered. After dinner, we recommend you head over to the Paramount Hotel Sky Lounge (the penthouse with the flickering lights) It’s where the hip and chic go to stand and model!

If heavy Italian food or judgemental nightlife isn’t your speed, then come along and take a walk with Mamma Biscuit through Central Park. There’s great live music and the park rules are so loose, you’ll be able to drink Bavarian-size steins out in the open without the threat of getting a ticket! Hustlers and Hookers are totes welcome, that nun feeding the bird off to the side is a Lesbian and in the closet, she won’t judge! Check out the many nearby outdoor activities such as ice skating on the glass pond and the Annual Christmas Dog Show Pageant—in Mamma’s city, that pageant highlights rescue dogs only! If you’re looking for bright lights alla Times Square then go stand in front of the train station with the homeless, the Central Church with the god-fearing folk or the firehouse with those calendar-worthy muscle studs—these buildings are fiber-optic and give off the illusion of digital screens!

Most importantly, before you leave Mamma’s Metropolis, stop in at 4F on 5th Avenue for a night cap of eggnog, a slice of cheese cake and an episode of the Golden Girls with Mamma at her pug palace—you’ll be glad you did!

Forget the Dow Jones, Nasdaq or S&P 500, these are the only numbers you all should be concerned about:
10 Days
15 Hours
51 Minutes

Enjoy!