Recipe: Holiday Spirit

 

Ingredients

-3/4 cup tinsel shavings

-2 peppermint candycanes, chopped

-1 cup snow, melted

-pinch cocoa powder

-handful fake snow

-3 reindeer hairs

 

Directions

1. In a blender, mix the melted snow, chopped candycanes, and tinsel shavings on "high" setting until consistency is smooth throughout
2. Pour slowly into mixing bowl, dropping in reindeer hairs continuously
3. With a large sized whisk, toss in the cocoa powder and stir until syrupy
4. Put in oven at 0 degrees for twelve days, or until mixture no longer resembles anything
5. Pour into individual mugs (preferably, with patterns of holidaylike themes applied), garnish with fake snow
6. Throw mugs into magical Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa cloud of joy, and bask in holiday spirit

Disclaimer: Do not attempt to actually do this. It is for entertainment purposes only. May have side effects of eggnog head, tinsel mouth, frostbite, bah-humbugitis, or bad sense of style in sweaters.

Have a happy consumerism-free holidays, folks.

Enjoy the boom of greeting card and wrapping paper businesses, and the sentimentality of traditions that no longer apply to modern life.

But really, have a good one.

In the future...

 

[In the year 2000] no Mosquitoes nor Flies.  Insect screens will  be unnecessary.  Mosquitoes, house-flies and roaches will have been practically exterminated.  Boards of health will have destroyed all mosquito haunts and breeding-grounds, drained all stagnant pools, filled in all swamp-lands, and chemically treated all still-water streams.

-The Ladies Home Journal, December 1900

 

[In the year 2000] etiquette and housekeeping will be important studies in the public schools.

-The Ladies Home Journal, December 1900

By the year 2020, five per cent of the world's population will have emigrated into space. Many will have visited the moon and beyond.

-Weekend Magazine, July 1961

[Our children] will get pills to make them learn faster. We shall be healthier, too. There will be no common colds, cancer, tooth decay or mental illness.

-Weekend Magazine, July 1961

[An English scientist] believes that it will be enough to dig a hole of several kilometers and there find the heat needed by all the industry. The water in such a deepness will be so hot, that all the machines in the whole world could be powered by it. [In the year 2000].

-Pressburger Zeitung, March 1922

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

-Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."

-Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

"Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy."

-Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859.

 

"Self-operating [vacuum] cleaners powered by nuclear energy will probably be a reality a decade from now."

– Alex Lewyt, president of vacuum cleaner company Lewyt Corp., in the New York Times in 1955

Democracy will be dead by 1950.
-John Langdon-Davies, A Short History of The Future, 1936.

 

And for the tourist who really wants to get away from it all, safaris in Vietnam
-Newsweek, predicting popular holidays for the late 1960s.

 

A 1930s fashion prediction for the year 2000, by fashion designers:

Holiday Songs Even Scrooge'll Love