You can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and not get wet. — Milo in The Phantom Tollbooth

By PJ Parrish

I spent yesterday in the cold rain hanging Christmas lights on my shrubs. And then they didn’t work. Yeah, yeah…I checked them all first. But they pulled a Griswald on me and only half of them went on. An hour later, a yanked them off and tossed them in the trash. Bah humbug.

So I decked the hounds in boughs of holly,  made a Hendricks Floradora martini and, like my lights, got half-lit.

.

Ever wonder where the word humbug came from? It wasn’t Dickens, by the way. It goes back to 1750, first appearing in The Student where it is called “a word very much in vogue with the people of taste and fashion.” This makes me feel marginally better.

A humbug is a deception, a lie. According to The Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose — dontcha love that title, so E.L. James? — to hum in English originally meant “‘to deceive.” It could also come from the Italian uomo bugiardo, which literally means “lying man.”

In the 1961 children’s book The Phantom Tollboth, there’s a large beetle-like insect known as the Humbug, who is a consummate liar. I had never heard of this book before a friend mentioned it in passing recently as one of his favorites and lent me his copy. Bah humbug…okay, so I read it .

The story concerns a sad kid named Milo who, bored to death at school — and by life — gets a mysterious package. Inside is a small tollbooth and a map of the Lands Beyond, leading to the Kingdom of Wisdom. There’s a note — “For Milo, who has plenty of time.” Milo begins a fantasical journey where he meets a companion dog Tock (so named for the alarmclocks in his fur), He leaves behind The Doldrums, and goes to the Word Market, where he mets the Spelling Bee and the lying Humbug, and then on to Dictionopolis. In the Mountains of Ignorance, they fight The Gelatinous Giant. The giant is a green Jello blob who takes a lot of naps, can change shapes on a whim, eats people, bugs and dogs. His weakness is he is afraid of new ideas because they make him sick to his stomach. Milo uses The Box of Words to defeat the giant.

I’m tempted, but I can’t recount it all here — it’s incredibly dense with the kind of details kids adore and double entendre lessons adults should heed. And writers would get  kick out of it. All ends well for Milo. He goes back through the tollbooth, “awakening” back in his bedroom, but convinced his trip was real. He finds a new note — “For Milo, who now knows the way.” The note say that the tollbooth is being sent to another kid who needs help finding direction in life.

So, crime dogs, on this holiday eve, as we look to a new year with hope, I wish you health, happiness with your loved ones, and sanity wherever you can find it. And that your Christmas lights work. Oh yeah, and that you keep writing. May you pick up some good stuff at the Word Market, find your way out of The Doldrums and keep marching on toward the Kingdom of Wisdom. As The Phantom Tollbooth told me:

“Milo continued to think of all sorts of things; of the many detours and wrong turns that were so easy to take, of how fine it was to be moving and, most of all, of how much could be accomplished with just a little thought.”

How fine is it just to be moving.