Shamelessly stealing

Hey, it's early enough in December that the Christmas carols aren't completely driving everyone insane, so it's the perfect time to share my favorites and maybe one or two that I loathe.

Everybody wins!

When I was growing up, we tended to listen to my grandfather's holiday music when opening presents for a couple of reasons. One, it was his house. Two, he wasn't big on 'modern' music. And three, for some odd reason, all the stations that insisted on playing holiday music before Thanksgiving decided that they'd stop playing Christmas music on Christmas. I have never understood that. EVER.

Any way. I suspect on some level that this instilled a hatred of these songs in other family members, but dude. I love some of them.

( Music! )

I've also yet to find any Christina Aguilera Christmas songs I like nor am I interested in finding any, given the ones I have heard. (Why, work. WHY?) There's some version of "Baby, It's Cold Outside" that topples the Jessica Simpson disaster from its perch as my least favorite version of it but I can't figure out which one it is.

SVH for the holidays, Lila edition

   Let's talk about Lila, shall we?

  As a kid, I had mixed feelings about Lila. It really depended a lot on who the ghost author was and which series we were in. SVT Lila tended to be obnoxious without the touch of awesome that usually saved SVH Lila from the same fate. She was, sadly, also shackled with cousin Janet so that didn't help her much. On the flipside, Unicorn Club Lila had a heart and was lovable. (Even if her cover art wasn't likely to convince you that she was one of the prettier girls in school.) Sweet Valley University needed a Lila even with sophisticated Isabella, it just wasn't quite the same.
  But when I think of Lila, I first think of SVH Lila, and that's where kid!me was conflicted. On the one hand, she was almost a worthy foil for Jessica. She was as pretty (if not prettier depending on your cover and your preference), she was rich, and originally she was given some talent. Thing was, she never won. If it was Jessica vs. Lila in anything happening on screen, Jessica always won, even when she didn't win in the traditional way. And as a kid (and a mostly adult type person) I hated that. You can't be a good foil if you don't occasionally get the upper hand. It's just not believable.

   The irony is that the series that breaks Lila and Jessica up (nooooo!) is the one that calls the previous books on this BS:

   This is one of the few things I love about Sweet Valley Senior Year. This quote. The rest can be written out of history for all I care but that? That nailed a big part of the Lila/Jessica dynamic for me.

  As I grew older, I appreciated Lila more. Some books would give you insight (poor little rich girl with daddy issues may be a cliche, but it works) into the mysterious Lila Fowler. I preferred those to the ones where Lila was painfully two dimensional. Despite being the shining examples of shallowness, they were one of the only friendships to survive most of the various series and I like that.
   I like that sometimes Lila goes over to casa Wakefield to experience being in a "real" family and I like that she doesn't really give up hope of her own family, small and fractured though it may be, being better. I love the good (friend)ship Lila/Jessica, and I've obviously devoted more than my fair share of time to thinking about the good 'ship Lila/Ken. Think about it. For a good chunk of the first 50 or so books, if Lila wasn't seeing some one-off college dude, she was essentially dating Ken for any party that cropped up. Even after she went a bit crazy on his teacher crush. There has to be something there for him to overlook the crazy, especially given the way he thinks about Amy later on. Ken likes his girls to have depth, which means prior to us even meeting them, Lila had to show him another side of herself.
  I'm a dork, please excuse me.

   And we haven't even begun to talk about Bruce/Lila. I'm not really sure I have as much to say about them other than when they finally got together in SVU, I believe Ari, Cass, and I all shouted "FINALLY!" because, well, duh. I'm a sucker for the love/hate relationship and they had the added bonus of their families not liking one another. Old money versus new money, how fab.
  Plus it made them nicer versions of themselves while avoiding the pod people alterations that happened with some of their previous relationships. How awesome is that?

  Then you've got another character I love who would not exist (and you cannot convince me otherwise) without Lila. Blair. Waldorf. She's GG's answer to Lila.

   Anyway, long story shorter: Lila is love. I love her, flaws and all, although I could have done a million lifetimes without the Very Special Stories wherein we needed someone to say something racist and bam, Lila was elected. But she learned. She grew. And I think Amy got elected to be the stupid mouthpiece. Huzzah!