One of my family’s Christmas traditions when I was growing up was that each Christmas Eve, after returning home from a celebration and present-opening at my grandparents’ house, but before my father watched The Bells of Saint Mary’s while he, um, waited up for Santa Claus, was that he would read me and my sibling’s Clement Clarke Moore’s A Visit From Saint Nicholas/’Twas the Night Before Christmas.
We don’t do that anymore for a variety of reasons, foremost among them being that Santa doesn’t visit grown-ups the way he visits children, so I was rather excited to see this link on Tom Spurgeon’s indispensable site The Comics Reporter this morning. Give it a click and you’ll find Stan Lee reading ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.
It’s quite charming.
Lee has always been a perfect performer and showman, but, beyond that, like a lot of comics fans, I feel that I’ve grown up with him. I know he’s still working like crazy, but the role he embodies most fully to me these days is that of an elder statesman for comics and, in a more nebulous way, a sort of distant uncle to anyone who spent very much time reading superhero comics or watching Marvel superhero cartoons at pretty much any point in the last 40 years.
So if you’ve got a couple of minutes this evening and are in need of some additional holiday cheer, why not let your old Uncle Stan read you a bed time story?
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QuickStopEntertainment.com, the site responsible, also had Lee read Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” for Halloween in 2008, which you can listen to here (Quoth the raven: “Excelsior!”) And, if you ever find yourself needing a quick fix of Stan Lee, he’s a pretty prolific Twitter-er.
