I can’t remember when I first heard Angus MacPhail’s word “MacGuffin”, the term for the object at the center of a story. In the early days of Hollywood, Pearl White called it the “weenie”. Cultures that strive for Capital-A Art might give it a fancy name, like l’objet d’le coup (I made that up), but lucky for us, Hitchcock popularized the term MacGuffin. I like it because “MacGuffin” is itself a placeholder (like “Whatshisname” or “Bugalugs”) and reflects the object’s essential fungibility.

The Wikipedia page on the word “MacGuffin” reveals some disagreement over whether the audience has to care about the MacGuffin. I think the distinction in that argument hinges on whether they’re talking about the structure of the story or the ability of the story to grab the audience.

From the standpoint of story structure, if a story can stay the same whether everyone is chasing a box of diamonds or a bottle of super rocket fuel or a briefcase filled with Illudium Phosdex, I think you have a proper MacGuffin. That’s what I meant by “fungibility”. You can swap the Maltese Falcon for the Burmese Lion and have the same story. Joel Cairo still smells of gardenia and Brigid O’Shoughnessey is still going over for it. On the other hand, you can’t swap the Maltese Falcon for the Eiffel Tower or the Brooklyn Bridge. That has to be a different story.

But from the standpoint of story telling–capturing the attention of the audience–I think the MacGuffin does need a connection. Otherwise the audience doesn’t get why the characters want it. Western audiences can identify with Caspar Gutman as he waxes romantic about the Templars. With a little tweak, they could identify with his enthusiasm for mysterious tales of the first Dalai Lama and a MacGuffin called the Lotus Of Tibet. But what about Gutman chasing the trinkets that Peter Minuit used to buy Manhattan? The Bronx Rabbit just isn’t “the stuff that dreams are made of.”

My personal favorite MacGuffin is Illudium Phosdex, the shaving cream atom. It’s silly. It’s absurd. And we need it desperately because Earth’s supply is alarmingly low. Meg and I use the phrase all the time–“Our supply of coffee creamer is alarmingly low.” In my interpretation of Pulp Fiction, the briefcase contains Earth’s last 600 grams of Illudium Phosdex, and Marcellus Wallace needs it to shave his head (as indicated by the band-aid).

My second favorite MacGuffin is the plaid bag in What’s Up Doc? It’s kind of an ober-MacGuffin that drives the hijinks by concealing the regular MacGuffins.

Then there’s Rosebud. Several articles cite Rosebud in Citizen Kane as a MacGuffin, but I disagree. Yes, Rosebud is fungible–it could have been any object from his childhood. But Rosebud isn’t part of the plot. It doesn’t motivate anyone. It’s irrelevant for all but a few seconds of the film. Rosebud is a thinly contrived mystery that brackets the biopic. Without Rosebud, the final moment of the story is boring: “…and the old shit died. The End.” Rosebud is a flourish, not a MacGuffin.

My least favorite MacGuffin is unobtainium. The name doesn’t even fit because they’re actually obtaining it. They would have done better to call it “maguffium”. “Why is it called that?” “We don’t know. Does it matter?” Then at least they could have gotten a laugh instead of an eyeroll.

[Edit: In 2025, I couldn’t help tweaking my old writing. I think this version is better.]

So many annual rituals bind people together. We have weddings and births celebrated within families, and we have astronomical events like the Winter Solstice celebrated across multiple cultures. For people who enjoy watching others compete, we have the Super Bowl, Triple Crown, Indy 500, March Madness, Reno Air Races, and a host of others. For those who build and fly their own aircraft, we have AirVenture at Oshkosh, WI. And for the more cosmically minded, there are even longer cycles, like those of Halley’s comet or the Transit of Venus. (Yes, that’s a real thing, even though it sounds like something from the pulps at the checkout stand–“Masonic Lodge Denies That Days Of Our Lives Cast Member Found Elvis Using Transit Of Venus In Ancient Roman Archaeological Dig!”)

If you read my last post, you won’t be surprised to hear that I was raised with Christmas and Thanksgiving as the two biggest annual events, followed by birthdays and Easter. The strongest emotional memories are from Christmas and Easter because they both had really good music and really good candy. Even when people stray from the church, they often come back on Christmas and Easter as part of family rituals or for the music. They may give up on their god, but they can’t give up the human ritual and its ties to their childhood.

Then there are other annual rituals, like the unpleasant one many of us have just completed (and that many others are still facing): filing income tax returns. I know next-to-nothing about taxation in other countries, but in the U.S.A. we loathe the deadline of April 15th. Many of us live in states that also tax our income, so we have to fill out the paperwork twice. Our tax laws have all the order and logic of a tribe of chimerical hydras tied in Gordian knots, Jello-wrestling in a Klein bottle. Alien lawyers in UFOs would use our tax laws as proof that humanity was not a sentient species. For my part, I am happy to fork out a few dollars for software that does the calculations and generates the paperwork. Not only does it save me from learning several thousand arbitrary and ultimately uninteresting details, it is less expensive than hiring human tax professionals. (The last time I used a human, he didn’t finish until lunchtime on the day the taxes had to be mailed. Fortunately, I had given up on him and done the taxes myself using software. For the record, Turbo Tax did a better job.)

Due to what I’ll simply call “family issues”, I have to do the ritual six times each year, filing three different returns for both federal and state authorities. I’m always very glad when it’s over. My drink at this moment contains a substantial quantity of rum. But for all the pain, it’s still a ritual and still binds us together. It marks the passing of time and keeps us away from the mental trap where each day is just like the one before it. And so, to everyone who hasn’t done their taxes yet, I raise my glass and say “BOHICA!”

Meg and I are the same age, give or take three months. Many years ago, when we were in seventh or eighth grade, we sat side-by-side on a car trip to see the Christmas lights in McAdenville, NC. Our parents had gathered both families together for the adventure–the long drive up from South Carolina, the slow crawl through the city to see the lights, and the drive home that was all too short because once it was over, I wouldn’t see Meg again for a while. My strongest recollection is that McAdenville only used three colors of lights–white, red, and green. Even today, those colors predominate. No yellow. No blue. No orange. How did that happen? McAdenville was a Southern Mill Town (as so many were in those days) and, according to my father, the Company provided the lights and specified the colors.

On other mid-December nights, my parents would drive us though our own town (whether it was Winnsboro, Easley, Columbia, or York) to look at the Christmas lights. Some homes were unlit. Some only had a tree in the living room, or a ceramic tree on a tabletop. We lived in the era of the aluminum tree and saw plenty of them glowing in other homes. Some homes put white lights on door wreathes or garlands on the porch. A few had lights along the gutters and wrapped around the bushes. The Charlie Brown Christmas special was first broadcast when we lived in Columbia, and we started calling the most-decorated houses “Snoopy’s Dog House”. Some were tasteful. Others were garish. But we enjoyed the tours. Colored lights were as much a part of Christmas as the midnight Christmas Eve service or driving across the river in Columbia to see the life-size Nativity that one of the motels erected each year.

That brings me to this past Christmas. Meg and I don’t have grandchildren and my own children’s Christmases are complicated enough without adding a 20-hour round trip. That leaves us without any compelling reason to put up a tree. My personal feelings about Christmas are complicated by the fact that I was an acquisitive little kid–more Daffy than Bugs–and I don’t feel good about that. So I wasn’t in a Christmas mood. We had a handful of presents and cards on the mantel, but nothing else. Meg didn’t feel particularly Christmas-y either. We talked about how we felt and what things had been like when we were kids. That was on Christmas Eve, and after the conversation I went up to my storeroom and pulled out a short string of LED Christmas lights. I didn’t do anything fancy. I just plugged them in on one side of the fireplace and draped them across the mantel to the other side.

The effect was startling. Somehow, the colored lights made everything feel more like Christmas. No snow came to help–it was 67 F on Christmas Day. No carolers came–they don’t wander country roads. But a string of bright colored lights made a difference. It changed how we felt. It changed what we did. It made Christmas feel like it had when we were kids. All it took was a string of colored lights.