All I Want For Christmas Is You

A fun story on the news this morning.

The British helicopter carrier HMS Ocean was deployed to the Mediterranean back in April of this year on a seven-week training exercise. Unfortunately, when the Libyan uprising began, the ship and crew were diverted to Libya as support for the UN air mission. Without notice, their seven-week training exercise became a seven-month deployment. It became a stressful time for the crew, and when they were informed they wouldn’t be home until Christmas, Lt. Kelly Cleeve came up with the idea of filming a video of her shipmates lip-synching the lyrics to Mariah Carey’s Christmas song, All I Want for Christmas Is You, as a morale booster and a diversion for not only the crew, but for their family and friends back home. Cleeve and Warrant Officer Mick Wakeham filmed and edited the video.

As you can imagine, the crew’s fun video has gone viral and it’s linked below.

But first…

I don’t mean to drop a lump of coal into this nice Christmas story, but when I heard the story this morning I was reminded of Captain Owen Honors, the US Navy captain of the USS Enterprise, and the morale-boosting videos he and some of his fellow officers made back when he was that ship’s executive officer. That story surfaced back in January of this year and Captain Honors wound up losing his job over the videos. I really can’t defend the videos he helped make while executive officer of the USS Enterprise because they were in bad taste, but then I’ve never been in the US Navy and I don’t know what’s traditionally been acceptable, or what’s traditionally been considered bad taste, and my understanding at the time of the story was that the videos weren’t anything new and the reason they suddenly became a problem for Captain Honors was because they happened to surface on the internet. I guess the part that bothers me the most about Captain Honors’ story isn’t that the morale-boosting videos were made, but that based on the video clips I saw, which were, again, in bad taste, they weren’t worse than any tasteless sitcom we’ve seen on television nearly every night of the week for decades and we have no problem accepting those without question. It was unfortunate that a good soldier, and by all accounts, a good man, had to lose his position and career over the incident while actors, writers and producers are rewarded with fame and riches for being tastless and offensive.

Oh well, that’s too depressing a story to think about and who likes thinking about depressing stories? Well, I guess I generally do, but that’s besides the point… Let’s forget about the story of the USS Enterprise and their videos and think instead about the story of the HMS Ocean and their Christmas video. To help with that, here is the HMS Ocean’s video which I’m also including as part of today’s Monday’s Music Moves Me.