The holiday season is nearly upon us. In this time of love, family, and being touched by a stranger at the airport because you refused to embrace modern technology, it’s important to remember: Every day is Festivus in the Roundup! Here comes another airing of grievances, you molested Luddites!

As if the Fare Assessment she received last week from our brutal overlord Jonathan L. Fischer didn’t send a clear enough message, WaPo‘s Anne Midgette is back with another New York dateline today for the Metropolitan Opera’s “solid” production of Giuseppe Verdi‘s Don Carlo. A closer reading will determine the Fare Assessment rating, but predicting that the show will “sound great in the HD broadcast” that will play in local movie theaters surely is an automatic deduction.

In local theater, TBD’s Maura Judkis continues her series on actors and their severed prop heads. The latest story comes from Chris Dinolfo, currently starring as Berlioz in Synetic Theater’s adaptation of The Master and Margarita. Money quote with a lot of the context removed: “But even though the head is cartoonishly fake, Synetic goes where none of the other fake heads have gone before — an on-stage severing.”

Now that Steven Spielberg‘s long-awaited Lincoln biopic is close to production with the casting of Daniel Day-Lewis as the Great Emancipator and the director popping up in Richmond last to scout locations, Ryan Kearney is reasonably concerned that a typical, nine-digit budget for a Spielberg film could very quickly break the bank on Virginia’s new $2.5 million tax credit program for film productions.

Kearney also comes through with a gift list for the Bieber-beseiged Black Friday shopper.

ReadysetDC has video of last week’s Tweed Ride, the event in which area hipsters impressed themselves by playing Coolidge-era dress-up. It’s enough to make one want to take the Delorean back to the early 2000s and stop this old-timey shit before it had a chance to take off.

And back at The Post, Lisa de Moraes‘ TV Column brings us the final installment of Bristol Palin‘s run on Dancing with the Stars. Turns out Bristol didn’t really come to dance, she just wanted to send “a big middle finger to all the people out there that hate my mom and hate me!” But the joke’s on you, Juneau Juno, as the Mirror Ball Trophy went to Jennifer Grey, the noted communist and one-time associate of Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.

In case being told to fuck off by Mama Grizzly Jr. while you brace yourself for TSA agents cupping your ass cheeks doesn’t warm the cockles of your heart, don’t worry—Christmas is just around the corner, and with it, THE SLEIGHER.