Experimental composer Charles / FRI 12-15-23 / Nephalist / Lines from a rapper in slang / Yard, nautically / Likely hyperbole from a texter / Button usually held down by a pinkie / Warning letters with a reddit link / West Coast NFL'er

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Just kidding, I lost my capacity for that long ago. I was not at all sure of this answer when I threw it across, but after CHILD'S TELESCOPE wouldn't fit, CHILDLIKE WONDER (34A: What on might look at the night sky with) was the first thing that came to mind. It's a corny phrase, but one thing I do love is that it's paired with the perpendicular grid-spanner HALLMARK HOLIDAY, which basically leaves you with The Two Holiday Spirits: Delight and Cynicism. People seem to mostly enjoy the Christmas season, but there is no more "overly commercialized celebration" than Christmas, so ... pick your feeling! I just like how the marquee answers seem to be marking out the spectrum of seasonal emotions. Very timely. I for one love the holiday season, mostly because of the lights people put up. It's a nice neighborhood feature during the darkest time of the year. We put colored lights in the bushes out front for the first time in a long time. They are not fancy, but they make me happy, as does our tiny Christmas tree, decorated with ridiculous ornaments we've accumulated over the years. Almost every commercial thing about Christmas, however, makes me miserable. Well, "miserable" may be too strong. Miserable-ISH. Put off, maybe. Irked. Anyway, I offer this discursion about my Christmas ambivalence as a prelude to my favorite, only mildly facetious wrong answer of the day. Faced with two ELS at the end of 55D: Common place to see Santa, I went with ...

Really liked the two longer colloquialisms today ("CAN YOU NOT?!""... AND STAY OUT!"). Did not so much like all the textisms. Just a barrage of textisms. First, FTW ("For the win!"), which I actually haven't seen / heard in years, but at least (unlike so many faddish expressions) it stayed in my brain. Then not only NSFW and ROFL, but NSFW *crossing* ROFL. These initialisms have appeared in the grid enough that even if you aren't a big adopter of texting shorthand, you should know them. And yet, ick. Don't cross these. It's ugly. Just a horrid letter train wreck.

It's been a year since we've seen LIANA (50A: Tropical vine). Did you know we once went nearly seven years without seeing LIANA!? It's true. Good times. LIANA is Pantheon-level crosswordese, one of those short words seen only in crosswords that I learned early early on in my solving career (so, early '90s). If you didn't know it, do not feel bad. Look how much the '80s liked LIANA!

Shortz, to his credit, brought fill like LIANA to heel. Still, a handy word to know, just in case. My only real "Word I Don't Know" today was INUK, which is making its debut today (!?!?!?) (10D: Arctic native). Glad it's a debut because I was like "how have I never seen this before?" INUIT is a crossword legend, but INUK, nowhere in sight ... until today.

I had KNOT before SPAR (1A: Yard, nautically). Did you know YARD is slang for $100? I've been watching Blast of Silence (1961), the 4th-greatest Christmas movie of all time, and they say YARD for $100 in that picture. It's good old-timey criminal slang. But not "nautical," I don't think, so not relevant here. I hesitated at OCHER v OCHRE, as I always will (29A: Earth-based pigment). I knew WENDIE Malick, though I did not know the spelling. Still, just knowing meant that I could make the spelling work, by inference. "If not WENDY, then ... WENDIE." I guess WENDEE was possible, but that just looks stupid (apologies to all the WENDEEs out there, both of you). "Stubbles" in the plural feels awful (18A: What stubbles may become => BEARDS). So many other ways you might've gone there without resorting to a plural no one would touch.