Chairman Kringle sez…

“Heightened Vigilance Will Defend our Jesusland!”

As I’m sure everyone knows, two of Santa’s most famous sayings are, “Mistletoe grows out of the barrel of a gun.” and “Christmas is war without bloodshed, while war is Christmas with bloodshed.”

And thanks to the sterling efforts of Comrade Bill O’Reilly, this Noel Season that sentiment has never been been more relentlessly and mercilessly hammered home, because when it comes to the Wholly Ginned Up War for Christmas, nothing less Totalen Krieg Kringle will suffice to see us through to the that glorious day of complete victory over our enemies.

But in the wake of even the most splendid battles and most absolute triumphs over the non-believer comes the aftermath, and the War for Christmas is no exception. After the masses have passed and worked their will on the landscape comes the assessment of the losses. The binding up of our nation's wounds in shiny paper and pretty bows.

Tonight I had to make a brief stop at a local Dominick’s (the regional face of Safeway, and eternal competitor of Jewel. Or, if you live here, “Da Jewels”.) and took a long walk down the “Seasonal” aisle to see what had been left behind after the righteous had swept through and gleaned every decent sliver of candy and stuffed, grocery-store-grade toy.

What I saw was not pretty, and it left me a changed man.

"Disney’s Jammin’ Easy to Make Jam Kit!” Because nothing says “Jesus” like gansta punctuation and an asexual Mouse and his methed-up dog tempting you to spend a perfectly good gaming afternoon making some chemo-jelly-analog when you can buy Welch’s by the drum for $3.00 at CostCo.

Some glop with the consistency of warm clots called “Brachs Winter Nougats”. I touched it. Oh god. If Satan’s nads had been basted in triply-rectified peppermint so toxic the stink penetrates thick plastic…

Now I’ll have nightmares and dare not smell my own finger.

Straw-stuffed Santas doing lurid, Mary Lou Retton splits and stick-angled snowmen with hydroencephalic -heads called the “Spirits Bright Stuffed Christmas Door Draft Décor.”

WTF? How many languages do you think that had to be badly strained through to come up with “Spirits Bright Stuffed Christmas Door Draft Décor"?


And don’t forget your, “Original Advent Calendar With 24 Milk Chocolates” for which I felt marginally sad. This “chocolate of last restort” piled up like remaindered books, still gamely trying to retain some vestige of religiosity.

Horrifiying things called "body ottomans" roughly in the shape of Santa Claus and Snowman. Like malformed toilet training seats. With heads. And arms. Ab-so-lu-tely guaranteed to traumatize the little ones for life. There was also a noseless Gingerbread Men model (apparently shooting for that microscopic, “I want my fanny hugged and analingulated by Tycho Brahe” market.)

Then, cruelly, the arson section suddenly begins. Shelves bursting with lighter fluid. Tins of Sterno. Ohio Bluetips. And a variety of accelerant-laced pseudo-logs for when you just have to burn shit Right Now!

The Whitest Unnaturalest Creatures Cthulu ever decanted – a heap of white-fudge-covered-marshmallow Frosty the Snowman things – squatted next to the pile of incendiary Yuletide fun and practically begged me like a glucose Greek Chorus to end their misery, but I was not strong enough to help them in their hour of need.

And shit, they were marked down from $1.69 a box to two for three bucks, although I still think you’d get a better sugar-deal -- pound for pound -- just taking a whole jar Marshmallow Fluff and mainlining straight into your femoral artery with a piping bag.

Then I ran into “Polly!” in her “Heli-car-pter” because they can’t pay real writers enough to write ad copy for an abomination like this.

”Bratz Babyz”? The sad and all-too-commonplace logic here is if you whip a “z” on the end of it, a crappy plastic off-brand toy’s sted cred’s just gonna skyrocket! Hint: It never does.

And, at the end, row after row of untouched, “Angel del la Fiestas Barbie” clad in stiff, white petro-taffeta and a helix of ribbon, legs slightly spread to allow ample back-door room for the tip of a Douglas Fir to be jammed up her ass. Which, while that may be justice – or at least some form of doll-fetish so rarified that I have never heard of it before -- if I come to your house and you have an actual Barbie straddling your actual Xmas pine in some kind of bondage anal arboreal angel Christian sacrificial/homage Druid thing and you aren’t going for irony, I will flee your house and never, ever come back.

The collective effect of which was to make me stop and think for a moment that maybe – just maybe -- what Einstein said was true after all. Just between you and me, as counterrevolutionary as it sounds, maybe the only way to win a War for Christmas is never to fight one.

Maybe, in the name of the Prince of Peace, making the streets run red and white and green with the blood and entrails of people who just don’t want to be beaten over the head with Mandatory Yuletide Jollity and the death rictus smile of Enforced Musak Christianity isn't worth the price.

In a world where none are left standing to restart civilization but rough beasts like Angel del la Fiestas Barbies and white-fudge-covered-marshmallow Frosty the Snowmen, slouching towards Santaland to be born, I believe the survivors would come to envy the dead.