Worse than War Criminals: The Case for Skewering Santa's Elves

My favorite curmudgeon Fred Reed isn't a big fan (to say the least) of what Christmas has become here in America:

I’m going to kill Santa Clause—cart him to the guillotine in a tumbrel, and then carry his head through town on a pike. I mean it. That damned red-nosed reindeer will be sausage. Why is his nose red? Because he’s a drunk. His real name is O’Toole. He emigrated to the North Pole under a forged visa.

I can’t stand it. The entire United States has become on vast elevator, with lame carols raining down like a musical sewage-outflow. Barely musical. There’s no escape. Ringdingchingading, Dingdingchingaring, Santa Clause is coming to…a bad end, if I catch the rascal. I’ll hang him on fish hooks.

Why do we put up with this saccharine compulsory gaiety? I’m dreeeem-ing of a …aaagh! It would drive shellfish to wear ear plugs. But we don’t just tolerate commercial leminghood. We congratulate ourselves on it. News reports tell us excitedly how sales compare with last year’s. Television clips show people pawing at bins in low-end slop chutes, dropping half on the floor.

I want to strangle something. Bring me a duck.

All that tiresome yodeling about things that most people wouldn’t recognize if they tripped over one. Half the public couldn’t tell a reindeer from a hat rack. A one-horse open sleigh? Probably nobody alive has ever seen a sleigh, or, many of them, a horse. It’s ersatz nostalgia for a world we never knew. Buy something.

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