“And have INTERPOL back up my ass?” Bellowed Santa. “Well, why don’t you just take them from the naughty kids again and…” “It doesn’t Goddamn matter about one rocking horse! I’m THOUSANDS of gifts short!” Besides, remember in the 50’s? We used to stuff stockings with cartons of Lucky Strikes.”Īt this Santa sprang back to his feet, suddenly fuming. “Now Santa, not a single cancer-related death was ever positively linked to our watches. “They’re not just pointy, you nit-wit! They’re radioactive!” He slumped down onto a nearby bench. “Well,” said the elf, “ever since this whole Indiglo thing came up, we don’t really have a lot of call for the old glowing hands, so we thought maybe, you know, this might work. “Great God in Heaven! What were you little morons thinking?!” “Yeah, what is it?” asked Santa, turning to look. ![]() He was contemplating reinstating a plan he had used once years before wherein toys already belonging to naughty children are stolen and re-gifted to nice ones, when a gruff, older elf approached him carrying a rocking horse fitted with a saddle made from old glow-in-the-dark watch hands. He had just discovered 653 pages of the naughty – nice list wedged between the cushions of his sofa, and while most of the children on it were naughty, he was still short almost 17,000 gifts. It was Christmas Eve at the North Pole, and Santa Claus, as is not unusual for a man of his carriage in a high-stress position, was on the verge of a massive coronary. So allow me to present, to the best of my ability, my father’s story of How the Angel Got on Top of the Christmas Tree. It is one of my most cherished Christmas traditions, and one I would like to share. We top our tree with an angel, and every year as my mother pulls out the realistically-rendered, red-robed heavenly guardian she bought about ten years back (and I push hard in favor of the chintzy, haloed female figure my great-grandmother made god-knows-when out of gold wire and a plastic champagne glass) my father clears his throat and asks: “Did I ever tell you the story of how the angel got on top of the Christmas tree?” So every year we get a tree and put lights on it and decorate it with a variety of hideous ornaments that my brother and I created through sheer talent and will power during the long, hot hours of our preschool craft time. It is after all the most important, what with the birth of Christ having been arbitrarily placed on December 25th in order to coincide with the already popular pagan mid-winter festivals, thus easing the conversion of the peoples of eastern Europe. But as a family, we did (and still do) buy into Christmas a bit more than the other big days on the Christian calender. Easter was all bunnies and chocolate eggs, and Lent was a word I had heard somewhere. We could call ourselves Christians and eat ourselves into a comatose state on all the relevant holidays, but we could also shoplift and engage in guilt-free masturbation. Specifically, my family aligned itself with a brand of Unitarianism that required no actual religious practice of any kind. ![]() No, my formative years were largely devoid of religion. Paganism implies that one worships something, be it the Sun God Ra, the trickster Pan, or Zeus, God of Thunder and Lightning. It wouldn’t be fair to describe my upbringing as Pagan. ![]() Christmas Angel Illustration by Juan Pablo Canale Banus
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