To hell with Christmas

Who killed Christmas? It wasn’t all us overly considerate types who like to substitute “Happy Holidays” for “Merry Christmas” so as to avoid giving offense to celebrants of Yule or Hanukkah. No, it was you – all you so-called Christians, masters of the pious shell game, who work to perpetuate this notion of an old guy in the sky who rewards good behavior with a buttload of material goods. God don’t like that, and it says so right in your Holy Bible, if you’d bother to read it. The message of the Book of Job is pretty goddamned hard to miss.

As long as I’m playing Scrooge, this story reminds me why I used to be a metal head: cut the “White Christmas” crap, pass the Slayer.

The 6-year-old Indiana boy who was killed when a jetliner skidded off a snowy runway at a Chicago airport was singing “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” when the plane crushed his father’s car, a family friend said yesterday. …”His mother said he didn’t suffer,” the family’s neighbor, Jean Cottrell, said. “She said it was a miracle nobody else in the family was seriously hurt.” …

Joshua’s dad, truck driver Leroy Woods, was at the wheel of the Pontiac when it was struck. His wife, Lisa, and three of their four sons were in the car with them.

“They were going to see Lisa’s parents to do some Christmas shopping,” Cottrell said. “Joshua was a sweetheart. A cute little boy who was missing his two front teeth.”

Cottrell said the town is raising money to pay for the funeral.

“I know they can’t afford it,” she said. “Leroy is just a hardworking regular Joe. She’s a stay-at-home mom. What an awful Christmas for them.”

Of course, this is America, so you can’t just blame God, or Fate, or whatever. We’re a nation of positive thinkers; life can’t just suck. So brace yourselves for months of investigations and hearings, finger-pointing and earnest soul-searching. Someone has to be found culpable so that This Kind of Thing Can Never Happen Again. Or, at least, not to the hard-working consumers of this most divinely favored of nations, whose happiness is, like our standard of living, completely non-negotiable.

Ah hell, this is all too depressing. I think I’ll go shopping.

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