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Christmas Lies 1999 Santa Was Circling Overhead Many years ago, on Christmas Eve when I was 4 or 5 years old, I was excited about Christmas. I imagined all the toys I would find in the morning, and would not go to sleep! My parents put me to bed, but I wanted to stay awake and see Santa. After a few hours of waiting for me to sleep, my mother saw an airplane flying overhead and took me outside. She told me the red light (which I later found out was a wing illumination light) was Rudolph's red nose glowing and that Santa was circling the house waiting for me to sleep so he could drop off the presents. I was in bed and sleeping within 10 minutes! I look forward now to using this story to get my 3 year old daughter to go to sleep on Christmas Eve - thanks Mom! send in your story to more Lies People Tell
CHRISTMAS RANT Many American retailers do almost two thirds of their business for the entire year in the two months leading up to Christmas. It's a nauseating statistic and it shows what sheep we are. We're still digesting the great dead bird of Thanksgiving as we stagger en masse into the muzak mazes that are the malls of our great country. It doesn't irk me that people want to spend a lot of money to buy each other gifts. What irks me is that they buy a bunch of meaningless crud that will only end up cluttering some landfill. The single most uncreative act that any one person can do at Christmas time is to even step into a mall or a superstore. There's nothing there. We already know that there is nothing there before we even go. But there we are again, standing in some thirty person deep line at Ross Dress for Gless, Pall Mart, or K-fart, or whatever the heck superstore we live near, buying an armload of cheap crap to wrap. That's what I'm calling my new superstore: CRAP to WRAP. That's mine! www.craptowrap.com (it's not a real domain, this is satire). Yes, I will fill my huge warehouse sized superstore with tons of trinkets and billions of baubles that will delight and amuse. Most of it will cost under twenty bucks and the people will pour in and buy, buy, buy! It won't matter for whom they buy, they buy for me, me, me. Yes! The mindless fools will do nothing but watch my commercials on television and see my adds in glossy magazines and they will come buy things that they don't need and they will buy things that no one needs. I will have convinced them that they need these things, but the fools, the sad fools will never know that they don't need these things. I will convince them that they need these things to look pretty, to feel acceptable, to feel strong, to feel happy. Yes, I will have thousands of adds making them believe that even their own scent needs to be masked by deodorants. I will hire impossibly beautiful women to inspire fear and dread into the hearts of all other women. I will fill the airwaves with only images of a success that equals a great accumulation of the items in my store: Crap to Wrap. Okay, my soapbox is starting to topple. I really can't sustain a good rant for very long these days. It's a shortcoming, I know. It's just that I have come to learn that I can't really do too much to change the way other people think, even if the way I think is so vastly superior. People will have to learn in their own time that they don't need to buy this world full of crap. They will learn in their own time that they will be happier if they don't watch T.V. or look at the ads in magazines. Sheesh, my wife brings home this Martha Stewart magazine and suddenly even I start to fall for all those damn pretty baubles. Or this ad that I saw in the New Yorker for the new... hey, stop me before I turn into one of these mindless consumers. So this is my pitch: CREATE stuff for your family and friends for Christmas! Make stuff out of anything. Bottle caps, bowling bowls, old clothes. Do drawings, sculptures, anything, just don't let the world be filled with more tin and plastic crap produced by slave laborers from far away lands. Let your heart speak through your fingers as you actually put your time and energy into fashioning something of your own devising. It will mean a lot more than anything you can find on a shelf. send in your story to
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