senoritafish | A Christmas giggle...

Since I am feeling particularly unimaginative this evening - tired as well, since I got up at 4:30 (what the hell am I still awake for {and can I possibly add any more parenthetical phrases?}) - I shall now defer to that god among humorists, Garrison Keillor, who kindly emails us once a week:

A NOTE FROM GARRISON

Let's be frank about fruit cake. Okay, maybe your mom makes terrific fruit cake, and you eat two of them every year in the dark while listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sing "Silent Night" and your eyes fill up with tears and this is the emotional highlight of your year. Fine. I'm not here to badmouth your mother's fruitcake. But --- she only makes a few fruitcakes a year, and that leaves the other thirty-two-point-seven million fruitcakes, and let me tell you about them.

They're made in March and April in a gigantic factory in Indonesia, sent to the U.S. in the form of thirty-foot fruit logs that are then cut up and wrapped in cellophane, stored in surplus fruitcake silos in Iowa, delivered to stores, sold, and nobody eats them because they're inedible, so you keep it in the refrigerator for six months, and in July it's sent to a fruitcake disposal site in Utah and put into concrete cannisters with millions of other fruitcakes and buried in the desert. (Those mountains around Salt Lake City where people go to ski are former fruitcake disposal sites.)

Now let's talk about "Little Drummer Boy". There are wonderful Christmas carols and others somewhat less wonderful and some that, after eight-hundred-or-so times, you'd rather not hear again anytime soon, and then there are songs like "Do You Hear What I Hear?" whose author you'd enjoy throwing barefoot into a sandburr patch, and then there is "Little Drummer Boy".

When I hear a choir go "Rum-tum-tum-rum-tum-tum-tum," I see multi-colored dots and feel the veins in my head bulge. If I'm in a store, I walk out the door and never go back; if I'm in my car, I never listen to that radio station again. I have heard of people whose minds snapped from hearing "Little Drummer Boy" and they dropped their shopping bags and ran crouched through the mall grunting and foaming like Lon Chaney Jr. in "The Return of the Wolf Man" and they had to be tackled by security guards and taken to a sanitarium run by the Sisters of Mercy and kept in absolute silence for three months. They did crafts and flower-arranging and painted water colors and ambled along the poplar-shaded walks and admired the flowers in the Sisters' cloister, and by spring, they were ready to resume their lives, though still under a doctor's care.

Now I'm going to tell you something, and I'll only say this once: the consequences of hearing "Little Drummer Boy" while eating a piece of fruitcake are not pretty, and while I'm not one who goes in for alarming the American people, I know of a young man from a fine family who swallowed a chunk of fruitcake in the same instant that a choir rum-tum-tummed, and that was years ago and we have never spoken of him since.

~Garrison Keillor
[from The Seven Dangers of Christmas]

(although actually I like "Do You Hear What I Hear" and "The Little Drummer Boy" is ok, especially the version by Bing Crosby and David Bowie)