If Donald Trump Were Santa Claus

 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

In the world of “What If,” since it is almost Christmas, I can’t help but come up with a weird idea  -- what if Santa Claus were to retire and Donald Trump take over.

First, The Donald would move his headquarters from the North Pole to Florida.  Only he and his secretary would relocate, however.  He would leave the elves up in the frozen north, under the supervision of overseers, and would lower their pay to just above poverty level.  The elves, of course, would go on strike.  The Donald would respond by bringing in thousands of laborers from India and expecting them to get used to living in subzero temperatures.

Herr Orangenfuehrer would not travel on Christmas Eve via sleigh and reindeer.  He would commission a special flying gold Mercedes, at taxpayer expense.  In the meantime, he would encourage his Indian toymakers up north to slaughter and eat the reindeer, which he would look upon as useless.  Rudolph’s shiny nose would be used as a street lamp.

When his Indian workers decide to join the elves on strike, the tiny-fingered dictator wannabe would outsource the toymaking to small businesses, which he would refuse to pay for reasons only he would know.

Donald Dishonest would kiss the behinds of his Evangelical followers by shouting all over the place that Christmas is Jesus’ birthday and must only be celebrated as such.  The fact that he doesn’t care a whit about this fact and is only saying it to make himself look good won’t make a difference.  Enough people will believe that he is religious to enable him to fool some of the people some of the time.

The Orange Menace would declare a moratorium on his tariffs, but only for his North Pole-Florida toymaking business.  Everybody else would just have to suffer.

Last but not at all least, Donald Trampler would not distribute toys to anyone on Christmas Eve.  Instead, he would travel the world in his flying gold Mercedes and expect people in every home in the world to give him gifts.  He would return to Florida with an overloaded Mercedes filled with the world’s enforced tribute.

Of course, most of his loot would consist of gag gifts because the majority of the people on the earth hate him and think he’s a stupid clown, but he will be too brain-addled to notice.

The North Pole-Florida toy company would go bankrupt because of neglect and mismanagement.

And that, dear readers, is what would happen.

 

The Christmas Movie Quiz

Any day now, they will start.  TV networks will broadcast classic Christmas movies, and they won’t stop until Christmas is over.  There will probably even be a marathon of A Christmas Story, as there has been every year since ... please don’t ask me, because I can’t remember.

In order to prepare for this yearly film festival, I have prepared a little quiz that will make you aware of how much you need to bone up on your Christmas movie knowledge, so that you can get up and go to the kitchen at any time during any of the shows without missing anything important.

The Christmas Movie Quiz

1.       Home Alone:  What is the name of the kid who is left alone on Christmas?

a.       Buddy

b.      Ed

c.       Kevin

d.      Krampus

e.       That’s no kid.  That’s a miniature demon.

2.       Home Alone:  Why does _______’s family leave him alone on Christmas?

a.       He’s an obnoxious brat and they hate him

b.      They’re stupid

c.       He’s stupid

d.      They’re late leaving for the airport to go to Europe and, in their hurry, they leave him behind

e.       All of the above

3.      Elf:  What is the name of the man who was raised by elves at the North Pole?

a.       Buddy

b.      Ed

c.       Kevin

d.      Krampus

e.       That’s no elf.  That’s a moron in a green suit.

4.      It’s a Wonderful Life:  What is the famous quote about bells in this movie?

a.       Ring those bells!

b.      Who keeps ringing those stupid bells?

c.       This is the one that made me deaf.

d.      Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.

e.       Keep doing that, and you’ll be hearing bells!

5.      The Bishop’s Wife:  Why does an angel who looks like Cary Grant choose a name like Dudley?

a.       It’s his name

b.      Nobody knows

c.       Nobody cares

d.      He won that name in a lottery

e.       It’s a nice name and he likes it

6.      Miracle on 34^th Street:  Poll:  Is Mr. Kringle really Santa Claus?

a.       Oh, come on!  You always wanted to think he was!

b.      He thinks he is, and that’s all that counts.

c.       Of course he is.  His beard is real, and everything.

d.      Are you joking?

e.       Anything is possible, if you just believe.

7.      A Christmas Story:  What does Ralphie want for Christmas?

a.       A pair of bunny pajamas with feet

b.      Somebody to force-feed his little brother

c.       A supply of Lifebuoy soap

d.     A Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle. 

e.       A football

8.      A Christmas Story:  What radio personality lets Ralphie down in a very dramatic way?

a.       The Lone Ranger

b.      Jack Benny

c.       The Shadow

d.      Little Orphan Annie

e.       Ovaltine

9.      The Polar Express:  All of the kids on the Polar Express are traveling to the North Pole in their pajamas.  Why don’t they put on their coats?

a.       Mom isn’t watching them.

b.      The train only stops long enough for them to run out the door.

c.       The look in the eyes of that scary conductor

d.      They don’t want to

e.       All of the above

10.  The Polar Express:  Who sings the theme song in this film?

a.       Some jerk

b.      A guy with a tenor voice

c.       Josh Groban

d.      Luciano Pavarotti

e.       A computer

Okay.  I have given you enough to get you started.  It is now up to you.

The Christmas Song Generator

Are you tired of hearing the same old Christmas music over and over?  The solution is obvious:  create your own song!

The easiest way to do this is to take a pre-existing song and change some of the words, to put your personal stamp on it.

To get everyone started, here is Christmas Song Generator No. 1:

To the tune of A Holly Jolly Christmas:[1]

Have a (insert two adjectives) Christmas

It’s the (insert adjective) time of the year.

I don't know if there'll be (insert noun)
but have a (insert name of food or beverage)
Have a (insert two adjectives) Christmas;
And when you (insert verb) down the (insert noun)
Say (insert greeting) to (insert plural noun) you know
and everyone you meet

Oh ho
the (insert noun)
hung where you can see;
(insert name of person or a pronoun) waits for you;
(insert verb) once for me
Have a (insert two adjectives) Christmas

and in case you didn't hear
Oh by golly
Have a (insert two adjectives) Christmas

This year

At the next Christmas party, you will dazzle your friends with your lyric-writing ability, especially if they have been drinking too much egg nog.

---

[1] “A Holly, Jolly Christmas,” composed by Johnny Marks in 1962.  Sung by Burl Ives in the 1964 Christmas special, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

I Want Christmas! -- Memories

Okay.  I already told everyone about my stage debut as Innkeeper No. 2 in the St. Joseph’s Elementary School annual Christmas pageant.  If you haven’t already read about it, you can find it here.  I won’t repeat that story again – not that it isn’t a good story, I just don’t want to go through all the trouble and I don’t want to bore you.

I didn’t tell you about the doll house, though.  That was one of those magical Christmases.  I was about 4 or 5 years old.  My parents and I were living in a one-bedroom apartment behind my maternal grandparents’ gas station, on our little town’s Main Street, which was part of a longer highway that extended to nearby towns and to the small city located about three miles away.  It was a noisy, busy highway and my parents and grandparents were always watching to make sure I didn’t venture onto it and get myself run over by some passing idiot driver motorist.  The little apartment was cramped and old.  A few years later, we would move across Main Street, into a much bigger house, but for the time being we were roughing it.

My parents didn’t have much money then.  My father was working seasonal jobs as a bricklayer.  My mother was not yet working outside the home.  Things were tight.  Of course, being a little kid, I didn’t know that.  My parents knew it because they were the ones who had to figure out how to live on peanuts.  There was never a thought, though, of not having Christmas.  Of course, we had a tree.  In my memory’s eye (which can be mistaken because, after all, I am now 70 years old and this happened back in the very early 1950s) it was a small tree.  To my young eyes, it was probably the most beautiful Christmas tree in the world.  I was easy to please.

That Christmas, I woke up, got up out of my bed in the apartment’s only bedroom and walked into the living room.  There, by the tree, was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.  It was a doll house.  It was unwrapped, probably because it was too big to wrap with whatever Christmas paper my parents had.  There were other presents, too, but the doll house was the centerpiece.  Of course, it was just an inexpensive metal one, but to me it was a miniature palace.

I played with that doll house for years until, eventually, it became dented and worn out.  I don’t know how it met its end.  It was probably tossed out.  But that would be in the future.  On that Christmas morning, it was the best present ever.

Another thing I remember from around that time is that I was scared to death of sitting on Santa Claus’ lap.  Nobody could get me to do it.  I was a pathologically shy kid, anyway, and a big, bearded fat man in a red suit with a loud voice could send me hiding behind my Mom’s coat.  Finally, one day, someone (I think it was Mom) got me to sit on the lap of some Santa or other and tell him what I wanted for Christmas.  I did it very well, too.  I actually talked and I didn’t cry.  Word of my accomplishment got around the family and my parents’ friends, and they must have thought it was cute because some of them laughed.

Fast forward to my high school years.  By then, everyone knew I could sing and I had ambitions to become an opera singer.  One Christmas, I found myself part of a small choir rehearsing to sing at the Midnight Mass at our Catholic parish church.  The choir was being led by a man whose desire to serve far outweighed his musical ability.  He couldn’t even carry a tune, a real drawback in a choir director.  The choir consisted of two men and three females:  my younger sister, another soprano and myself.  We three females had good singing voices.  The two men, on the other hand, were at least as tone-deaf as the director.  This made for an interesting balance.  My sister was the youngest of the female participants, so the other soprano and I were the ones who ended up trying to make sure the whole thing wasn’t a disaster.

Somehow, we got through the mass, and that particular singing group disbanded for good.  Nobody was sorry about that.

I Want Christmas, Continued Again

The Art of Opening Gifts

Like all arts, gift wrapping requires concentration, dedication and talent.  Most of us don’t have that much talent for making something immortal out of fancy colored paper, ribbon and Scotch tape.  Concentration and dedication are not even considered, because we just want to get the whole thing over so we can get on with something more fun, such as watching Christmas movies on Lifetime or eating a lot of cookies.

The other popular Christmas art is opening gifts.  Different people have different techniques for peeling off the layers of paper and ribbon and revealing whatever treasure or dreck is inside.

(A)                There is one adult female in every family who sits and looks at a wrapped present and says, “It’s so pretty, I hate to open it.”  Her lack of perspective concerning what is important (the present inside the wrapping) and what is not important (the wrapping) and her hesitance to get on with it make everyone else want to pick her up and shake her like a rattle.

When she is finally persuaded to disturb the wrapping, and find out what she is getting, she VERY slowly and VERY carefully, with great reverence, frees the gift of, first, the ribbon, then the paper.  This gives her time to form a plan of how she is going to react if the present inside is something she must hide in a closet or re-gift to someone she hates.

(B)                I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have never seen a man act like (A) above.  Men usually prefer to rip the damned paper open as fast as possible to see if, this year, they lucked out and are getting something good for a change.  There is still a certain art involved.  A man can either rip open a gift with great <i>élan</i> or with great disinterest, knowing he is probably getting cologne, aftershave or a tie for the fourteenth year in a row.

(C)                Women who are more impatient than (A) above – in other words, the rest of us – usually take reasonable precautions not to tear the wrapping too much while trying to get at whatever is inside.  We were brainwashed by our mothers to save used Christmas wrap from one year to another, and we still have Mom’s voice deep in our psyches.  That is the Voice of Christmas Past, and it never goes away.

(D)               Some gifts, such as a new Harley, are too big to be wrapped.  In that case, nobody has to open anything.  They just have to figure out how to get the thing out of the living room.  This takes half the fun out of getting a present, but it saves paper.

(E)                Many families have a joker who loves to put a small sized gift into a large box with a lot of stuffing to take up the extra space.  I used to be one of those jokers, until I grew up.  This provides endless fun to everyone except the recipient when the gift is opened.  If an adult pulls this trick on another adult, the present had better be something spectacular, if the gift giver knows what’s good for him.

(F)                Kids are not concerned about such mundane things as wrapping paper.  If they are left to their own devices, they will have pieces of mutilated gift wrapping all over the living room floor by the time they get through opening their presents.  Mom is usually watching, though, and making sure that enough re-usable paper survives the yearly paper holocaust, to be used again the following year.  She learned this from HER Mom, who learned it from HER Mom, who learned it from HER Mom, who survived the Great Depression.

The Original Family Gift Wrapping Saver

 Giving gifts to our loved ones and beautiful Christmas memories to our children are wonderful things.

I Want Christmas, Continued!

I always love the Christmas season, but this year, more than ever, I need a good old-fashioned one.  I have a terminal case of We-Are-Going-To-Have-a-Sociopath-in-the-White-House Syndrome.

Even back in ancient times, before cable TV, smartphones and the Internet, we knew how to celebrate the Christmas season.

It always started off with the annual collection.  This was my idea.  All three of us Minicozzi kids would pool our money together to buy gifts for Dad, Mom, Grandma and Grandpa.  As the Advent season ground on, we would add whatever coins we could spare to the fund, and by a few days before Christmas we would have enough to get something nice for all four of them.

“Nice” was a relative term.  Our family was working class, and we lived in a small town, next to a small city, in the middle of the apple growing area of Washington State.  Nobody in our family expected diamonds or anything like that.  We weren’t rich, not by any kind of stretch.  Some sweet-smelling hand lotion from the dime store was a “nice” gift from three kids who had been pooling their change.

We always had the most fun on the days and weeks leading up to Christmas.  The streets in the Downtown shopping area in the small city next to our small town were decorated for the season, and the stores had their colorful displays in the windows.  Window shopping and browsing were obligatory and fun, especially if you were trying to figure out what you could get for Mom, Dad, Grandma and Grandpa with the money collected from you and your siblings.  I think that’s where I learned how to be both budget conscious and a spendthrift.  I can spend a lot of money, but I know how to get a bunch of decent stuff in return, even if some of it is stuff I don’t need.

I don’t remember when I stopped sitting on a store Santa’s lap, but I remember one of the times I did.  I was a terminally shy kid, but I was persuaded to go and sit on the lap of the big man with the big beard and tell him what I wanted for Christmas.  I must have been cute or funny, or both, because my parents laughed about it and told their friends.

Our Catholic elementary school held a Christmas Pageant every year, and the whole school took part.  Every grade had a presentation.  I made my stage debut in the First Grade, as an innkeeper.  Our grade was presenting The Nativity that year.  When the time came to cast everyone, Sister A. gave all the plum parts to other kids.  I was a homely kid, tall for my age and awkward.  In addition, I had attention deficit problems.  There was no way that I was going to get the part of the Virgin Mary, and I was not likely to be cast as an angel, either.  Joseph, the shepherds and the wise men were all boys.  The only thing left that would at least give me a line or two and a chance to shine was the part of an innkeeper.  I became Innkeeper No. 2, in a line of three.  Innkeeper No. 3 (a boy, of course) was the one who got all the lines because he got to direct Mary and Joseph to the stable.  All I got to say was that I didn’t have any room.

I learned very early in life that it’s best to get on the good side of the director if you want to be cast in a decent role.

I got a laugh when I spoke my line in the performance.  I wasn’t trying to be funny.  I was telling the two holiest people in the world that I couldn’t put them up, for Pete’s sake!  Later, my Mom told me that the audience laughed because I was cute up there.  I wasn’t trying for cute, either.  I was trying for unforgettable.  I was unforgettable, but not in the way I wanted.

I have a special memory of the school Christmas Pageant when I was in the Eighth Grade.  My singing voice had been discovered the year before, and my wonderful Seventh Grade teacher, Sr. Ernest, had passed the word on to my very dear music teacher, Sr. Dolores Mary, who had arranged for me to get singing lessons at a local music school on a partial scholarship.  In the Eighth Grade, I was asked to sing “O Holy Night” in the annual pageant.  The catch, though, was that I had to sing it in French.  I had never attempted French in my life.  Sister Ernest, who was of French extraction, taught me how to sing the words phonetically.  Poor Sister Ernest!  She tried hard, but I had a terrible time getting my American mouth around some of the French pronunciation!  I wish I could sing it for her now, because now I can do it properly.  Back then I was just a kid who couldn’t speak French who was thrilled to be asked to sing such a big solo.

Sister Ernest would be proud.

==========================

For more of my humor, go here.

I Want Christmas!

I know.  Thanksgiving Day hasn’t even come yet, and I’m on Christmas already.  This year (2016) I am in desperate need of Christmas, more than ever.  It’s one of the symptoms of a disease called We-Are-Going-to-Have-a-Sociopath-In-The-White-House Syndrome.

This would have made my mother say,
"It's so pretty, I hate to open it!"

What Not to Give Me (A Single Female Baby Boomer) for Christmas

Everyone likes to get presents.  I am no exception.  There are times, though, when a thoughtful gift can turn into a pain in the ass.

Take large plants, for example.  There are people who love spending time with plants.  I am not one of those people, and there are many more of us.  Plants don’t like me.  I think plants are fine, so long as someone else is taking care of them.  I am the kind of plant parent who thinks that plants should be seen, but not in your face.  When I DO give a plant attention, it is a death sentence.  Plants take one look at me and die, because they know they are doomed, anyway.  Never give someone like me a plant, if you value its life.

Please don’t give me a pet, either.  I already have one:  Harmony the Cat.  She has been an only cat since I adopted her, and I don’t think she’d take kindly to having competition for her position as Empress of the Apartment.  I don’t relish the thought of fights to the death being conducted in my living room.[1]

Another impractical kind of gift for me is any kind that involves large amounts of perishable food.  This includes big baskets of fruit.  Fruit is delicious.  I love almost all kinds of fruits, especially things like grapes, apples, pears, peaches and oranges.  Those things can be easily eaten.  Whole fresh pineapples and whole coconuts require muscles and/or sharp implements and a lot of patience.  Often, there is a whole fresh pineapple in the middle of one of those big baskets of fruit.  To add more craziness, one person cannot possibly eat all that fruit before it starts to go bad.  Have you ever tried giving fruit away to your friends?  Don’t – unless you enjoy wasting time and carrying oranges around.

Nobody has ever given me a Costco gift certificate, and I hope that nobody will ever do that.  I have never taken out a membership in any company that expects customers to buy things in bulk.  Families can save money that way.  I would only end up with a small apartment full of stuff that would go bad or that it would take me a year to use up.  Yes, you can buy a TV at Costco, but that never occurs to me because there are so many other places to get a good bargain on a TV.  On the other hand, if anyone wants to give me a Costco gift certificate for a great meal at a fine restaurant, I will grab it and love it.

Oh, and I live in a small apartment.  Before anyone gives me anything that takes up room, I hope s/he takes the size of my apartment into consideration, especially if it is a butt ugly thing that the giver is re-gifting to me.

... like this thing!

Pretty dishtowels are nice, and I have one hanging in my kitchen.  I almost never use it, though.  I air dry all my dishes on the dish rack because it’s more sanitary that way, and easier.  If anything in the kitchen requires wiping, I use paper towels or a sponge.  The dishtowel is just there for looks, although nobody ever looks at it.  My kitchen is full of everything from big bottles of Poland Spring water to a big bag of cat food to just about anything a kitchen can hold.  One little dishtowel is lost in the clutter.

Sets of bath towels can be a good gift, but that shelf in my closet where I keep towels and washcloths is already bursting with them, and I don’t think they want more company in there.  This is my fault, in part, because the local odd lot store sells nice towels at cheap prices and there are times when I am in the mood to shop.  You can guess the rest.  I have more than one useless item that I bought in that store, along with some good stuff.  I discovered Sarabeth’s preserves and storage ottomans there, for which I am grateful.

One of these days I’ll write something about a lack of closet space, for which storage ottomans take up a lot of the orphaned stuff that doesn’t have any room.

That’s a whole other story.

---

[1] In fact, you should NEVER give anyone a pet unless you are SURE that the person will love the animal and care for it and make a lifetime commitment.  Seriously!

A Black Friday Poll

Yes, I know.  It isn’t time for Christmas-related stuff yet.  We haven’t even had a chance to survive Thanksgiving Day.  That’s a whole other thing itself.  There is one aspect of the Christmas season, though, that we should address before it has a chance to overcome us:

Black Friday

I would like to conduct a little poll to see what my readers have planned for Black Friday.  Please choose one of the following:

I plan to:

(A)  Hide at home, with all doors and windows locked, binge-watch episodes of “Law and Order” on TV and eat Vanilla Almond Granola directly out of the box.

(B)  Do all my Christmas shopping in one day – online – sitting in front of my computer wearing PJs.

(C)  Get to Target, Kmart or Walmart before anyone else, defend my place in line with a baseball bat and a shotgun and bring someone with me who has sharp elbows and good shoving skills.  If possible, bring my scariest-looking relatives with me, male and female, including kids.

(D)  Refuse to think about Christmas shopping until Christmas Eve, then run around like a junkie on Speed trying to buy everything at once.  This is like Black Friday, except there won’t be as many bargains and a lot of people will be too tired to fight, anyway.

(E)  Refuse to think about Christmas shopping until Christmas Eve, then go online and send everyone gift cards.  This is the last resort of the lazy and of people who hate to go outside to shop.

(F)  Other (you don’t have to elaborate, unless you have a really juicy idea).

You may post your choice in the Comments section below.

The Ten Best Uses for an Unwanted Fruitcake

Judging from some of the reactions I have seen, the majority of the human race in the Western World either hates fruitcake or thinks it hates fruitcake.  In the meantime, the giving of fruitcake is a Christmas tradition that goes back many centuries.  Such venerable customs are hard to stop, so most of us are exposed to fruitcake during the holiday season.  Those of us who like it (including this author) are thrilled.  Others are not.  Here are some ideas of what to do if you hate the stuff but someone sends it to you, anyway.

10.  Cut the cake into pieces, let the pieces harden to the consistency of large gemstones, paint them in bright neon colors and use them as paperweights.

9.  Leave the cake in the cupboard until it hardens to the point where it could break bones.  Use it as a decorative holiday doorstop.  You can cover it with pottery glaze if you want, but why bother?

8.  Use it for discus throwing practice.  Of course, this only works for the round-shaped cakes.  The rectangular ones can be used to play fetch with the dog.

7.  Re-gift it to that obnoxious cousin who borrowed your laptop and returned it with twenty different pieces of malware on it.

6.  Did you ever see the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding?  Remember the engagement party scene?  Well, a round fruitcake makes a lovely centerpiece when you stick a plant in the middle of it.

5.  Extract all the liquor from it and use the rest of it as mulch.  You probably don’t know how to extract the liquor, but the very act of trying to do this will give you many hours of holiday fun, especially if you are sampling a nice bottle of Kentucky Bourbon at the same time.

4.  Donate it to the office Christmas party.  When half your co-workers are too drunk to know the difference, offer it to them and tell them it’s chocolate.  After Christmas, tell them what they really ate.  You can all have a good laugh.

3.  Mash it into a powdery mess and add it to the cat’s litter.  Warning:  this might cause the cat to go on a litter box strike.  Just saying.

2.  Cut it into small pieces and put each piece between two chocolate chip cookies.  Feed them to the kids, telling them it’s a new kind of Oreo.  Kids eat grass and paper.  They will be sure to eat these.

1. Eat it!  It’s good!  Really, it is!  Would I steer you wrong?  Just add whipped cream.