Category: My stories

John the Baptist needed a Christ.
He’d announced that the messiah would be arriving soon to lead the Jews out from under Roman rule.
So, when he saw Jesus, he figured the stoneworker for a good enough messiah.
“Come join me in this lake for a minute,” said John.
“Okay, that’s a bit weird,” said Jesus.
But he did it anyway, and had a vision.
“Shit, dude, you okay?” said John, who had dragged Jesus to the shore and got the water out of his lungs. “Don’t sue me, okay?”
“All’s cool, bro,” said Jesus. “Wanna go wandering?”
They did.

They say that the three wise men followed a star to the place of Jesus’ birth.
But if they were so wise, why would they follow a star?
That doesn’t sound very wise to me.
The little drummer boy found Jesus, and he didn’t follow a star.
Jesus’ mother Mary was worried about the star.
“If the Romans follow the star, they’ll find us and kill us,” she said.
So they bundled everything up and fled the barn, setting it on fire to cover their tracks.
“Nobody born here,” said the wise men to the arriving soldiers. “Nope. Not here.”

A mountain of letters arrived at the North Pole every day.
No matter how many elves he had go through the pile, it would just grow bigger and bigger.
Santa had a team of elves write a database.
And they scanned the letters into the database.
Were they good or bad?
Governments spied on their citizens all the time.
So did big tech companies.
The elves hacked into the those databases, cross-referencing and coming up with a score.
Automating manufacturing and shipping made the holidays a breeze.
Santa kept a skeleton crew to maintain the systems, and fired the rest.

Usually, kids ask Santa for a bicycle or video games or other things.
Sometimes, they ask for a new sister or brother.
But every now and then, one asks for their stepfather to stop beating them.
Santa hates these letters.
He’d call the cops to tip them off, but there’s no phone lines up at the North Pole.
So, when Santa does his dry run on December 24th, he brings a baseball bat and kneecaps these motherfuckers in their sleep.
Or drags them up to the sleigh, takes off, and throws them over the side on to the hard pavement.

The Christmas Truce in World War One, The War To End All Wars.
Exhausted and bloodied British and German troops lay down their guns, come out of their trenches, and meet in No Man’s Land.
They come together to share rations, drink together, and play soccer on the broken ground.
And they sing carols together.
Word reaches the generals, miles back from the front in their mansions-turned-headquarters.
They give the order to fight.
Messengers nod, get in their cars, thinking it over.
Perhaps a little engine trouble, maybe a flat tire.
Something to give the boys a little more time.

Santa asked Rudolph to guide his sleigh through the fog.
As the elves put the harness on Rudolph, the crowd surrounding them cheered.
“I knew that nose would be useful some day,” said Rudolph’s father proudly.
This was the same reindeer who was ashamed of the glowing red nose.
The reindeer who made his son cover it up, no matter how uncomfortable it was.
Drove his son to tears, into exile.
And now, he was proud?
Fucking liar.
“Put him on the venison list,” whispered Rudolph. “Or I don’t fly.”
Rudolph’s father had been a jerk.
Now he was jerky.

Twas the night before Christmas, Bob, Joe, and Ray stole some Santa suits and a van, and they went package pirating out in the suburbs.
They managed to get a pretty good haul, and they didn’t get caught. Twelve days in a row.
After scrubbing the van down and abandoning it, they checked out their haul.
Most of it was the usual cheap crap, groceries and stuff, but there was some jewelry and electronics and computer stuff that they could sell on eBay, or fence through their flea market pals.
“Merry Christmas!” they said, tapping their cans of beer together.

As Santa farmed out more and more of the operation to the big tech companies, the elves had less and less to do.
The traditional jobs of cookie-baking and shoe-making had also been automated.
Their ancestral forests long cut down.
And there are so few jobs for mall santa assistants, what, with the malls dying out because of the big tech companies, too.
Idled and furloughed, the elves turned to crime and underground fight clubs.
Bloodied drunk midgets, stumbling the streets at night, stealing hubcaps and hood ornaments to fashion into weapons and drug paraphernalia in their alleyway craft shops.

Every Christmas, Sandy has made a gingerbread house.
She bakes the walls and roof, and little people to put in the house.
Then, she mixes the icing to put it all together.
Assembling the house and decorating it wasn’t hard for her to do.
So, she made it fancier each year.
Bigger houses, electric motors, LED lights, and toy trains.
Soon, she had a whole village built.
Full scale.
You could walk into the houses.
You could live in the houses.
The year she died, we buried her in a gingerbread coffin.
In the gingerbread cemetery.
Outside of Gingerbread City.

When you eat a chocolate bunny, do you eat the ears first or the feet?
What about the tail? Do you eat that first?
I remember a comedian who said that he bit out the eyes and screamed at it.
But that’s crazy.
Because nobody bites out the eyes of their chocolate bunny.
They do that to their chocolate Santa Clauses.
Or they bite out his crotch.
I mean, after all the kids who sat on the laps of mall Santas, especially the ones who were child predators getting off on it?
And the worst part?
They were paid to.