Happy Sacred Baby Festival to all you Wonkers! Hope you’ve had as much festivity as you can handle, and perhaps more.* And now, for some Happy Holiderp: a roundup of seasonal stories that were too stoopid to ignore altogether, but not quite worth a whole post of their own. We recommend that you treat it like dollar-store eggnog: add enough liquor, and you just won’t mind the taste anymore.
Our first tale of Christmas cheer comes from Lake City, Florida, where the Columbia City Seventh-Day Adventist Church had a “drive through Nativity” scene with more than just a manger. It also depicted other parts of the Gospel accounts, like King Herod’s slaughter of the Innocents — the attempt to knock off Baby Jesus by killing all boys under the age of two. A local mom complained that the display, with decapitated dolls and fake blood everywhere, left her two-year-old daughter seriously freaked out:
“as we pulled up further, they were depicting decapitating babies and that happened to be on the side of the vehicle that my 2 year old was on and it was very traumatic for her she started crying and screaming because of the baby and it took me hours to calm her down.”
Hey, it’s in the Bible, so it’s suitable for all ages, lady. You have a problem with the Bible? Extra points to the doofus local teevee reporter for describing the display as “historically accurate,” but all points lost for their not including any video of the actual display. No photos appear to be online either, so instead we’ll just link to an appropriate song.
Elsewhere on the “scare the kids for Christ” beat, we have pastor Jon Knudsen of the Lokken Free Church in Vendsyssel, Denmark, who underscored the religious nature of the holiday by hanging a figure of an elf from a mock gallows outside his church.
The elf held a sign saying “We renounce the Devil and all his deeds and all his being.” Knudsen believes that elves represent demonic spirits from Scandinavia’s pre-Christian past, and executed the little toymaker (or dentist) to remind people that elves and Christmas do not mix. We respect his effort to keep fictional worlds from colliding, but as fanboys, we have no real problem with crossovers, as long as they’re well done, like that one fanfic where Twilight Sparkle ends up teleporting into Hogwarts. Rev. Knudsen’s efforts at elficide were subverted by local pranksters – trolls, as it were — who left garden gnomes around the pastor’s house and kidnapped the elf and left a note saying it would be returned after the new year. The elfnapper turned himself in, but Vendsyssel police did not press charges, saying their “caseload was too heavy to make investigating theft of a stuffed toy elf a priority.” In America, we’re pretty sure someone would have ended up getting shot.
Speaking of which, a local Santa actually did get shot in Washington DC, though thankfully it was only a minor injury from a pellet gun. Xavier Hawkins was participating in a community toy giveaway Tuesday — and being filmed by a local news crew — when some idiot shot him in the back with a pellet gun from a nearby upper-floor window. He’ll be fine; we’re wondering if pastor Jon Knudsen can account for his whereabouts the day of the shooting. Then again, he was a black Santa, so maybe police should be looking for Megyn Kelly or Neal Boortz.
In other Elf News, environmentalists have been joined by Elf lobbyists in an effort to block construction of a local road, which the elf fanciers worry will “disturb elf habitat, including an elf church.” The Lorax was unavailable for comment.
In Florida, the State Capitol building allowed displays featuring a Festivus Pole made of beer cans, a representation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and a traditional Nativity scene, but rejected an entry from the performance-art-as-religion group Satan’s Temple, because it was “grossly offensive”:
The 5-foot-by-5-foot poster the Satanists hoped to display showed an angel falling into hell along with a message reading, “Happy holidays from the Satanic Temple.”
If nothing else, should make for a fun lawsuit.
In Phoenix, a bell-ringer for the Salvation Army got punched in the arm by a lady who didn’t like the bell-ringer’s saying “Happy Holidays” instead of ‘Merry Christmas.”
“The lady looked at me,” said [Kristina] Vindiola. “I thought she was going to put money in the kettle. She came up to me and said, ‘Do you believe in God?’ And she says, ‘You’re supposed to say Merry Christmas,’ and that’s when she hit me.”
Phoenix police said that there was insufficient evidence to arrest the woman who Vindiola identified as her assailant; no word on whether the Merry Christmas Vigilante has yet been signed to a contract with Fox News.
And finally, a sort-of nice-time observation from Seinfeld writer Dan O’Keefe — whose father’s “combination of alcohol, mild mental illness and Reader’s Digest politics” led him to create the fake holiday of Festivus for his family — said on CNN that his “family disgrace” was never something he wanted to put on TV, but that Jerry Seinfeld thought it was something that should be shared with America, whether America wanted it or not.
O’Keefe also believes that Rand Paul’s twittered airing of grievances may have finally made Festivus uncool:
“When Rand Paul tries to seem relevant with 15-year-old pop cultural references, it reminds me of when Bob Hope used to dress up as the Fonz, but that’s just me.”
Hahaha, don’t get your hopes up, guy. In the next few years, we should probably expect grumpy editorials about how Festivus has gotten too commercialized.
*Next year, we’re really going to remember to repost KBJ’s Eggnog Riot recipe with the Thanksgiving Foodtacular.
[WCJB / Daily Mail / IceNews / WJLA / Guardian / RawStory / ABC15.com / CNN via TPM]