Bummed out at the holiday season

I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of bummed out this holiday season. There’s been some weird, scary stuff happening. I don’t remember other years being like this.

Several evenings ago I was out for a walk and came across Santa Claus, face down, flattened out in someone’s yard. It looked like a road grader had run him over. My heart fluttered. I was hoping the neighborhood kids hadn’t spotted him. Can you imagine–“Oh crap, look at this. Santa’s bought the farm. Screw being good anymore.”

Closer inspection, however, revealed that Santa wasn’t really kaput. He was merely deflated–a magical timer would blow him up and bathe him in light come dark.

But speaking of blowing up, you may have seen on the news that a small person dressed up as a Christmas elf and toting some shopping bags went to visit a mall Santa here in metro Atlanta. After standing in line for a while with a bunch of kids, the “elf” finally climbed onto Santa’s lap. “Hey, guess what I’ve got in my bags,” the elf said, or something like that.

“Don’t know,” Santa answered.

“Surprise. Dynamite.”

As you can image, the mall emptied faster than Santa’s reindeer leaving a venison lovers convention.

Oh, yeah. Reindeer. I’ve got a couple of lighted deer in my front yard. (No, real lights, not too much rum.) They just kind of stand there and rotate their heads back and forth like they were watching a tennis match.

The other morning, it appeared one of the deer had been shot. It was lying on its side, not moving. Well, of course it’s not moving, I thought. I turned off the power before I went to bed last night. I went outside to examine it. No bullet holes or buckshot damage. Maybe it was just the wind.

What do you think?

Photo: A brightly lit, festive Christmas tree–things as they should be for the holidays.