The big Election is over and our guy won (please note that I’m writing this in early October, so I’m absent malice) and we all know what that means: it’s time for my annual column on this year’s ideal Christmas gifts. Well, if you wanted logic, you’d be back there reading the Letters To the Editor section.
I love the Letters section. It’s where you’ll find the true results of the Election, as readers write-in complaining about how life as they know it is over because their candidate lost, or lamenting about how life as we all know it is over because of dumpster-raiding bears, or demanding to know why they still have a bear-sized pothole in front of their house and now it will never get fixed because the other guy won.
This brings us to my five favorite Christmas gift suggestions (you left logic behind, remember?). These are real items, made in China, and designed for those special someones in your life. Here is where the true spirit of the holiday season enters my heart just in time for those pre-Thanksgiving Christmas sales, as I think of lonely sea captains picking their way across an ocean of floating plastic junk with their cargo holds full of plastic junk.
First up, the Bunny Ear Salad Servers. These are (floatable) plastic simulated bunny ears. Apparently, you stick them into a simulated grass pattern-decorated plastic salad bowl (sold separately) to help get you into the mood to munch, and “now even the kids will want their greens!” It’s not likely, after you’ve traumatized them into thinking you’ve buried the Easter bunny in the radicchio.
HUMORIST’S NOTE: Some of these Chinese-made items are shipped from the United Kingdom. This means that we live on a planet where petroleum-based rabbit ear utensils first go around the world before they ultimately land on the “Free!” desperation tables at next summer’s yard sales in America.
(A moment of silence and holiday greetings, please, for the sea captains out there separately shipping a few tons of salad bowls.)
Next, the Cat-A-Pencil. This is a working pencil. For my younger readers, a pencil was a writing instrument that you chewed until suffering gum slivers, eraserhead plaque and lead poisoning. The Cat-A-Pencil is shaped like, I’m not kidding, a slingshot, and is “not suitable for children,” yet the description also adds that it’s “perfect for mischievous Monday morning desktop fun after you’ve finished doodling.”
There is so much wrong with that statement. No one has pencil-doodled for 30 years, and the rest of it is why it takes six to eight weeks for your bunny ear salad fork order to be processed.
I’m only thinking of Christmas day emergency rooms filling up with moms and dads presenting with puncture wounds:
“Uh … how’d this happen?”
“My kid winged a plastic bunny ear into my ear with his pencil slingshot.” I see a whole new branch of medicine in the works.
Next, the Re-usable Hot Pants Hand Warmer.
Ah, nothing says Christmas spirit and/or New Hampshire winter weather to me better than designer underwear used to warm your hands, and I looked at this one closely.
Wait. It seems these are shaped like skivvies, but are NOT made to be worn as such. You keep them in your coat pocket until needed, then take them out, “click the tab inside,” and insert your hands. To re-use them you “simply pop in a pan of boiling water for a few minutes and allow to cool.”
I already see the lawyers lining up on December 26th for these lawsuits, as someone is surely going to forget the allow to cool part, ignore the “no, they’re not meant to be WORN you idiot” part, and the emergency rooms, already jammed with ear trauma cases, will fill up with an outbreak of groin burns.
There’s little I can say about the Christmas Inflatable Fruitcake, designed to “repay your Aunt Franny’s kindness” in sending you a real one, by giving her a (plastic) blow-up one. We can now add dear Aunt Franny’s choking on fake candied raisins to the influx of speared ears and scalded crotches.
Lastly, my favorite Christmas gift offering, as we all begin recovering from election fatigue and marauding bears stuck in potholes:
The Remote Control Zombie.
It’s plastic, and comes packaged in enough plastic to open up another sea lane. The special holiday sentiment it invokes is perfect, and it comes when you press the button on the plastic brain-shaped remote control, and your Yuletide zombie “trudges forward and groans.”
Santa, you still get my vote.
Senior Wire News Service syndicated humor columnist B. Elwin Sherman writes from Bethlehem, N.H.