Words To The World #5

If you ever have any doubt that we here in America do Christmas to an excessive, fanatical point, I have simply to point you to that tyrannical chain of retail juggernauts we all know and loathe called Wal-Mart. I’ll skip the anti-Wal-Mart diatribe for now -- it’s been done to death. But I suppose I should explain why I was there, and what horrors I saw.

While with my kids this weekend, we needed a quick, inexpensive lunch fix. The local Santa Clarita McDonald’s -- the one which has always been so busy you were lucky to get into it -- had been removed. With McDonald’s reporting record profits throughout this year, and this one having been such a strong location, this is a mystery. You could hear the locals pondering it when we went in to the nearest alternative McDonald’s -- at Wal-Mart. (By the way, economists who didn’t know we were in a recession until last week could learn a lesson here: If McDonald’s is having a surge of business, it’s because people en masse are being forced to eat cheap. Direct indicator.)

So we went into the McDonald’s at Wal-Mart and, upon finishing our pseudo-meat, liver-killing meal, decided to stroll over and have a look at all the Christmas decorations. They were so abundant and visually loud that it would have required the McDonald’s meal to have blinded us for us not to be drawn in to the madness.

We walked into the Christmas section and were greeted by a slim, young Santa. Oh, he had the red suit, the white beard and the little wire rim glasses, but he looked like a high school kid in the outfit. I asked my teenage daughter if he went to her school, and she acknowledged that he looked familiar.

We turned next to the wall of “push-button” decorations -- a huge, tall section of these variety of animated things you see everywhere with a button that says “try me” and, once pushed, begins to wiggle or move and wail some awful version of Christmas song in some awful voice, annoying every customer and worker in the place. (I think an effective penalty for criminals would be to stick them in a room full of these things all playing at once. No one would ever think of committing a crime again after a trauma like that.) (Actually, I’m not sure what prevents employees from going postal during the holiday season with these things in the store.)

There were like 87 different varieties of Santa doing some odd thing, including one where he turns his backside to you and shakes his money-maker in your face. There were about 87 more with animals of all kinds, doing a variety of things, singing a variety of songs or playing a variety of music. There were also several different snowman themed ones, including one which hiked up its skirt to reveal the bloomers underneath (something I never knew about snowmen, but there you are). Did all of this really start with Billy the Big Mouth Bass? Like the jerk I am, I pushed as many of the “try me” buttons as I could get going at once and walked away. That’ll teach them to put so many on display at once.

Serenaded by the cacophony, we then walked under the ever-growing variety of big, fat, inflatable decorations. Here we saw more snowmen, animals and Santas in a variety of goofy acts, all ready to be blown up. As tempting as it was, I opted not to purchase and bring home for display the Santa with the serious camel toe problem.

There were a lot of tree ornaments. Some of them were nice. Some of them were incomprehensible. I’ve been in Christmas-only emporiums that had fewer ornaments. Where do they all come from? Where do they all go?

There was a long stretch of nutcrackers. I had to wonder if there was any relevance to the fact that, with the male styled nutcrackers, you put your nuts in their mouth to crack them -- but with any female styled nutcracker, they create an opening in her chest to put your nuts in, rather than having you insert your nuts in her mouth. We actually did find one, and only one, instance of a female styled nutcracker that was set up so it was her mouth that cracked your nuts, just like the male styled ones. But there was only one of her, and all the other nutcrackers would have nothing to do with her.

At last we reached the branded Christmas section. There was an entire array of John Deere decorations. Disney/Pixar CARS decorations. Hannah Montana decorations. But nowhere did I find any Obama decorations. No Keith Olbermann decorations. No gay couple decorations. And then it finally occurred to me.

Christmas is for kids and redneck conservatives, but it’s especially safe for redneck conservative kids.

And then I remembered where I was, and why it might seem that way, and we got out of there.

The Emerald Quill