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Claus and Effect |
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One of the only advantages to being a parent comes from subjecting your children to the same horrifying ordeals your own folks put you through while you were still too busy shitting yourself and stringing together incoherent monosyllabic sentence fragments to slap them in the face and tell them to knock it the fuck off. Of course nothing else embodies that spirit of handed down vindictiveness quite like the annual holiday photo with Santa. There's nothing sketchier than a mall Santa. Most mall Santas are just displaced carnies looking to keep busy during the off-season and homeless people the city council couldn't pass off as a decorative piece of urban shrubbery. As it turns out, most bushes don't urinate on the sidewalk and expose themselves to old women outside of the ATM vestibule. What better people then, to entrust with the manifestation of some of our children's earliest memories? Remember the man in the street who spit his chaw at mommy, Billy? Why don't you hop up on his lap while mommy goes and finds something to help raise daddy's "Christmas spirit." So it's in the spirit of the holiday that we present to you this gallery of human decay known as the common mall Santa and the children whose traumatic experiences will years later be cited as the motivation behind some brutal school massacres before their parents shirk responsibility and place the blame of Doom and that damned Beavis and Buttwipe cartoon.  Asian people have no idea how to make Christmas movies, even if I love seeing that baby get karate chopped. That's how the Little Matchstick Girl should've ended. She could've lit a matched and looked into a home just in time to see White Lotus jumpkicking her through the wall. I'm not sure if the Asians ever really cared about the plight of Rudy Huxtable, but thinking I wouldn't want a delinquent with fire hanging around outside my paper house either. Maybe this isn't Asian at all and is just one of those terrible silent movies they try to pass off as art in film school. Hey look, Buster Keaton fell down realistically, let us SHOWER HIM WITH PRAISE UNTIL THE END OF ALL TIMES. Put a buffalo nickel in the penny arcade and see the Little Tramp try to stick a ball in a little kid's throat! Now enjoy D.W. Griffith feeling bad about black people for ten hours. You know, it isn't as if being a mall Santa is physically demanding work. All you've got to do is sit in a chair for eight hours a day listening to some grubby eight-year old prattle on about the latest imported trading card craze from Japan featuring characters with names so outlandish most ivy league etymology majors would have a bitch of a time with the pronunciation while resisting the temptation to suck a candy cane into a fine point and jam the sharp end through the little shit's trachea. Oh, and after your shift ends when you're trying to drown the living hell that is your life amidst an endless sea of bourbon, try taking the beard off before vomiting all over yourself. That shit stains, you know. The kids in this picture don't look scared so much as perplexed as to how this man continues to function on even the most basic of human levels. Oh come on, this kid isn't afraid of Santa Claus. She's mad because of the shape of that present. It can only be one of two things; one of those terrible fashion dolls that little girls love that are just the same young person mold with a handbag taped to their shoulder that got painted to resemble the basic features of whoever just got a show on the Disney Channel, or clothes. Clothes always come in boxes like that. I'd always seek those out first, because getting "jeans" is a lot more tolerable when it isn't sandwiched between a walkman and some Ninja Turtles. Did you ever see "Scanners?" Yeah, Santa's head is full of garland. He, Santa, will KNOCK YOU ALL DOWN! A hilarious way to view this photo is to imagine that Santa is repeatedly smacking her with the box. I want to crack a glass bottle across that girl's self-affirming smirk. Just because your brother is a little bitch and will more likely than not be the prime candidate on the football team's "things we need to violate with a parking cone" list doesn't mean you've got to rub in the fact that you're sitting there like the model child you are, you indignant little shit. I tried pulling a stunt like this once and as a means of knocking me down a peg my old man brought back all the expensive stuff he'd bought me and replaced it all with a single Post-It note reminding me of how much he didn't love me and that just because it's Christmas didn't mean the gutters wouldn't need to be cleaned. Meet me in Montauk. I don't know why Disney's The Kid is having so many problems with Santa. The only problem I can see here is that the guy looks too much like the Santa from Santa Claus: The Movie, which is right alongside flipping over the handlebars of my bike and landing face first in a pile of jagged rocks as one of the most enjoyable moments of my life. But still, some of these kids should just suck it up and realize that you're GETTING PRESENTS FROM THIS GUY and if you TELL HIM he may bring you SPECIFICALLY WHAT YOU WANT. Don't be such a toddling sociopath that you can't muster up "NINTENDO" before bursting into tears. I always loved Santa. Here. Here we see Lucifer, fallen angel and lord of the underworld, assuming the role of a mall Santa. For which purpose I'm not sure exactly, but the horns sticking out of the top of his head don't exactly render him inconspicuous or anything. You'd think that as the prince of darkness and bringer of all that is unholy, someone would give him the nod or the heads up before he'd get the chance to make an ass of himself. Then again in spite all the forced barbed enema sodomy, I'd doubt he'd be the most popular guy at the office Christmas party. I feel so bad for that poor kid with the varnished hair and the stool up his ass facial expression. He's got to watch on in horror as Satan's spawn chokes the life out one of the Littl' Bits. whoa acid freakouuuuut Here we see Zanya, Mexico's juvenile high jump Olympian, throwing the World's Least Effective Shining Wizard off Santa's knee at 2004's Las Olas festival, also known as the place where the stupid Hispanic Golden Girl comes from. Although if she's Mexican and Golden she might be Mayan. Anyway, three things stand out about this picture. And wait, is he wearing BOWS on the side of his face?  The Civil War was pretty fucked up, man.
 Hermey: "OH SHI-" The discomfort on this child's face could be a result of Santa grabbing him around the torso and by the inside thigh, like one strong twist could rip the kid in half. Maybe Ed Asner got too much of that jolly rouge in his eyes to know he was grabbing the boy up in the Thunder Alley, or maybe he was just trying to mercifully end the life of a young man dressed in a white sweater and baggy jean shorts by his parents. Alternately Santa and the boy have just fallen out of a window and we are looking down on them as they hurdle toward the Earth. Part of me wants to chuck that kid underhand into things Wouldn't that be fun? Bring a shopping cart full of crying kids to one of those elaborate Styrofoam mall setups with the caverns and animatronic elves making adobes and shit and just lob those tiny miscreants through the glittery hillsides. Better yet, tie them the mall railroad tracks. Those trains can't be going more than negative eight miles an hour and would derail if they tried to make it over a penny, but it would still be worth it to hear the little creeps emit some REAL screams. Two-year old (24 month old hey look i'm a shitty parent) Cassie, far left, is mortified to be sitting in Mall Santa's lap. Her brother Jack, middle, is scared out of his mind. Federal Agent Rich (right) is fine because if he blows his cover he compromises the entire investigation. These kids represent the different emotions and personalities inside comedian Dave Thomas' mind. The kid in the middle represents Dave Thomas' face. I should've reconsidered before contributing to this article, because I've totally got a Blair Witch vibe going and will imagine these faces forever etched in time and screaming at me from the darkness of my home. Way to force your child who isn't even going to remember this onto a stranger's lap, hypothetical parent, now I've got bloody handprints up and down my stairwell. Y'know, some of these kids need to stop being such blubbering drama queens. I'm no Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzerelli myself, but even if I were a kid I probably wouldn't be scared by so-
WHAT IN THE NAME OF CHRIST IS THAT??? I'd like to think of myself as a politically correct person. I may not be in the running for an Image award any time soon, but I still do my part. I resist the primal urge to punch homeless people in the face even though I want to, because in my heart I know it's wrong. Even still, I don't see which agenda could possibly be furthered through means of a gender-confused Santa Claus. And don't even bother asking why Alice from Dilbert looks like she's rocking out to the latest magnum opus at the Senses Fail show, brah. I'm just as confused as you are. So to all the mothers and fathers reading this right now; spare your child the indignity of being propped up on the lap of a guy whose cohort is in the process of stealing your expensive car stereo system because amidst the "hustle and bustle of the holiday season" you forgot to lock the doors to that SUV you needed in order to "feel safe" and have a Merry Christmas.  |
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