HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Let’s take a good look at the state of Christmas in America, also known as day of the jolly fat man. When Ulysses S. Grant signed into law that which established Christmas as a holiday in the 1800’s the U.S. wore their Christianity on its sleeve much more openly. Sure we would have to get over burning witches. Those kooky Salem residents could have used a healthy dose of Samantha and Daren to learn to laugh at being Bewitched! The sitcom was just a little too late for Lizzy Borden.

The average citizen feared God much more than their government historically, unless you include the passage of the tax code. For 80 years the initials I.R.S. were about as feared as the Second Coming! Today we’re afraid of many more things such as Russell Crowe movies, “What’s Happenin’” reruns, and Ernest Borgnine naked. The image of Christmas has lost it’s pizzazz in some circles. No longer are we comforted by the family around the tree as much as a Ferrari in the driveway, and a mistress in the back room.

Extremely progressive organizations will cite the first Article of the U.S. Constitution, selectively. The text says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” and here is the part the radicals forget “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." That means if my religious convictions have me in a ritual involving plastic dolls, leather whips, a shoebox, and a squirrel named Delores, it’s no one’s business; unless of course the playthings belong to a domineering mistress, in which case much frolicking play finds the rodent is afoot.

Organizations like the ACLU would have you believe that exercising religion in public, or on public governmental ground is an establishment of one religion over another. That would be like saying that your marriage vows are more important than the casual fling with a neighbor. This is the 21st century after all! Do they still perform wedding ceremonies?

Since the release of the movie Indecent Proposal where Robert Redford bought Demi Moore from Woody Harrelson for a one night fling, the standards of America have been up for sale to the highest bidder. That’s why the poor are always screaming about the unfair nature of the wealthy. It’s not that the poor are being shafted as much as they are not getting screwed! Any more cultural debauchery, and we’ll become the Roman Empire!

Since 85% of this country identifies themselves as Christian it stands to reason that the vast majority of them will be seen posumously in hell, given the high rate of infidelity among spouses, and sheep herders. Public displays of affection, much like Christmas decorations and the phrase "Merry Christmas" itself, seem to be a no-no in today’s culture. If you can’t ride a wild "Eve" through the snow this Christmas, then I don’t know what the world is coming too!

Take note. There should be no restriction on other faiths displaying the trappings of their religious occasions on public sites. With that kind of thinking, orgies are quite logical. Think of old Rome with its public bath’s, toga wearing citizens, and general nudity. Sounds like a constitutional right to me, but then I’m not a government worker as much as a horny little devil.

Instead of suing for the right to also be included in displays of a religious nature, the AUCLU should sue to allow bare breasted women to express themselves in flamboyant ways. New Orleans perhaps was getting it right with its voodoo practices, transgender dress, homosexual parades, and Mardi Gras party offering loose half-nude people flashing the opposite sex. Then it looks like God put an end to all the frivolity with a little mayhem of his own! C’mon God! How many parents have you heard say “I’d rather my children be exposed to sex than violence?” That was just New Orleans’ motto.

Culturally the phrase "Merry Christmas" is even being cast aside in favor of the phrase "Happy Holidays." Examining this we find that no one is “Merry” anymore, much in the same way that happy people are no longer gay! There is no other sanctioned holiday between Thanksgiving and Christmas so the phrase “Happy Holidays” is not applicable. Just to break up that dry 30 days or so, I suggest another federal holiday for adults only. It could be a swinger’s holiday. Now wouldn’t that be something for philanderers to be merry about? It certainly would give new meaning to the phrase "Thanksgiving" for unsatisfied wives willing to attemt their own fling.

The second officially sanctioned holiday is New Years Day and is quite secular. That has at times become the unofficial swinger’s holiday. Many office workers, friends and acquaintances get together for a pleasant night of dancing, loud music, drunkenness and the like, only to wake up in a strange bed with their college professor’s bride, a hangover pounding their head, and a brazier protruding from their mouth. Now that’s a happy holiday!

DREAMS

One of the greatest inventions known to man is the sleep to wake cycle; especially the sleeping part. Okay it’s really a marvel of evolution that the gods provide as a mechanism of rest from the pencil pushing, butt kissing, shoe licking, desperate groveling mode that most of us call work. Nowhere can we find a complete culmination of laziness more than when flopping on the mattress long before it is time to do so.

The folks who stand out the most however, are the ones who are on their way out of the door after work claiming “the only thing I’m doin’ when I get home is getting in the bed.” It is never my bed it is always the bed, as if there is some club-med oasis secluded in their very own home.

Who can blame us? Where else can we close our eyes and live a completely different life? We are forever young in our dreams. We can touch forbidden things, and perform feats without consequence. All of it is tailored by our own desires. When sleeping, our mind goes where it wants to and there is an assumption that we are not to blame. A spouse can have a fling in a dream, and there’s not much a partner can do about it.

It is a fair bet that most of us have affairs in our own beds while our spouse lies right next to us. A typical explanation is “after all it was only a dream.” If you ever try this method, then beware. Dreams can also cause black eyes, brusies, and a weekend sleeping on the couch.

This special alternative universe of the subconscious is valuable. We are spoken to from the great beyond, receive premonitions or are given tonight’s winning lottery numbers. The one who tries to pass off the winning numbers to us inevitably wears broken glasses because they are never correct. In this mysterious mode we are capable of solving the worlds problems, delivering consequential answers to questions of the age, and seeing our favorite sexy neighbor naked after all these years.

Of course there are those out of control experiences where we dream about falling, losing control of the steering wheel or the bluebird of happiness pooping on our head.

Another problem with the unconscious state of mind is that we often wake and after a period of time don’t remember some of the juicier visions. In the morning it is fresh and easy to describe just how somebody’s butt wiggled as we watched them falling off their bicycle into a thorn bush. By the time the day is over though we’ll forget about every detail; except the throny rump twitching like a pair of hams . Even with the loss of dream details there are some things that we consistently commit to our brain permanently. It’s like storing secrets under our mattress. Thank goodness no one else goes there to find them.

Sometimes that recall refuge is seen on our faces as we daydream in front of our work computers. It looks like we’re concentrating on the bosses important excel spreadsheet when, in fact, we’re looking in our brain at a completely different spread altogether.

It’s even tougher to summon up the good dream material once senility sets in. Ask an elderly person about their dreams and they’ll likely tell you something convoluted. Usually it is about their pacifier, or a story about how they spent a long winter at Mount Vernon. There are only short moments of lucidity for the elderly, but in those times the ultimate memory is from their dreams regarding that special someone’s keester; even if it belongs to Martha Washington.

CREATURES OF THE NIGHT!

We have an obsession with things that scare us! Things that go bump in the night pique our interest. Most of my bizarre writing ideas strike me after the sun goes down. The topics irk me until I commit them to paper and you read the resulting horror….er.….humor! As a culture the interest in scary things has been heightened since the 1960’s. Rosemary’s Baby was the vehicle for that decade by which this dementia presented itself. The actress Mia Farrow played the trembling and naive victim of the evil one himself (and I don’t mean Woody Allen).

The Exorcist took it a step further with quite a visual depiction in the 1970’s. It also sent split pea soup stock into a tailspin. It might have done wonders for the chiropractic industry too. Too bad failing medical students still wanting to practice didn’t come up with the idea of being a witchdoctor sooner. Chiropractics use to be considered practicing something akin to voodoo medicine before becoming respectable. Who better to fix that 360 degree kink in Linda Blair’s neck than a chiropractor? On top of that ,our family pet wasn’t even allowed to walk on the carpet. When the character little innocent Meagan "let it leak" on the carpet in the movie and no one smacked or rubbed her nose in it, you knew you were in the presence of true evil!

Of course literary works were pervasive in our subconscious long before the 20th century. Terrifying writings included topics about vampires (Bram Stoker’s Dracula), the mystery of Jack the Ripper and those Dick and Jane books!

The fact that Italian families tend to pass on ridiculous superstitions also meant I was doomed to be haunted throughout my childhood by some malokya (muh-low’-kyah, which means evil eye). When the evil eye was determined to be upon you or odd things kept happening in our Italian household, you said a lot of prayers and hung a lot of garlic! Sure it was very old world and you smelled like you hadn’t bathed in 3 months, but at least it gave you the opportunity to ward off garlic hating spirits. It kept you alive so you could actually skip bathing for 3 months.

As children there was quite a bit of relating ghost stories, but a grandmother could spin a yarn scary enough to send you back to the womb. Their stories were true no matter how ridiculous! If they tell you that “the baby was in the crib when I left the room and then when I returned the infant was on the floor under the crib” you would then believe their conclusion that evil spirits lurked in the domicile. There was no questioning that there might have been a thud to mark the incident that went unheard! The ladies couldn’t hear something as simple as a baby doing a double summersault swan dive onto the floor among all of the banging of pots and pans that were normal everyday sounds for cooking in our house. We Italians use our hands a lot for emphasis when talking, so get out of the way before you get bopped upside the head with a garlic loaf, or your new white clothes get drenched in pasta sauce.

There are other kinds of horrors also that cross all cultural boundaries. We love a good eye popping, breath taking, heart thumping, underwear changing, head shaking story. Take for instance medical yarns. Every once in a while the local news will report something along the lines of this: "Mr. Jones who was admitted to the hospital on an outpatient basis to have a hangnail removed woke up from the operation only to have his keester fall off!" It’s not that having one’s hiney hit the floor without you in it would be so bad. For some of the derrière’s that I’ve seen (especially the ones I come across in mirrors) doing without would be okay. It would keep the Mrs. from asking that impossible to answer, breath stealing, you’re gonna sleep in the basement if you don’t answer correctly question, “does my butt look big in this?” On top of that they always ask it after they’ve squeezed their fanny into some ridiculous item in a size they would have worn when they first entered grade school. “Honey why don’t you let our 8 year old wear that” is not a good response.

It is a fact that as a culture we have great interest in the suffering of others. Sometimes the combination of fear and just plain stupidity entertains us. According to Psychic News of London, a French farmer had an unfortunate accident after watching a horror movie late at night. “It seems that shortly after retiring, Michel Maumond, 40, reported seeing "a ghost in white at the foot of my bed." The frightened Maumond grabbed his gun and subsequently shot-off the toes of one of his feet. Maumond has since determined that from now on he will stick to reading safe books at night.”

The darkness seems to be a natural setting for scaring us pantless. How many times did your parents tell you “there is nothing in the darkness that isn’t there in the light? “But mom” you’d plead in the terrified high pitched haunted tone. They never saw the horrid things that came out of the inside of my anxiety closet like my brother and his date. On dull yet stormy nights the biggest thing shaking wasn’t just me under the covers.

It didn’t help that as a child my daily afternoon ritual included watching Dark Shadows, the only soap opera ever aired devoted to vampires. Not to worry though, as a clever youth I had a plan of action if one of those blood suckers ever arrived at the foot of my bed. As I recall it involved a lot of screaming and bleeding.

If I could I would have slept with a silver bullet under my pillow, or a well sharpened stake on the nightstand. I could never get the old folks to agree to such risky items. At my house anything with a sharper point on it than a baseball was considered too dangerous for a young hand. I was forced to rely on my wits for my own defense when going to bed. Sleeping on my left side was the only hope I had available to me. Vampires you know (as Dark Shadows illustrated) only bite people on the left side of the neck. I scrunched my precious carotid artery ever so strategically next to the bed and cushioned around it extra thick fluffy pillows to assure the best hope I had to avoid being drained during the night. It was like wearing a neck brace. I spent a decade with a perpetual stiff neck. It was no wonder to me why my school class pictures always highlighted my head tilted ever so artistically. “How come you never smile in your class picture,” my parents would ask. Since they were no help and left me to fend for myself against the monsters they didn’t ever get the true answer that I WAS IN AGONY!

You also knew that the toe monster lurked under your bed too. Any attempt to get up in the night took a spectacular amount of bravery. It made for a swollen bladder and blood shot eyes come the morning. I still don’t understand how my daughter can get up in the morning and not run as fast as she can to the bathroom. She has to be reminded to get in there. I can still remember some nights just trembling and waiting to be devoured by some nondescript creature that lurked in the darkness and under the floor boards. You could hear them any evening. They always made noises, but only after dusk or was that my brother and his dates?

There were no cute and cuddly movies like Monster’s Inc. when I was growing up. No! We had The Outer Limits, and Rod Serling’s hallmarks, The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery. Rod Serling seemed like a creepy dude all by himself with his own eerie style of delivering monologues. I’m convinced that his most sinister creation is Stephen King. He carries on haunting us with his literature in Serling’s spirit even though Rod is no longer among us….or is he?

Our special Saturday night offering in the nation’s capital included a program called Creature Feature! It was a humorous to corny program for an adolescent, but it could make the eyes of a youngest bug out. This show was a different series of old horror movies introduced and commented upon during the commercials, by a campy stage host dressed like a vampire (his name was Count Gore Vidal). Count Gore, who offered bad makeup, jokes, sight gags, and B-movie horror flicks is still around. There was a reunion show with the Count that aired at the turn of the century during the Y2K scare. I even have a videotape of it though, I’m afraid to watch it!

There are the truly odd and real things that happen at night if you stop, look, and listen. As reported in West Memphis Tennessee newspapers and on various television news channels: West Memphis - Officers have arrested a man for making late-night runs along Airport Road in the nude. Officers said they used a Taser to subdue Fate Patterson, 39, who had dodged police for about six months. He was arrested after he ran past a police car, and ignored orders to stop.

What does one officer say to his partner upon landing the big electric jolt? “Hey man nice shot!” I think I’ve seen that scene in some x-rated genre Movies! There are probalby allot of other punch lines for jokes regarding the police, a naked man, and a taser gun, but I’ll let you amuse yourself by thinking up your own. I’ll wait! (Pause… while you think). Okay that’s enough!

The point is that we now build themeparks, make movies, and indulge in other icons devoted to scaring us out of our wits. What kind of sick twisted and perverted person is drawn to such hair-raising things? The one who is under an evil spell that’s who! Momma mia, I have been touched by the malokya. Check the baby! It’s time to hang the garlic!