You know, I never really trusted the whole Santa thing anyway. Being a native of the barren Arizona desert, I could never relate to anything about the traditional Santa/winter wonderland/white Christmas consumer package that got rolled out every year a few days before Thanksgiving.

I mean, what the hell is a sleigh? Never seen one. Snow either for that matter, until I was old enough to drive myself to Flagstaff in the winter. Reindeer? Come on. We got mule deer, and whitetail, and bighorn sheep up on Tabletop, but a reindeer? With a red nose? A cougar would be on that one in a heartbeat. Are there any reindeer in the US?

Then there's that chimney thing. I've seen some of those, but thought they were for decoration. Who'd want to start a fire in the house? Hell, it just now cooled off from the summer. Enjoy it a little. Go outside. Don't make it hot again. Like he would fit anyway. And come out clean, with all that white fur and everything? Riiiight.

Never mind the whole "Santa delivers toys to all the girls and boys in the whole world - [i]in one freaking night.[/i]" thing. Yeah, right. UPS and FedEx ought to hook up with some of that technology. In a flying sleigh. Uh huh. Forget the hub in Atlanta or wherever it is, just throw it on the sleigh when it absolutely, positively has to be there tonight. Unless you've been naughty, that is. Yeah, ole Santa has a database of that information right on his PDA. He probably Googled "george naughty" right before he left, and got 8 pages of stuff. That's it, straight on, Rudolph, no landing at that house. Looks like mean dogs there anyway.

And remind me again why we kill a baby pine tree every year? Where do pine trees come from, anyway? For me, they showed up in bundles in a dusty chain-link enclosure on a normally-empty lot in town, with strings of bare lightbulbs lining the perimeter and a travel-trailer nearby with some kind of a fat dog on a chain. Enter ye the portal of the hallowed chain-link, and purchase therefrom the most sacred Christmas tree. For 20 bucks. We still had the base from last year, so no need to buy that, to the chagrin of the fat dog owner.

Now don't get me wrong. I like Christmas trees. Especially about two weeks after Christmas when they have dried to explosive tinder. We used to go to town and run down the alleys looking for throwaways. We'd build a monster pile of Christmas tree accelerant and light it off. It would make a sound like an F-4 breaking the sound barrier over on the Goldwater range, and we'd be sporting half a red face for a week. Throw some of your new plastic army guys into the white-hot inferno and watch them melt into a dripping olive-drab lake of pure heat. Now that's Christmas.