A vainglorious, hooting, tooting Christmas
Clamored about on December 26, 2010.
Despite my best attempts to prevent it, Christmas finally arrived this past week, just as expected. And I, still reeling from my miserable failure to celebrate Alyssa Milano’s birthday 518,400±15 seconds prior, was woefully unprepared.
It was five of clock in the morning, and the Sun wasn’t even up yet. Darkness filled my bedroom like an Everlasting Gobstopper and gripped my town like an overwrought cliché. Silence reigned and the world slept. I was pleasantly dreaming of that hot lesbian scene with Grilka, Lursa, and B’Etor that I’d seen on TV years ago. Yappie was yapping all snug in his bed. Not even the Himalayan Varnishing Gnomes that had been dogging my every step for the past three days were stirring. But then suddenly, a sound: A vainglorious hooting and tooting sound, off in the distance, but growing louder and louder and drawing nearer and nearer with each passing tick and tock of my ceiling-mounted alarm clock.
I rolled over and buried my curiously square head in my pillows. The sound of hooting and tooting, trumpets and drums, and singing, grew nearer; I grumbled, mumbled epithets of bah-humbuggery in every direction, and attempted to stuff my pillows into my ear canals. If all those enormous dugongs could fit, why couldn’t two reasonably-sized pillows? Alas it was no use, and after a long string of maximal pontifications and exudations of parsimonious grumnuttery and punctilious accursations proved equally as ineffectual, I finally stumbled out of bed to see what the hell was the matter.
In groping about my darkened bedroom for a flashlight, Fleshlight, or some other source of illumination, I clumsily tripped over Yappie, who was still sleeping soundly at the foot of my bed, oblivious to the rising cacophony approaching our palatial abode. Yappie, unfortunately, made a very poor guard dog. However, if perchance the approaching roar did indeed herald the arrival of a threat (Samuel Dreckers, trained assassin, coming to kill me in my sleep perhaps?), Yappie was not entirely useless from a tactical point of view: He made a quite effective area-denial dog, for, when startled awake suddenly, Yappie was wont to engage in the most noxious of farting sprees for many more minutes than a human being—even a trained assassin—is capable of holding his breath.
Gagging and gasping for air, and now wide awake, I ran into the hallway and slammed the bedroom door, leaving Yappie to his own sulphurous devices. I made my way downstairs amidst the virtual nonstop sound of canine flatulence behind me and the growing cacophony of hooting and tooting coming from everywhere else.
Stumbling past my floor-mounted calendar on my way down the stairs, it suddenly struck me smack-dab in the face: Christmas had arrived in all its hooting, tooting, clamorous glory. And every single person on the face of the Earth was expecting presents from me in less than three hours. And… being the witless boob that I am, I had completely forgotten.
“But at least I didn’t forget about Hitler this time!” I retorted, to no one in particular.
I threw on the nearest light and began running in circles in stark, raving panic. What would I do?! What could I do?! I stopped running in circles, and began instead running in tight parallelograms about my dining room—overturning all the furniture in the process, and breaking three windows. Snow began to billow in, and with it came a legion of Bavarian White-Tailed Gnomes, who promptly went to work taunting and jeering me for my witless boobery.
I shrieked in terror, horror, panic, anger, rage, fright, and even, dare I say it, a bit of galoobery. Out of my dining room I flew like a flash; the gnome problem I would have to deal with later. There was only one thing I could do now, and there was no time to waste: To the Spend-O-Mart on Alpha Ralpha Boulevard I must go, and fast—before everything was sold out.
Being in such a filibusterous hurry that I had not even time to open the door to my garage, I scurried down to my basement and fetched my axe: The axe I had planned on using to fetch a Christmas tree from Mr. Wilson’s front yard, but that would have to wait until the ’safternoon. Smash, smash, crash! Three minutes later and I had succeeded in hacking my way through the door. Into my car I flew (like a flash), again employing the axe in thirty-seven decisive blows, rather than waste time unlocking and opening doors using key and handle.
I’ll spare my dear readers the tale of my frantic, chipmunk-like scurrying up and down every aisle of the Spend-O-Mart, and the veritable train of shopping carts I had to employ in order to purchase 6½ billion presents, and I’ll spare you the details of me shouting “Choo, choo!” all the way home with my train of shopping carts, too. Suffice it to say that the tale involved scurrying around in a frantic, chipmunk-like manner, making childish train noises, throwing fistfuls of dryer lint and old soy sauce packets at the cashier, rewriting this sentence several times in order to achieve the proper grammatical parallelism, and a bunch of other stuff, too. A bunch of other stuff!
Spwahh!!
Arriving home at a quarter-second to eight of clock, I set about wrapping all 6½ billion presents nearly at the speed of light. After wrapping 37,095 of them, I realized there was a faster way: Into a giant heap went the remainder of the presents, and around and around I flew with the wrapping paper, wrapping them all up in one huge bundle. Yappie looked on resignedly, unfulfilled visions of doggie snacks dancing in his doggie little cranium.
“Done!” I crowed triumphantly. “And not a moment to spare!”
And with that, I donned a Santa Claus suit made of shaving cream and pepperoni, and dove into a man-sized gift box I had purchased for just this purpose (diving into it). From the inside I wrapped the gift box up in the most alabasterous wrapping paper I was able to find at the Spend-O-Mart, and on the top of the box I super-glued the most efflubious paisley ribbon. Then, I waited.
Soon everyone—the entire poopulation of the entire planet—would arrive, yammering and clamoring for their presents from Pnårp. I planned to wait for at least a million of ’em to embarken my doorstep, and then… pop! Out of the box! Ho, ho, ho! Merry Christmoose!
So I waited.
And waited…
And waited…
And… Oh, shazbot! It’s Monday morning and my wobsite was supposed to be updated yesterday!!