When I was a kid I used to sneak out of bed and sit at the top of the stairs and listen to my parents and their anti-imperialist friends argue about life. During one of the arguments my father said, in a loud voice, “I don’t mind my son learning about Jesus, but I will not have him believing in Santa Claus”.

Then he picked up a pipe bomb and headed out into the darkness in the vague direction of some government building.

Or something like that. To be honest I might have picked up that line from ‘Howard The Duck’, but I’m fairly certain it was daddy. I get the two confused a lot.

So, now that I have a son of my own, I’m a little ambivalent about the whole Santa thing. To be honest (again), I just figured out yesterday that I only have four shopping days left until Christmas.

The kids sitting on Santa’s lap in the photo are my newly two-year old son, and his older brother who, I think, is just figuring out that Santa is, really, a load of horseshit.

It’s such a weird holiday. I really don’t know much about Kwanzaa or Hanukkah, but for Christians it’s a religious holiday whose main symbols are totally secular — a tree and a Coca-Cola marketing tool, and the religious part is totally manufactured. Christ — the man, not the expletive — was born in the spring, probably in April.

But I guess it’d be a little weird celebrating his birth, death and resurrection as Zombie Christ all in the same week. Plus, that’d be a lot of gift giving all jammed together.

Yeah. So… anyway, Merry Christmas.