Perhaps you have been hiding out in a cave, or waiting for the rapture in a cabin stocked with guns in the middle of Montana, or holding a candle light vigil at the McCain-Palin headquarters while your petition for a recount is being examined. I have some terrible news for you and I don't know how to tell you so I'm just going to tell you. Folks, there is a war on Christmas.
We have attempted to prove through rational inquiry that Christmas is real. We felt that we could provide more conclusive evidence than the 10,000 letters addressed to Santa Claus that vindicated Saint Nick in Miracle on 34th Street. We felt that only through scientific methods could we coerce retailers into returning to the good old days when clerks could greet shoppers with “Merry Christmas” instead of the hyper politically correct “Happy Holidays” now currently in vogue.
We began with a list of Christmas truisms and exposed them to the cruel scrutiny of scientific investigation.
Does the holiday season promote peace on earth and goodwill?
Sure, why not? Just as long as you aren't standing between me and sale items at Wal-Mart. I myself am not a violent man, but they had Hanes men's briefs on sale, three for $7. You need to give me some room to work here people or someone is going down. Next time Wal-Mart has a stampede of bargain hunters the National Guard should fire off a couple of warning shots to direct the crowd.
Can reindeer fly?
For most of you, apocryphal accounts of flying reindeer and popular ballads of the exploits of Santa’s sleigh drivers are all the proof you need, but we wanted to establish this fact scientifically. We traveled to the Lapland region of Finland to find a herd of reindeer. We transported fifteen of the sturdiest examples of the breed to our testing center at the Space Needle in Seattle. Working closely with a team of aerodynamic engineers from Boeing Aircraft we joyfully launched the reindeer, one by one, from the top of this Seattle icon.
Can reindeer fly? The short answer is “Hell no.” The Boeing people actually said that what they saw was the exact opposite of flying, but many of the test subjects certainly displayed characteristics of a species that desperately wanted to fly, and that is good enough for us. On a side note, reindeer meat is quite flavorful and tender, although the tenderness may have been the result of dropping the animals from 605 feet.
Could Santa Claus slide down a chimney?
For our next experiment we enlisted the help of 65 year old Armando Escovedo. We lowered the retired Seattle fireman into a chimney and waited to see how long it would take him to make it into the living room.
Although paramedics pronounced Mr. Escovedo dead at the scene after spending nearly three hours extracting him from his sooty grave, we feel that our test subject may have had other health issues that contributed to his demise and thus to the failure of our experiment. We are experiencing some difficulty in finding another old, gray-haired, and overweight volunteer for further investigation into this matter.
Can Santa's elves make toys for every child on the planet?
Although they refused to allow us to call them elves, we employed a group of midgets to work under harsh arctic conditions.
The result was a rather resounding Yes! Yes! Yes! We proved, without a doubt, that working a small group of “elves” 20 hours a day, seven days a week our team was able to make a hell of a lot of toys. Granted, the toys were kind of crappy, and thanks to an Amnesty International report we’re not exactly going to win any awards for being employee-friendly. Whether or not we face a human rights violation tribunal in The Hague or not, there can be no denying that it is possible to make a prodigious amount of toys using a well-motivated group of height-challenged workers. The trick is to keep them inspired. Techniques that we found to be successful were constant threats of physical violence, holding workers' family members hostage, and always supplying an open bar at company functions.
