Did you know that for decades, jolly old St. Nick was a heavy, couple-packs-a-day smoker? According to prominent advertising of the twentieth century, at least. How to be a Retronaut has an extensive collection of popular culture portrayals of a nicotine-loving Santa, puffing away as he festoons trees with cartons of smokes, and more…
John Farrier writes on Neatorama:
Allegedly, this is a picture of a Godzilla-shaped Christmas tree that appeared in the Aqua City Odaiba shopping mall.
Within minutes, it destroyed the mall.
So, in retrospect, it was a really bad idea …
Keepers of morality the American Family Association have released their annual list of companies that are “Christmas friendly” or “anti-Christmas” (the latter using the term “Christmas” sparingly and instead referring to “the holidays”). Lesson learned: Jesus loves Wal-Mart, and when you shop at Staples, you’re shopping with Satan.
What follows is an open letter to the President of the United States, extending my holiday greetings and providing a brief explanation of some perhaps ‘idiosyncratic’ gifts sent to Pennsylvania Avenue via U.P.S. this past week.
Okay, okay, I realize this may seem rather belated, but let’s be realistic: there was no way you were going to get around to opening my Xmas gifts to you until now. Indeed, they probably still remain unopened in some storage room, if they haven’t already been nicked by the staff you’ve assigned to opening packages. Or the security detail hasn’t mistakenly drawn a sinister interpretation of their contents and ruined them by soaking them in some watery defusion contrivance.
Which would be a great shame. Not because my personal feelings would be injured by the gifts’ destruction, but because recent events have shown me that you sorely in need these items. So much so that I regard it as equally necessary to append this open letter describing the thought process behind each of the gifts.… Read the rest
The Fortean Times has a very interesting analysis of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” by Guy Reid-Brown, in which he investigates the possible mystical/shamanic inspiration for the classic Christmas story:
No doubt as this Advent commences, I, and many others, will be re-reading Charles Dickens’s 1843 seasonal classic “A Christmas Carol” for the umpteenth time. Those of us who have fallen under its spell will doubtless continue to do so every year, even if we live to be as old as the oldest Biblical patriarch, and each time with the same degree of emotion – whether it be delight, wonder or sadness -– as the times before.
In any other context, such behaviour might be interpreted as borderline obsessive, but that simply doesn’t apply here. Ponder this for a moment: there are few other works in Western literature that have enjoyed such a breadth and variety of adaptations across all media.
One of the highlights of Graham Hancock’s lecture in support of his new book Entangled is when he shows us how the mythological character that he refers to as “Father Christmas” (better known in the U.S. as Santa Claus) has much in common with Siberian Tungus shamans who fly high on fly agaric (amanita muscaria) mushrooms, eaten by reindeer whose urine is then drunk by the shamans — and whose urine is then drunk by villagers, passing through up to seven bladders before potency is lost. Gross, right? Yes, but effective!
disinformation reader Dainius sent along a link to a similar account, saying it’s “about how the meme of Santa Claus was born in the minds of tribal psychonauts, and shows the fascinating links between Christmas and shamanism,” by Mark Adams at the Aminam Recro blog:
These red and white mushrooms, Amanita muscaria, were found in an alpine forest around Creede, Colorado.
Science fiction writer Robert Anton Wilson once researched all of Santa’s “Crimes Against Humanity.”
Jolly Ol’ St. Nick is guilty of more than just paganism, perjury, and trying to steal Christmas from Christ. “Pope John XXIII threw the suspiciously merry old clown out of the Roman Catholic church back in the late 1960s,” and “The Jehovah’s Witnesses have always denounced Santa for his unsavory pagan past. (They also recognized Christmas trees as phallic symbols long before Freud.)”
Santa also has “a rather criminal family history all around,” since he’s a descendant of the primordial bear-god. And in some rustic parts of Europe “and probably in Kansas, Santa retains traces of his carnivorous past. Children are told that if they are good all year, Santa will reward them, but if they are bad, he will EAT THEM ALL UP.”… Read the rest
Here’s a video of a “Krampus Parade” filmed in South Tyrol, an autonomous region in Italy right on the Austrian border … Enjoy!
My favorite part of Christmas is that every time someone plays a Bing Crosby song, I’m thinking about how he used to smoke pot with Louis Armstrong — and that he loved smoking pot his whole life!
He even recommended it to his son as a less-harmful alternative to alcohol. And this song from The Road to Morocco could be seen as a secret testament to how much how loved the mellow, laid-back life:
