“Honey, will you get the door? It looks like Satan and Santa are here.”
Eve slips into her peignoir and opens the door. “Hello, welcome!”
Old Nick and Saint Nick bow and greet Eve by kissing her hand.
“Come in,” sez Eve.
So they all gather round the tree and open their gifts. This is the first Christmas where everything turns out perfect. Each present was tailor-made for its recipient.
Drinks are served. Eggnog, etc. They all retire to the screening room to watch the film Wrong Cops (2013), which is their family tradition.
Outside, in the dark, a happy fellow wearing a white top-hat is driving an ice-cream truck. An orphaned child who lives on the street approaches the vehicle.
“Can I help you?” the man in the white top-hat addresses the urchin.
“I would like to purchase a bon-bon,” the child holds out a caesar coin.
Meanwhile, at Dave’s Pub, down the street, all the stools and booths are occupied — there is a warm crowd, and these people are singing a song. We listen to the lyrics:
Give me that old-time religion;
It’s good enough for me!
Now Jesus Christ comes in the clouds in glory, and everyone can see him plainly — in other words, this is no dream-vision or mass hallucination: this is the actual Second Coming. Even the man who pierced him thru the side with a harpoon sees the Lord as he enters Dave’s Pub. The singing stops abruptly. There is a tense moment of silence as all the drunken revelers realize that they are witnessing an historical event of cosmic proportions. Then Jesus declares:
“Tonight is Christmas. I have returned, because I heard your call. You have asked to be given the religion that our forefathers believed in. Here it is. Take it; use it. It’s yours to keep. I’ll never ask for it back.”
And now, having spoken these things, while they are still beholding him, he is taken up; and a cloud receives him out of their sight.
“Was that really who I think it was?” sez a man named Jeff who is holding a mug of beer.
“I would say yes,” sez a woman named Clarissa from the other side of the bar, after sipping her cocktail, “but that’s cuz I’m comfortable going out on a limb and taking wild guesses. Truly, it depends. — Who, by the way, do you think the stranger was?”
Jeff finishes his beer, orders another, and then answers Clarissa: “Wasn’t he obviously the Buddha of the ninety-nine percent?”
“What does that signify?” asks Clarissa, “I mean, I know who Buddha is, but what’s that part about ninety-nine percent?”
“Ah, that’s easy to explain,” Jeff takes a few more gulps of beer and then answers: “it just means ‘All the members of a population EXCEPT those belonging to the top percentile of wealth-possessors’.”
“Oh, I get it,” Clarissa lifts her finger to the bartender, to indicate that she would like another cocktail; “so, the man who visited us and gave us this old-time religion is, in your opinion, probably the Buddha of the slum-class, so he cares specifically for the workers, the slaves. And the rich folk presumably have their own private Buddha who brings them presents on Christmas.”
“Exactly,” Jeff nods.
Although only having met each other this evening, Clarissa and Jeff end up going home together. They first park their vehicles at Jeff’s apartment; but, once they step inside, they decide the place too small; plus, Jeff owns no record player, and there’s very little booze in his cupboards; so they decide to try Clarissa’s place.
Clarissa lives in a trailer home in the southeast side of Minnesota, at a place called Queen Anne Courts. Like I said, she and Jeff both initially drove their cars from Dave’s Pub to Jeff’s apartment building. (Yes, I’m sorry to relate that, instead of calling for a taxi, which would have been the more responsible thing to do, they both drove drunk — please do not emulate their example: I almost wanted to leave this fact out of my account here, but I vowed to report the truth about what happened on this night: after all, I’m writing journalism, not moral parables, fables, allegories, or encyclicals.) When back at the lot of the apartment complex, Jeff double-parked his Rolls-Royce Phantom (1925) over some guest-spots; then, when they decided to leave for Clarissa’s, they both got into her Alfa Romeo 8C (1938) and sped to the trailer park.
A police officer stopped the couple when they were just one kilometer from their destination, and Jeff was ticketed for traveling 25 km/h over the limit (tho it was Clarissa’s car, Jeff drove on this occasion, because he was a little more intoxicated than she was; thus he insisted that he would be more conscientious, which turned out to be true: we actually performed countless double-blind experiments in the science lab later that week, which confirmed Jeff’s hypothesis); but Jeff was not issued a citation or even a warning for being smash-drunk, because the cop who pulled him over was smash-drunk too.
So when they finally pull in and park on the rectangle of loose gravel in front of Clarissa’s trailer home, Jeff and Clarissa get out and stretch their limbs. The moon is full. Clarissa fumbles for her keys. The keys fall on the ground. Jeff and Clarissa both bend down to pick up the keys, and, in the process, they lightly bump their heads together, which makes them laugh. Then finally Clarissa gets her keys into the lock and the door swings open:
It is a very beautiful trailer. There is a lamp by the window, and an entertainment system in front of the sofa. There is a box set of digital video discs, featuring the films of Werner Herzog, on top of the television.
“I like your living quarters,” Jeff sez.
“Would you care for a drink?” Clarissa swings open the doors of her cabinetry, revealing 100 bottles of booze.
“I’d love a drink!” replies Jeff.
They kiss.
Outside, a racoon wanders up to a garbage can and presses against it, knocking it over.
“What was that!?” Clarissa pulls back from the kiss.
“It was probably just a raccoon,” Jeff sez. “I’ll go check.”
Jeff grabs the shotgun from the wall-mounted rack and opens the front door as silently as possible. He tiptoes around the trailer, aiming the gun anxiously at everything that captures his attention. When he reaches the raccoon, he lowers the barrel and laughs. “It was a raccoon after all, just like I thought,” Jeff yells so that Clarissa can hear him from outside (for her trailer’s windows are all closed). Jeff kneels down and pets the cute little creature on its head, as it licks the pesto sauce off a half-eaten caprese salad that has tumbled out from the trash.
Jeff returns indoors and Clarissa hands him another drink. They now retire to the bedroom, where there are two single-person beds pressed against the opposite walls, each bed having a sheet, a pillow, and a twin size mattress. Jeff sits on one bed, and Clarissa sits on the other. They talk for a while about their views on politics.
§
Atop the hill nearby, a wolf howls at the moon. It is 2 a.m. on the dot. Satan and Santa can be seen leaving the Christmas party in the latter’s sleigh, silhouetted by lamplight.
The sleigh lands on the moon. Satan and Santa now climb out and unpack all the gifts that they received. They enter their house on the magnetic north pole of the natural satellite and spend the rest of the evening making telephone calls. (Neither Satan nor Santa ever stops working.) A young boy — I’d say he’s about nine years of age — coasts past on a skateboard, right in front of a bright yellow sign that reads “No Skateboarding”. Santa exits his house to smoke a cigarette. “Ho, ho, ho!” he shouts; then he rings his signature cowbell. The skateboarding boy looks back and salutes: “Hiya, Nick!” And the red-suited saint returns the lad’s greeting, jollily.
An air-force commander now parachutes into the desert. He looks to his right, and he looks to his left. He removes his aviator sunglasses. A herd of camels approaches. The man skillfully leaps upon the nearest camel as it is trotting by, and it willfully (even happily) accepts his saddle. As rider and beast begin to gallop while the rest of the pack picks up speed, it becomes harder and harder to finish buckling under the the beast’s belly all the thousands of fasteners; which are necessary to assure safe travel for the rider, as well as to ease for the camel the burden of carrying a human passenger; however, the air-force commander completes this death-defying mission. The saddle is secured. They can now ride at top-speed alongside the pack without a care in the world.
Suddenly the camels all halt at once. The air-force commander almost falls off his beast. “What’s the idea!?” He shouts. The fact that the whole herd has stopped seems inexplicable, until the rider descends from his camel and marches forward to the front of the pack, where he sees that, there on the desert sand, two pregnant women are reclining and in the middle of giving birth. The air-force commander lights his cigar and puffs a couple times, then nods and shouts back to his herd:
“It’s OK, boys; I’ll take care of this.”
He now sets to work very gently and carefully dragging one of the pregnant women far over to the left side of the herd of camels, so that she’s out of their way. Then the air-force commander stomps back thru the thick desert sand and conscientiously pulls the remaining pregnant woman, whose baby is starting to be born, to the other extremity, so that the path is clear for his herd of camels to trot over.
“There ye go,” remarks the commander to his pack, “I commend ye for refraining from trampling on the ladies.”
Now the beasts begin to pace forward before he has a chance to find and remount the camel that he had saddled aforetime, so he’s forced to fasten another saddle on a fresh camel. Luckily, this new beast, chosen necessarily at random, is just as accepting of the riding arrangement as was the last one; and soon the pair are galloping at full speed thru the desert.
They make it to the Bermuda Triangle Vortex and the pack stops abruptly, as they did before; yet this time the halt was expected. The air-force commander dismounts and unfolds his map. “Yep, we’re here,” he ashes his cigar on the “X” which marks the spot; then he crumples the paper and stuffs it back into his breast pocket. “Let’s go!” he points confidently to the Vortex and leads the way, on foot, marching thru the deep desert sand. The camels follow after him and disappear into the diamond-shaped haze of glowing sapphire.
They all end up in the Atlantic Ocean. It is extremely relaxing. They spend the rest of their days floating at leisure between South Florida and Puerto Rico. When they tire of one place, they float over and visit the other. They marry the locals and produce beautiful, healthy children. They build churches and spread Paul’s Gospel to parts of the world that have never even heard of it. Soon, computers are invented; and America the Great comes and visits them. She brings gifts in abundance, just like that one special Christmas at the dawn of this Age, which started the world on a fancy new path.
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