Santa Claus is Coming to Town (SCICTT), the 1934 holiday anthem penned by J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie, is a dank and terrifying morass of Western religious child terror, wallowing in the threadbare banality of Orwellian paranoia.

The first strains of this well-worn dreadnought of a carol set an appropriately hopeless tone: “You’d better watch out, you’d better not cry, you’d better not pout…”  Children — ostensibly the intended audience of this misanthropic musical melange — are put on notice. They are to be observed, measured, and managed. Not only their behavior but their mental and emotional states will fall under the purview of a merciless overlord in red and white fur. A cheerful melody and jaunty accompaniment lay a whistling-in-the-dark veneer over the lyrics, which summon a haunted existence so unoriginal as to numb the mind.

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I know it’s not a turkey. It’s a great-tailed grackle. I don’t have any pictures of turkeys, even though wild ones apparently live in theseabouts. Since it’s a holiday, today I shall do no work. Probably. I did bring home a huge stack of tests that need grading, but I may just ignore them. In honor of turkey day, I have shamelessly ripped off the following from www.shoeboxblog.com :

Where Would We Be Without The Pilgrims?
An Essay by Dan

Jammed into England like sardines with bad teeth.

The End

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On NPR today, I heard one of those “personal” essays (the ones written by presumably everyday-type writers with wildly varying skill at not sounding anesthetized). The author captured my interest by opening her piece as a long-overdue homage to the bedroom skills of unsung suburban husbands. Interesting. As an aspiring home-owning and daily-wife-contact-type husband myself, this sounded relevant.

Within about 30 seconds, she had “praised” these suburban lovers two or three times for their amazing skills in seducing their wives in spite of piles of laundry, crying children, overdue bills, and a generally tedious sense of oppression. This seemed to be in stark contrast to the horndog husbands’ carefree, sexually selfish lives. NPR will have to forgive me for turning off my radio for the next few… weeks. She might have taken a softer tone later in this veiled tirade, but then again, she can also bite me. Sometimes it gets tiring hearing crap like that.

Apparently, the following painfully evenhanded hypothetical letter is an accurate representation of how the majority of the wives of the Western World feel about their husbands (or maybe just the ones who listen to those essay things on NPR?):

Dear Abby,

My husband sometimes wants to have sex with me. This is in spite of clear evidence that I am not only a woman, but a mother, as well. As if his gender hadn’t caused enough problems on this blighted earth.

I’m just sayin’,

Offended and Sickened in Oshkosh