November 29: Scraggy-Looking Santa Clauses, the Grinch, Yuletide Fairy Tale

...All those scraggy-looking Santa Clauses were standing on corners ringing those bells, and the Salvation Army girls, the ones that don't wear any lipstick or anything, were ringing bells too...

Yes, it's Black Friday in the United States.  The day where people hit the stores at ungodly hours in hopes of getting some sort of amazing deal on a plasma TV or tablet computer.  It's a day where scraggy-looking Santa Clauses and Salvation Army girls face crazed, iPad-hungry shoppers.  It's a desperate day.  The commercial kick-off of the holidays.

I didn't participate in Black Friday today.  I have never participated in Black Friday, mainly because I can never afford it.  However, I do celebrate the day after Thanksgiving as the official start of the Christmas season.  Tonight, I watched the annual broadcast of How the Grinch Stole Christmas on ABC.  Yes, the Grinch, that classic yuletide favorite that promotes the message that Christmas isn't about packages and gifts and boxes and bows.  That Christmas is about so much more than that.

Unfortunately, ABC decided to highly edit the Grinch in order to air about five million commercial breaks during the half hour.  That's right, the network cut out parts of a treasured Christmas cartoon in order to sell Verizon phones and Black Friday specials at K-Mart.  And I was really pissed.  The kids watching this evening have no idea that they missed some really good parts of the Grinch because of greed.

Which reminds me of a little story.

Once upon a time, a village idiot named Bobbie decided he was going to go Black Friday shopping at the local Walmarket to buy a new iWand for his fairy godmother.  Well, Bobbie stood in line for twelve hours, fought a crowd of 563 cranky fairies, and found out that the store only had three iWands in stock.  Bobbie did not get an iWand.
 
By the time he finally got back to his hut, Bobbie had missed Thanksgiving day and dinner.  He didn't get any turkey or pecan pie.  In fact, Bobbie was so obsessed with getting the iWand that he missed the messenger pigeon carrying the news that his fairy godmother had died the night before of a stroke of bad luck.

Bobbie lost his idiot job at the palace the next day, and his fairy godmother didn't leave him anything in her will.

Moral of the story:  ABC sucks for fucking up the Grinch.

And Saint Marty lived happily ever after.

Don't mess with this guy...