The Discussion: Christmas!
(Our Christmas episode has been officially recorded, so if you still want to share your Christmas stories in the comments you may, but they won't be shared in our annual holiday episode. Thanks to everybody for participating, and we hope you enjoy the episode coming up! -D)
Hello once again, all you fascinating internet-dwelling folks! Once more we reach out to you from the depths of chaos to join our festive discussion here on the old TRAPPO blog. This time around, we're celebrating this lovely Christmas season by asking you, our dear listeners, to tell us all about your experiences with this holiday. And we're not just looking for general warm and fuzzy memories, friends. On this exciting occasion, we want you to share with us some of your most memorable holiday season fails. Now what does that mean exactly? To be frank, if you have any interesting and amusing stories to share where things didn't go quite right with your festive celebrations, we'd love to hear them. We're not looking for anything dark or depressing, so if a member of your family had a heart attack at a holiday party or your house burned down when you were a kid because your Christmas Tree dried out and caught fire, you can keep that sad bastard crap to yourself. Unless, of course, you really want to get that off your chest, in which case you can share away, although your comments likely won't make it into our special Christmas episode coming up a little later in the month.
We're looking for funny and light stories to share on our show, so if you've got a holiday tale that fits the bill, share it below or in a much appreciated email, and we'll include it in our final episode. Funny Christmas fails! Did your young nephew scream so hard he shat his pants when he sat on Santa's lap at the mall? Did you laugh so hard when your young nephew shat his pants that you shat your pants? Did your grandmother shit her pants while eating Christmas dinner last year? Did your father strain so hard while hanging twinkling lights on your house that he shat his pants when you were a kid? Did anything amusing but not directly related to people shitting their pants happen to you or anybody you know on Christmas? Tell us all about it, and your stories will be immortalized on our upcoming holiday spectacular edition of TRAPPO, the show that talks about Christmas on purpose!
Get to it, dear listeners, because your time is tick-tick-ticking away!
Hey TRAPPO, it's Sammy. That's still not my real name, but I've got some real stories for you, and I've got some handy tips that might make your holiday season a little easier. I believe Ryan Graveface has the right idea. Halloween is a state of mind. You can keep that flame alive and well in your heart all year round. And I do just that. You know you don't have to put all your Halloween decorations away in November. You can just wrap Christmas lights around them or put cheap Santa hats on them and bam! Seasonally appropriate decor, my friends! I'm like the Martha fucking Stewart of lazy motherfuckers. It's so easy to do. Go to the dollar store and buy some cheap shit and just kinda put it around or on top of your Halloween stuff. No big deal.
ReplyDeleteThat rotting pumpkin on your porch? Just leave it out for the animals to fight over, and by the time next October rolls around, whatever's left is so dry and shriveled you can just kick it into a corner and forget all about it. Or put a Santa hat on that shit, too. Who fucking cares? Christmas blows, anyway. I don't know why I even bother.
My parents are dead and I get stuck with all their old janky decorations. I put them out every year out of habit, but whenever I do I feel like I'm being haunted by the tacky ghost of Christmas past. It really bums me out more than anything. My big brother's too busy being a reclusive alcoholic to spend the holidays with me. I just want to watch old episodes of Supermarket Sweep and eat some lasagna on Christmas. Like I did on Halloween. Only on Halloween I was wearing a shirt that read "this is my Halloween costume", so that counts. This Christmas, I'll be wearing a shirt that reads "this is my Halloween costume", but I'll be wearing a Santa hat, and I'll probably be sucking suggestively on a candy cane while I watch Supermarket Sweep in my thermal underwear. My girlfriend might join me. Or she might just spend the holidays with her parents to spare herself my holiday ennui. She hasn't decided yet. But if she flies the coop, she is missing out, my friends.
I don't really have any funny Christmas stories. My father farted really loudly once when he reached for a wrapped present under the Christmas tree when I was ten. We all laughed for a few minutes, but it seemed to make my old man really self-conscious. He acted like his feelings were genuinely hurt for a few days. He usually would hide away his farts like he was smuggling them through the Underground Railroad, he was so weird about them. Usually men don't care. They'll just let it rip like they're really proud of their flatulence. Not my old man. I think maybe he snuck off and cried for a few minutes. Maybe I made that up. I don't really remember anymore. But I do remember how hard my grandmother laughed when her uptight son blasted ass while reaching for that shiny box on Christmas morning. That's probably what hurt the most. Mommy laughed like a deranged hyena and I bet that cut him to the quick. Maybe he didn't have a very good relationship with the old woman. I did. She was cool. She left me her house in her will. I still live in it today. She left her car to my brother. He sold it to one of his burnout friends for a bunch of booze money.
Happy holidays.
You want to hear about some Christmas fails? I think I've got one for you TRAPS.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was ten years old, I had to perform at our school's Christmas pageant. I was in the fifth grade choir, and we sang Good King Wenceslas and Silent Night. We were all wearing alternating red and green robes on the stage, standing on a four-tiered platform, holding fake plastic candles. It was like something out of a storybook, but people can't smell pictures in storybooks. You know kids smell. Little boys farting and giggling on stage, some of them don't wash their hair, some of just don't wear deodorant, some of them smell like stew, even if they've never even eaten stew in their lives. It doesn't make sense, but very little in this life tends to make sense.
Right in the middle of Silent Night, the kid standing next to me, a rotund little misfit named Wally, just up and puked all over the girls in the row in front of us. This kid was like a fucking vegetable soup fountain. It was the most amazing and disgusting thing I'd ever seen. The girls started screaming and everybody scattered like cockroaches when the lights come on. It was absolute pandemonium. When the dust settled, it was just me and Wally standing on the platform, his red robe covered in vomit. He looked at me and said "where'd everybody go" like he had no idea what he'd just done. Wally's mother ran up on stage and grabbed his hand, pulling him away to the bathroom to get her boy cleaned up, and I just stood there for a moment, staring out at a sea of shocked parents in the crowd. Then I just pulled off my robe, dropped it on the platform, right on the fresh vomit, then walked out into the audience and left with my mom and dad.
We stopped at McDonald's on the way home. I had Chicken McNuggets. They were delicious.
I don't know what happened to Wally after fifth grade. Maybe he moved out of town to escape the shame. I know I will never forget that Christmas pageant. I still remember seeing the arc of that vomit flowing out of Wally's mouth, into the air, splashing onto the heads and shoulders of the girls below us, like it was in slow-motion. Fucking brilliant. Thanks for the memories, Wally, you gross bastard.
Happy holidays, TRAPS.
My crazy father cut a tree down in the woods and brought it home. It was too big for the house, but he made it fit. There was a squirrel living in it, and it ran all around the house and our cousin's dog chased it and wrecked a bunch of furniture. Then the tree caught fire after my great uncle smoked a cigar around it even though he was told he couldn't smoke inside, because the dog drank all the water out of the base and it dried out, but the house was fine. It was like a big joke. Then my dad's cousin-in-law kidnapped his boss after my dad didn't get his Christmas bonus and was really upset about it because he promised the whole family he was going to have a pool built in the backyard and everybody was going to have a big party next summer, and the cops showed up and almost shot everybody, and Christmas was almost ruined, but then my dad's boss just gave him a bonus anyway and didn't press charges, so Christmas was saved.
ReplyDeleteWhat a wild Christmas that was.
A bunch of dogs broke into our house and ate our Christmas turkey when I was a kid, and we had to eat at a Chinese restaurant that evening, and the wait staff sang Jingle Bells and it was racist as hell. I also almost shot my eye out playing with a bb gun my old man gave me, but I was okay. And I guess it was the 1940's, so I'm really old now.
DeleteMy first year in college I decided not to go home for Christmas because I just wanted to be by myself in my dorm. I was going through some stuff and didn’t feel like celebrating the holiday. I ended up meeting a girl at a local coffee shop on Christmas Eve and we talked for a while. Turned out she was Jewish and had recently been disowned by her father for getting a tattoo of a blue star on her ankle, and I guess that’s against the rules for Orthodox Judaism.
ReplyDeleteShe was in a particularly rebellious mood and wanted to spend the night with me, so I snuck her into my dorm room and we watched It’s A Wonderful Life on TV and drank a bottle of vodka she’d brought with me.
I passed out, and when I woke up in the morning all my stuff was gone and there was a note on the door (which was wide open) that read: Happy Chanukah you dumb asshole!
I never saw her again.who knows if anything she told me that night was true. Probably not. I know I should have just gone home for Christmas. But aside from the whole getting ripped off part, which I don’t want to minimize, since I was a poor student who couldn’t rely on my parents to just bail me out when I inevitably would get into trouble, I actually had a really good time that Christmas Eve. She didn’t just steal my wallet and my laptop and my shoes, she also stole my heart.
There was a lot of good porn on that laptop, though. I couldn’t just look up porn in the computer lab after hours, you know. They locked that damn door. That was the beginning of a long, miserable, chaste winter, my friends.
Happy holidays, TRAPS.
I have an uncle who loved fireworks. He lived outside of town and would drive to Mexico a few times a year and buy a metric ton of stuff that he’d just blow up all year. He didn’t have a lot of hobbies, so mostly he’s just drink beer and smoke unfiltered cigarettes and light fireworks.
ReplyDeleteHe’s a nice guy. Usually we’d go to his house on the 4th of July and have a literal blast, but sometimes he’d bring some bottle rockets with him at Christmas and he’d gather the kids around outside and we’d be entertained for a little while after dinner.
When I was 12, it was snowing on Christmas and Uncle Hair (we all called him that. I never asked why) was blasting bottle rockets into the sky, and we were all standing around laughing as he told dirty jokes we were all too young to be hearing or to understand. One bottle rocket popped right next to a crow he didn’t see in a tree, and that crow raised hell up in those branches. We all laughed and forgot about it after a few minutes.
A little while later, Uncle Hair went to his truck to grab another six pack and, I swear to god, he was attacked by a gang of angry crows. There had to have been ten of them swooping him and screeching and pecking at him out on the street. Uncle Hair was yelling and flailing around like a man on fire, and in the commotion he dropped his beer, which shattered all over the road. We were all watching in awe at this display. It was absolutely insane. I’ve never seen crows act like that before. It was like a scene from “The Birds” come to life.
When my uncle finally got back in the house, the crows following him to the door, we all noticed he had pissed his pants at some point during the attack. His jeans were soaked. Uncle Hair stopped bringing bottle rockets with him after that. And I swear I see him flinch every time he hears crows outside.
We still talk about Uncle Hair’s harrowing encounter with those crows. And we still laugh. Except for Uncle Hair. For some reason, he doesn’t seem to think it’s very funny. But the crows probably do.
Merry Christmas!
Last year was the first Christmas holiday I spent with my in-laws after my wedding, and it was like something out of a David Lynch movie. They had a full-size, fully decorated Christmas tree in every single room in the house. Even the guest bathroom. It was in the bathtub, because that's the only place where it would fit. A seven-foot tall, plastic Christmas tree in a bathtub. It was lit, too. They ran an extension cord into the bathtub and tried to hide it with a cheap tree skirt. Fake snow was sprayed onto every window to provide the illusion of frost. In Jacksonville, Florida.
ReplyDeleteRolls of white fluff blanketed the front yard. A life-size animatronic Santa was ho-ho-ho'ing on the porch all night long. His hips gyrated like he was banging an invisible animatronic Mrs. Claus. It was very suggestive. Christmas music was always playing somewhere in the house, thanks to the smart speakers in every room. They had a carefully curated playlist of every stupid Christmas song you don't want to hear playing on repeat, and they only shut that down when it was bedtime. The guest bedroom was right next to the front porch, so the air-fucking robot Santa's horny shadow was cast on the wall, and that horrifying undulating shape still haunts my dreams.
We sang carols. Every night. My father-in-law played the piano, and we had to gather round and be cheerful for an hour of this good-natured weirdness. Hot cocoa all the time. I want some coffee in the morning. Wouldn't you prefer some hot cocoa? No. No, I wouldn't prefer some hot cocoa. I want coffee. Do you know what wassail is? Because they did. And they made their own. It was wretched. They also made their own egg nog. It, too, was wretched. Baking and decorating cookies. Attending church services and being strong-armed into singing in the choir in front of a bunch of strangers with cranky faces. Being volunteered to ring that bell for charity in front of the grocery store for six hours, wearing a rented gingerbread man costume. Wearing a different Christmas sweater every day that was carefully laid out on the bed for me by a deranged elf every time I got out of the shower. Every single activity being done "as a family". They were always so damned cheerful. Like they were all just as "real" as that dry-humping Santa Claus on the front porch. At times, it was genuinely disturbing.
My wife always said her family was big on Christmas, but I could never imagine just how into Christmas a family could be. We left for home on December 27th. Six days felt like six years. Six years in a Christmas-themed Hell. When we got on the plane, I told my wife I never wanted to celebrate Christmas again. She laughed. She thought I was joking.
This year, we're skipping Christmas. She's not laughing now. Next year, we might be divorced. Time will tell.
Happy holidays, trappers.
Use this in your episode: blow me! TRAPPO sucks.
ReplyDeleteDid you know that some bars are open on Christmas Day? I learned that a few years ago. My longtime partner left me after an affair a few weeks before Christmas, and we had already made plans to go to Savannah, Georgia for the holidays. That sucked, but I ended up going to Savannah on my own, which was probably a mistake since I was just miserable and didn't enjoy basically anything during that trip. I spent my Christmas Eve in a dive bar close to my hotel, and I asked if they would be open tomorrow, and the bartender said their doors would open at 11 AM, so I knew how I would be celebrating Christmas that year!
ReplyDeleteI shuffled in around 5 PM, and the place was pretty busy. I was surprised at the time, but in retrospect, I understand why there were so many people drowning their sorrows at some hole in the wall bar on Christmas Day. I get it now. I had an okay cheeseburger and some decent fries, I played pool for a few hours with some local sad sacks and we got to talking. We smoked a bunch of cigarettes in the alley and swapped stories. Then a pair of dudes dressed as Santa Claus walked in around 9 PM. I guess they had spent their afternoon on a street corner, breakdancing for charity. So we all started carousing, buying rounds of drinks and telling dirty jokes and laughing too loud. We closed the place down, stumbling out into the chilly night air, shaking hands and patting each other on the backs, parting ways forever. I never saw any of those people again. I've never even been back to Savannah.
When I ordered my first drink that afternoon, I was broken and depressed, wanting to drown myself in a sea of booze. But when I left the bar that night, I felt better. I had made a connection with those drunks, if only for a brief moment. I felt alive again, like I actually had a future to look forward to. I never made it back to the hotel, passing out on a park bench near the beach, and the morning sun rising over the ocean was my alarm clock. My head felt like a cracked egg, but that was the most beautiful sight I'd ever seen. When I got home a few days later, I was ready to move on with my life. I thought I was going to spend my Christmas Day drinking and feeling sorry for myself. I ended up having a great time with some pretty interesting people. That night was like a year of therapy for me.
It may sound insane, but that turned out to be one of the best Christmases I've ever had.
Merry Christmas, TRAPS.
I used to play Santa Claus at a shopping mall for three seasons in a big, gaudy plastic village with a bunch of fake snow and giant candy canes and all that crap. My elf assistant that first year turned out to have a bit of a Santa fetish.
ReplyDeleteI don’t know if it’s a weird “daddy” thing, but she was really into me, so we eventually started seeing each other, but she wanted me to wear the costume a lot, which was fine at first because I like a little kink as much as the next dude who plays Santa Claus, but after a while it got old. We got along really well, but she got too hung up on the Santa role play which started to rub me the wrong way. I even caught her smelling my big fake beard one night in my bathroom, in a really suggestive manner. That might have been too much for me.
I broke up with her on Christmas Eve, after the mall closed up for the evening. I took my costume off in the back of “the workshop” and before I could even got my jeans on, she burst in with a fucking switchblade and told me to stand in the corner. I thought this crazy bitch was gonna kill me, but she just stole the Santa costume and ran off. I told the security guard what happened, but I honestly don’t think he believed me. Who would?
I don’t want to imagine the things she did with that costume. Okay, sometimes I do. I can’t help myself. Although, you wouldn’t believe how many little kids actually piss themselves when they sit on Santa’s lap. Squirmers, screamers, the over-stimulated ones. I got at least a dozen every year, and only one uniform per season. Sure, it got dry cleaned every morning, but it was soiled when she took it that night.
Maybe she had a piss fetish, too.
Anyway, that was my big Christmas story. That elf really helped pass the time at the North Pole, if you know what I mean. Nice girl, really. Even the switchblade thing at the end was more bizarre than traumatizing. It sure made for a memorable Christmas holiday, so I’m not complaining.
Ho-Ho-Ho.
I had a humdinger of a story, but I guess you don’t want it now, so fuck you.
ReplyDelete