The 2023 One Percenter Gift Guide

Its been awhile since I’ve written up one of THESE things, but what the hell. It’s time to have a little fun again. It’s the fun-lovingest season of them all, you know, and you know what that means: Gift lists! Gift lists of every niche gift ever made for all of your niche buddies! And that means the inevitable lists which feature suggestions for the gift-giver on a budget! Folks who have been reading this blog since the beginning know that, until a few years ago, I too offered a list of good gifts for people who are on budgets. They also know MY budget lists feature gift suggestions for those whose budgets are particularly high! That’s right, I’m here to create a new list of the best damn gifts you could ever get your One-percenter friend! Price here is no object – after all, the true One-percenter has to pay people to hang out with them, so aren’t they actually paying for all this shit themselves anyway? Yes, your One-percenter friend may think they have everything, but there’s always something they don’t have and may not even realize they want until you give it to them!

HigherDose Infrared Sauna Blanket – $699

Saunas are in kind of a weird place. The common person sees them as a full-out luxury item or, at the very least, a bit of a splurge. Rich people see them as basic items which they hand out to commoners like candy and don’t bother with unless come with nice fixins, like dispensers for caviar and champaign. So why not get the One Percenter in your life something that combines a sauna with another item – say, a blanket – that’s also for commoners? (What, you think Jeff Bezos sleeps under a regular old comforter? HA!) The solution to this unique dilemma comes from HigherDose: An infrared sauna in blanket form! This nice little sleepytime aid boosts your body’s thermal temperature for increased circulation, enhanced relaxation, and glowing skin! Yes, the pedestrian price tag reeks of something your friend would expect you to buy on a whim when you just happened to be in the neighborhood, but One Percenters CAN be interested in novelty as well. Just as long as the regulars can’t afford that novelty.

Serendipity3 Golden Opulence Sundae – $1000

Finally, a treat for those who can always afford to treat themselves! This sucker is the dictionary definition of a rich dessert! It features three scoops of Tahitian vanilla ice cream drizzled with almonds, caviar, and gold leaf! Yes, gold leaf! I’m not sure if the gold leaf there is edible or not, but the big orchid that tops this extravagant runny confection is crafted from sugar and takes a whopping eight hours to construct! And hey, you think a masterwork like this is gonna be served in a dollar store bowl? No, One Percent ice cream is worthy only of One Percent dishes and silverware, so this sucker is served in a #350 Baccarat crystal goblet and eaten with an 18-carat gold spoon! It also has to be ordered 48 hours in advance, so when you send your One Percenter pal to the One Percenter restaurant, make sure you warn them to not get too indulgent with the wine too quickly.

Shumukh Perfume – $1.3 million

We don’t often think about the way we smell. But our musks follow us all the time, wherever we go, and they’re always sort of just wafting through our personal auras. If you think your One Percenter friend isn’t going to want to run around with an enchanting scent following them, letting all comers know how much better they are than the plebes? The world’s most expensive perfume is called Shumukh – Arabic for “deserving the highest.” And your One Percenter friend almost certainly thinks they’re the highest of all! Released by Spirit of Dubai Parfums, this perfume hails from the land of all rich things: The United Arab Emirates. It comes in a bottle nearly two meters tall and adorned with 3571 diamonds, as well as other bits of gold, silver, pearls, and topaz. Also, the spray is controlled by remote. Hey, spraying perfume right is work, so your One Percenter isn’t gonna do it!

Reinast Luxury Toothbrush – $4200

A good set of pearly whites is like a good smell: You may not think about it very much, but if a good One Percenter is to keep up appearances, it’s best to make sure they have a set their business partners can see themselves in! But they probably don’t want their servants to be pre-pasting an Oral-B from the dentist’s office. The Reinast Luxury Toothbrush is something your One Percenter will be stuck working manually; that’s right, it’s not even an electric toothbrush! But it’s made of titanium, and the company says its design, durability, and anti-bacterial coating make it worth the hefty price tag. And this thing IS built to last – the bristles are replaceable and screwed on for the times when they inevitably wear out. Your One Percenter can have a choice of four colors: Titanium, champagne, rose, and matte-black. If they complain about the lack of a motor to do the work for them, remind them that the lack of a motor makes it extra classic and that they have servants who can brush their teeth for them!

Jewel Royale Chess Set – $9.8 million

If your One Percenter has friends they like to bring over for a nice night of gaming, a good, old-fashioned board game is a good bet for them. And board games are very easy to spend money on – a good base game can run $60 easily, and an expansion or two could push the price into three figures. You know, pocket change. But if your One Percenter is into the classics, a good thing to buy them as a gift would be the Jewel Royale Chess Set. Manufactured by Boodles in 2005, this chessboard is made of solid gold and platinum and features nearly 1000 diamonds, rubies, and sapphires. The pieces are helical-shaped with the exception of the knights, which are realistic-looking horses. I realize it may be tempting to get them that gold Monopoly set for $2 million, but a good One Percenter won’t be impressed. They’re already doing that shit for real.

Swarovski Crystal Toilet – $128,000

Well, you know that your One Percenter needs a comfortable spot to do his business while they do their business. And although their shit may not be encrusted with crystal, that doesn’t mean their throne can’t be! This thing has 72,000 crystals on it! But if it’s a frills, bells, and whistles seat you’re looking for, this ain’t it; the Swavorski is meant to sit there and state “my owner is fucking RICH!” while it gets befowled.

Shenzhen Nongke Orchid – $200,000

Maybe your One Percenter has a green thumb. Or maybe they just like to call themselves gardeners because they have a ridiculously large greenhouse full of plants which they like to neglect like they do their spouses, kids, and employees. Either way, this plant isn’t natural – it was cultivated by a group of scientists who worked for eight years to get it down. And that was just in its creation! Should you choose to splurge on this for your One Percenter, they’ll have to wait four or five more years before it finally blooms. And the fragrance is said to be truly one of a kind, so most people will never get a chance to get a whiff of its unique scent. Let’s face it, your One Percenter will likely never get to sniff it either because they don’t give a shit about doing the garden work that comes with a houseplant. They’re just in it to brag about the cool and rare new plant you gave them.

Princess Diana Beanie Baby – $10,000

Your One Percenter believes themselves to be royalty anyway, so why not offer them a Beanie Baby created to commemorate royalty? Ah, Beanie Babies. Remember when they were a thing? With the distinctive purple color and the white rose embroidered on its chest, these particular Beanie Babies were launched right off the line back in 1997 as a tribute to Diana, the Princess of Wales. After her death that year, they were all snatched up and sold off as collectors’ items. And there’s nothing like the feeling of giving your One Percenter a stuffed tribute to a member of a royal family to make them wonder why no one makes stuffed toys as tributes to THEM.

Hock Goldloft Dumbbells – $164,000

HA! Let’s be honest: We all know your One Percenter isn’t an exercise hound. Why work out when you can pay people to do all the heavy lifting – both physical and colloquial – for you? These things are more there for art. One Percenters want them for the same reason they want all that other gold-embossed, useless shit: To show everyone how much better they are than you! These dumbbells are made with sustainably grown grenadilla wood, which is the same wood often used to make clarinets. Not that it makes much of a difference. It’s then treated with natural vegetable oil before being sanded for smoothness. The gold weight plates are cast in a German gold refinery and polished by hand. There’s about one kilogram of gold in each dumbbell.

Dirty Santa Candle – $70

For those who haven’t read one of these lists before, I usually close it out with a GOOP listing from Miss Paltrow. And this doesn’t look like an overwhelming price. But keep in mind, it’s for a fucking scented candle! That’s right, for the price of a Triple-A release video game, you too can own a candle from perfumer Douglas Little! This gives you an intoxicating fragrance of hickory, woodsmoke, and pine with a spike of warm clove and oakmoss, with a hint of leather for good measure. One wonders where the leather scent part comes from, seeing as how this thing is vegetarian! Yep, it’s made of vegan soy wax and has an unbleached cotton wick!

The 2014 Christmas Gift Guide for Your One Percenter Friends

It’s a question we have to ask ourselves every year: What Christmas gift should we get that one person in our lives who can afford to buy anything? In our materialist frenzy, many of us start to forget that One Percenters are every bit as human as you or me, and that makes it dangerously easy to forget to include them on our Christmas card lists. How do you think they would feel about that? Of course, that leaves the question of what the perfect present to get your One Percenter friend would be. Above all, it should be thoughtful – and by thoughtful, that means you should have put some thought into the kinds of things the uber-rich could buy themselves to live the uber-rich lifestyle. That’s why I’m here! So, without further ado, here’s a list of awesome gifts for the One Percenter in your life. After all, for you, $500,000 is merely the cost of your house, but for your One Percent friend, it could be the tenth luxury sports car for his nine-car garage!

Techinvasion 24 Karat Gold iPhone Passive Horn Amplifier
This is basically a pure gold version of one of those vinyl record amplifiers cartoon characters are always slamming down over each others’ heads. Therefore, it has a certain retro charm, at least for those who know what vinyl records are. Instead of it being attached to a 24 karat gold record player, though, this one stands on its elbow, and the iphone is shoved into the top to amplify your music and possibly your favorite movies and TV shows, which you’ll presumably be watching through a corresponding telescope. Those of us who play RPGs know that these things have to be fairly awesome by default because we’re used to seeing gold get used to make a lot of other unlikely items in our favorite video games. Right? No RPG characters ever complain about how useless their gold weapons and armor are. If not, you know the $1041 price tag probably justifies the quality of this thing. As an added bonus, if one of your friends is a soft phone talker, you won’t be forced to endure the work of pressing the speakerphone and volume buttons anymore!

Van Cleef and Arpel’s Poetic Wish Watches
A nice pair of his and her watches which might be the prettiest watches I’ve ever seen in my life. Hand-made, hand-painted with real potraits, and you can never go wrong with a nice timepiece because people rarely join the One Percent without being real sticklers about punctuality. The company’s watch harvest manager calls it a classic friendship story: Boy meets girl, romance gets sparked, fate keeps them apart, both left longing. It’s a basic plot to a soap opera romance, but since this one has characters who are stuck in time so you can’t have your heart ripped out when the bitch stepmother poisons the girl to a dramatic terror music track, it’s worth the $1,090,000 price tag.

Bulleit Woody Tailgate Trailer
This is a trailer from interior designer Brad Ford which is sort of a mini-bar you can tow behind your car. It other words, it’s a natural device you can use for tailgating, making it perfect in case your One Percent friend is a sports fan. You know what kind of lives the One Percenters lead: Always locked up in the trapping of the high life, your sports fan One Percenter just feels the urge to go out and join his fellow fans for a day of grilling and barbeque. Just imagine what kind of hero your friend would be to the other fans, pulling up in his Ferrari, pulling the $150,000 Woody Tailgate Trailer equipped with the finest scotch available, along with a selection of excellent wines from Italy and France. Then he’ll pull out the less-expensive caviar, which the rest of the fans will probably be grateful to try. I mean, your friend can’t offer them the nicest perks, right? It’s not that kind of crowd. This is the 300-level seat crowd, after all – the cheapos who are only paying $200 per ticket. Which is the price your friend decided to just set and not go any lower, since your friend is also the team owner.

Prada Skis
You know skiing hasn’t been the popular thing for about two decades. What’s big nowadays is snowboarding, but snowboarding seems so commoner; so 99 Percent. When your friend goes skiing, s/he goes skiing, wearing a pair of elegant ski blades on feet. And there’s not a whole lot which will be more elegant than this $500 pair of skis, developed when ski maker Volant teamed up with popular fashion designer Prada. They’re guaranteed to always look awesome, even after your friend slams into a tree.

Pennwick F5 Sports Car Custom Golf Cart
Its been said that golf is nothing but a nice long walk that’s been spoiled. Of course, that makes it the highest and noblest of all participation sports for your One Percent friend. But there’s one thing that spoils golf itself – those weird little carts they drive around on the greens in order to catch up to their golf balls. They look like the cheap cousin of hockey’s Zamboni machines. And hockey is so, well, pedestrian. But those carts are also necessary, so your friend has to suck it up and sit in… Those! Well, Pennwick is here to act as a salvation to your friend. No, your friend probably isn’t in need of another fancy Italian sports car, but life is always better with one, right? And for $20,500, now your friend can recreate the experience of driving the family Ferrari on the golf course. Golf carts never have to feel so 99 Percent again!

Fantasy Treasure Bra
Miranda Kerr debuted this baby back in 2011 at the Victoria’s Secret show in New York City. It features 142 karats worth of diamonds, and with a $2.5 million price tag, you can probably be sure none of them fall off during the course of a regular business day, so no commoners, you know, pick them up and try to sell them or something. Think of all the famous chests that have worn bras like this: Miranda Kerr, Adriana Lima, Kate Upton… Hey, your One Percent friends shouldn’t have to wear such pedestrian duds if they’re not driving pedestrian golf carts!

JetLev R200
For the sci-fi-loving, adventure-and-thrill-seeking One Percenter, there’s this $99,500 gift. All of us have seen the likes of Buck Rogers, The Jetsons, or The Rocketeer, and dreamed of owning such a convenient, back-held form of travel. Real jetpacks, however, are a big pain in the ass – they weigh a ton, and getting them into the air requires a lot of rocket fuel. So there’s this alternative, which grants unlimited usage as long as they have a nearby water source to keep drawing from. If that’s making you think twice, just remember: Your friend is in the One Percent, and can easily afford to truck around with a nearby swimming pool going everywhere. And if your One Percent friend is a fossil fuel power magnate, this will have the added bonus of maybe changing his mind on hydro power.

Oswald Haerdtl Candy Dishes
While on the subject of stuff from out of science fiction, here’s a candy dish that looks like a dome-shaped alien spacecraft! These beautiful candy dishes are masterworks of crafsmanship, but more importantly, they’re also light and designed in a way which encourages elegant handling, which will probably be a relief to the butler. There are three different designs which cost $314, $353, and $432 individually. The actually all look the same, but you can trust a rich, high-end designer who says they’re different, right?

Row Rina Fringed Cashmere Cape
You can think of this as a snuggie which you can get away with wearing in public. It’s a blanket, but it’s a blanket that features nice bodyline and clothing cuts like a fringed trim, shawl collar, open front, and it was made from cashmere! In Italy! All elegant things come out of Italy, right? If your One Percent friend can’t appreciate Italian nativity, they can at least appreciate the $3190 price tag. If they can’t, they’re probably not real One Percenters.

Lobmeyer Tulipmania Water Pitcher
This baby has hand-painted tulips on the side and a very special way of holding the water on the inside. Or at least it better have a special way of holding water. At least, for the $428 price tag, it better have a special way of holding water that can’t be deciphered by the photo. Maybe there’s a secret filter? At the least, you should expect it to be able to hold all different kinds of liquids, especially alcoholic liquids.

An Everyday New Year

Okay, I’m a real oddball. I make those ridiculous things known as New Year’s Resolutions, and more and more, I keep them even as they grow more outlandish and grandiose. They help me keep track of the things I’ve wanted to do and have accomplished in what timeframe, and what I have left to do. This year, I want to re-sculpt my boy, get my grades up, find a new focus as a writer and continue sending out more work, and visit another place I haven’t been before. I had some high goals last year, but I managed to reach every one of them.

However, this whole New Year’s-is-magic thing is something I’m never going to understand. The whole process only has relevance because it’s so close to Christmas and, by proximity, it gets the shit advertised out of it. Yes, folks, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are more corporatized holidays, but unlike every other corporatized holiday, there’s no real sound basis for it. Valentine’s Day – which I outright rebel against – at least celebrates love. What’s New Year’s? A new beginning? If people were actually serious about the whole new beginning thing, they wouldn’t be saving their self-improvements until then anyway. Even though I make resolutions, I know full well in advance what they’re going to be and how they’re going to help me reach a higher plateau. I don’t create them on some wistful December 31 whim, yanking them from the air because that’s what people are apparently supposed to do. Doing that is probably why so many people keep their resolutions for about two weeks.

So if you pull your resolutions out of the equation, just what the hell is this? Sometimes you get invited to a party. It’s nice – hang out with your buddies, have a few drinks, stay up late, kiss someone at midnight. An all-around good evening, really…. And nothing you don’t do at any point earlier in the year. Hell, for people in their 20’s, that’s basically the after-work schedule. The only difference I can spot is that you’re a lot more uncomfortable on New Year’s, because you’ve decided to trap yourself in some tight-ass tuxedo for no other reason than because, hey, that’s what it is to be an adult, right? Also, you’re boozing on overpriced champagne instead of beer, wine, or whatever cheap spirit is your signature.

It’s a pricier night out is what it is.

I found myself at the Buffalo ball drop a few times, which was nice because the fireworks display at the Electric Tower is very beautiful and choreographed to the classic rock music that is the city’s signature musical sound. The best New Year’s Eve I’ve experienced in my life was on December 31, 1997. My family went to see the Buffalo Sabres that night, and we ended up watching Sabres goaltender Dominik Hasek tie the all-time record for number of shutouts in a single month when the Sabres beat the Ottawa Senators.

Besides all the hype, the calendar starts all over again, whoop dee do. The Earth starts another revolution around the sun, which is a meaningless statistic considering how much we bend and maul the calendar to fit our own personal convenience. Even the most accurate measurement of time on Earth, the atomic clock, is so accurate that it actually manages to overshoot the mark.

I prefer literally any other holiday. Martin Luther King Day, Presidents’ Day, Independence Day, Easter, May Day if this country ever grows enough of a fucking brain to start observing it…. New Year’s is, to me, nothing more than another day in the life. I’ll still happily accept party invitations, but don’t expect me to get too worked up about how awesome the magic of New Year’s is.

The Dark Territory of It’s a Wonderful Life

I looked up the writers of the classic Frank Capra flick It’s a Wonderful Life. Capra’s name was among them, and when I did some further-depth research about his own life, I was a little surprised to learn that he suffered occasional bouts of depression during an earlier downswing in his younger years. It seemed odd to me because It’s a Wonderful Life doesn’t come off as anything that could ever have been written by anyone who’s suffered from depression. It comes off like more the fantasy of a screenwriter trying to put his arm around the backs of depression sufferers everywhere and say “There, there, it’ll all get better.”

There was a brief window of my life when I made a tradition, like everyone else, of watching It’s a Wonderful Life during the holiday season. I was just a few years into it, though, when I noticed that there was something about it which really wasn’t sitting right with me. I had hit a low point in my life at the time and was contemplating suicide harder than I ever had – it’s fairly safe to say only my religious beliefs at the time kept me from going through with it. That, of course, puts me in a situation similar to that of George Bailey, James Stewart’s main character. The movies takes us through George’s life story, bringing us to the moment the movie begins, when God – yes, THAT God – is commanding an angel named Clarence to talk George out of his suicidal depression. Clarence visits George, shows him what everything would be like of he never existed, and George is magically happy again.

If only real depression were that simple. In real life, there’s no Clarence, and George offs himself. The problem with the movie’s premise is that George is set up and defined as a man of very significant impact. It’s true that George has thwarted dreams that are similar to my own in a couple of ways, but it’s difficult to get me to believe George really had it that bad. His dream of traveling the world, after all, is something he surrenders willingly, even if he does do it quite often. George first takes over a business that was threatening to stop writing loans out for the poor because the board heads would only continue doing that if George was running it. I don’t have any problems with this; but George gives his college cash stash to his brother Harry, and that’s where the problem begins. Harry takes George’s cue and then seemingly coasts through his life on a series of implausible breaks. Harry marries into a rich family and becomes a war hero.

George, meanwhile, runs his company and keeps roadblocking his own path. His gestures are admittedly noble: At one point, he gives his honeymoon money to depositors to satisfy their immediate needs. At another, he turns down the job of his dreams when it’s offered because his nemesis, Potter, is planning to take over his city.

Throughout all this, by the way, George is able to find the time and means to marry his longtime love and sire four kids. He buys a home, too. During the never-born sequence, George’s wife, Mary, ends up being a shy, perpetually single librarian, as if she could never have found a man who wasn’t George Bailey and a fulfilling career. (Well, okay, this movie is from 1946, so the career isn’t very likely.)

A supremely ironic point that occurs to me right now is that so far, the movie and I are in agreement over the main theme: George is leading a life most people would consider very significant and fulfilling. But that’s where our similarities end. George is very well known and beloved throughout his community because of the willing selflessness he shows, constantly sacrificing pursuit of his dreams in order to better the lives of those around him. Everything he did, except getting rejected by the military, was something he gave up by personal choice. He has good friends and a devoted wife and a good home in a nice community.

This is basically magical Hollywood depression. It’s sanitized nicely for people who believe a few inspiring words are more than enough to snap anyone out of a funk and return them to their jolly old selves. Just like real depression and real suicidal contemplation, I swear, knowing from experience. It’s basically the same, except take away George’s communal niceties, flowing opportunities, family, and largely decent job. Strip him of all the status, prestige, and trust he earned from the people around him, and put him in a much more menial situation in which the livlihoods of a lot fewer people depend on his fortunes and you’ll start to get the idea. I can’t imagine myself being the only person who ever watched this while depressed and thing holy shit, this movie is fucking mocking me!

The one inspirational thing that I did take away from It’s a Wonderful Life is actually the life story of Frank Capra himself. He got himself stuck in a life rut very similar to my own, and our ages during this rough patch weren’t that far apart. Capra was going through his during much worse circumstances. Yet, he still found a way to overcome his obstacles and eventually become one of the most important directors in the history of American film.

The Star Wars Holiday Special

“If I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every copy of that show and smash it.”

That was what George Lucas thinks of The Star Wars Holiday Special. Now, go back and read that last sentence again, and take into consideration the fact that the very same person who said that is the very person who later greenlighted the Ewoks, the Howard the Duck movie, and Jar Jar Binks. It’s no secret that Lucas hates it in a way which would qualify him for Sith Lord status. It aired just one time, ever, on November 17, 1978 as the entire prime time lineup that night on CBS. Then it presumably became one with The Force. Word of god says Harrison Ford spent a large chunk of his career denying its existence. It was never rebroadcast on any other stations or released on any home video mediums. Unfortunately, this valiant attempt at denouncement didn’t take into account the people who taped it and never erased the tapes, so it became something of an underground sensation until the internet came along and wiped out every bet on the issue. 

Lucas himself had virtually nothing to do with the production. It was handed off to a group of people who were known for those campy variety TV shows that were all the rage in the early days on television, who proceeded to write in variety material and create things which lend validation to every bad stereotype about the 70’s that exists. Using those tacky aspects of the era culture and throwing in a grab bag on Star Wars characters, the creators then proceeded to create an excuse to jump between celebrity cameos, character cameos, and music videos. If it was anywhere in their heads to create a memorable holiday special, they certainly succeeded, but for all the wrong reasons. The Star Wars Holiday Special sucks. It sucks hard. It reaches a Masters of Teras Kasi level of suckitude, says “I can beat that!” and takes shovel and drill to the solid ground. 

Lucas may have escaped, but the network folks managed to cop the top talent from the movie. Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and the others got forced into this thing. Even composer John Williams and James Earl Jones don’t get out unscathed. Jones, of course, is there voicing Darth Vader and Williams’s Star Wars Theme is there as the introduction. They should have just brought in Williams outright for the rest of the soundtrack which, without his input, comes off like a village side music in a bad 16-bit RPG. Maybe that doesn’t sound so bad, but through the first ten minutes, it gets unbearable. The first ten minutes don’t have any dialogue. Just a lot of growling and roaring from Malla, Lumpy, and Itchy, who are the relatives of Chewbacca. Yeah, ten minutes of muted muppet speaking, and half the time, we can’t figure out exactly what’s going on in the scene because there’s not even a courtesy translation rolling along the bottom of the screen. At one point, the kid leaves the house and walks on top of a rail between the balcony and a nice long drop. Why? Search me!

They really do look just like muppets, by the way, since this is TV stuff and there was no way in hell the network was going to pay for special effects which still rank among the very best ever seen in movies. They actually intersperse it in with archival movie footage. There isn’t much to disguise the fact that everything is shot in a studio. Suspension of disbelief is clearly a foreign concept to variety show people.

When the Holiday Special begins, Han and Chewie are seen doing something which is quite distinctly Han-and-Chewie-like: They’re trying to bust through an Imperial blockade. Chewie is on his way home to his family for Life Day, a Wookiee holiday. On the planet surface, we meet his wife, father, and son. They’re worried because Han and Chewie are late. Still though, they manage to exchange a few gifts, prepare some food, and entertain themselves with a hologram TV. Ah, holograms. Remember when they were The Next Big Thing?

Most of the Special takes place right in the Wookiee household. While a lot of things do happen, it feels like one of those Saturday Night Live sketches from the show’s worst years: Stretched to unbearable length, going on for so long after the punchline that the punchline is forgotten, and meant solely to milk the show’s running time. In one scene, one of the wookiees tries to prepare some food following the directions of an overly excitable TV chef, with hilarious consequences! Another scene involves the assembly of a transmitter. Both are longer than they need to be. At least the latter is important to the plot of the Special. The former, not so much. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that there’s some kind of wookiee porno machine in this thing too, which produces another music video.

There are Imperials in this thing, but you can’t go into it expecting more of the blaster and lightsaber action that makes Star Wars Star Wars. While it has what very well should have been a decent -and very Star Wars-like – plot about Imperial occupation, the entire thing takes a lot of really bad sitcom twists. Yes, worse than the Ewoks. For all their high training, the Special takes a rather dim view of the Stormtroopers, who are apparently easily distracted by the Wookiee version of television. The wookiee family uses their entertainment device to distract the Stormtroopers while they literally do everything right behind the Stormtroopers’ backs. The device the wookiees are trying to build is meant to trick the Stormtroopers into returning to base by imitating the Commander’s voice. I can’t help but think of the Star Wars novel The Truce at Bakura, which says that six Stormtroopers against one armed wookiee would be a fight that’s just about even. Yeah, there are a couple of Commanders and a pair of Stormtroopers there that the wookiees, despite being really fucking strong, don’t do anything about.

That magic box Chewie’s family owns is responsible for every weird, absurd twist the Special takes. At one point, it shows a video of the old Mos Eisley Cantina, which the Empire has decided to shut down. Bea Arthur is the bartender there for the final party. Apparently this is a video being broadcast by the Empire as required viewing for some reason. The official reason is subversive forces. The real reason is to present Bea Arthur, who is approached by a character who misunderstood something she said. We don’t know anything about this new and sudden plot thread, and at the end of it, there’s another song. However, it’s also the TV set which produces the famed cartoon. The cartoon is easily the best part of the Special. It has a much more interesting plot and even a bit of acceptable suspense.

The most ridiculous and insane thing about The Star Wars Holiday Special is that it appears to actually be canon! Chewie’s family of Malla, Lumpy, and Itchy were later given real wookiee names – Mallatobuck, Lumpawarrump, and Attichituck, respectively – and have small roles in other, later Star Wars stories. The animated segment introduced fucking Boba Fett, who became one of the most popular and badass characters in the entire Star Wars universe. The canon has to be the work of fans, because we all know George Lucas hates this thing. Honestly, after watching it, I can’t blame him.

Christmas, Christianity, and Commercialism

It’s the most maddening time of the year. Now, don’t get me wrong: I love Christmas. What I can’t stand is this whole Christmas season that leads up to it. It’s really fitting that the popular image of Santa Claus is what we use to symbolize this season. Santa is centuries old, but the jolly fat man dressed in red was popularized by the Coca-Cola corporation, and let’s face it: Christmas is a corporate holiday right down to the very core of its being.

As Jon Stewart said, Christmas has become so large now that it’s engulfing the other holidays, and yet a disturbingly large proportion of people in this country manage to trick themselves into thinking there’s some kind of phantom war on Christmas. Only in America could we possibly get away with this kind of chutzpah. Christmas season even has a kind of official kickstart day of its own now – Black Friday – which comes immediately right after the day we give thanks for the things that go right with our lives. Then we get a solid month and a half of Christmas themes which overrun into November as people physically beat up and trample over each other to grab the hottest new items which some corporations are undoubtedly holding shipments on in order to create a false sense of scarcity.

Then we manage to conjure up the idea that this feeding frenzy is somehow being done in the good name of a man who, if he were around today, never would have been an American. Even if he was born in this country, he probably would have cast off the misnomer of “American.” No matter what the circumstances, it’s extremely difficult for me to imagine Jesus Christ elbowing his way through a line of shoppers in order to grab a new TV and being the first in line of a corporate bait and switch scheme. I CAN, however, imagine Jesus – at least somewhat – buying out a stock of HD television sets and simply giving them away, no questions asked. That vision requires a certain bending of Jesus’s character too, although not nearly as much as Cowboy Jesus does.

Furthermore, Christmas the season has become a kind of go-to attack against the Americans in the country who aren’t Christians, and that’s around 20-25 percent of us at the most wildly liberal estimate. I tend to identify with any one of the various non-religious people in the United States on any given day. Mostly, I call myself either an agnostic or an atheist, depending on how I’m feeling toward religion in general. Those who know me, though, know that I’m incontestably irreligious. I gave up organized religion years ago in a long and bitter fight with my own sense of cognitive dissonance, with my ideals of individual liberty clashing against everything every religious authority in my life had ever told me.

You would think the irony of Christmas commercialism would be a lot more obvious to people claiming to be Christians, but it seems like the people who wear their Christianity on their chests are the ones most oblivious to it. They’ve somehow managed to completely hijack their own holiday while spreading the blame on everyone but them. Which I guess makes sense in its own little way. The current version of Christianity is a religion which is about shifting blame onto someone who didn’t deserve it. Jesus dying for the sins of everyone? Yeah, it’s a pretty idea, but there’s a very sinister undertone to it which liberates its followers of personal responsibility. Believe in Christ and you’re saved no matter what sort of sadistic shit you’re into.

Christianity as introduced was a very radical lifestyle change which had nothing to do with religion. It emphasized the strength of community and the idea that everyone in said community was on equal footing; not equal footing as everyone having a theoretically equal chance to improve their living circumstances, but equal footing as the idea that no one had more power or greater status than another. It’s easy to see why the personal savior version of Christianity caught on – it doesn’t require very much work. Just abstain from – or limit – a few vices and condemn everyone to Hell and you’ve punched your ticket to a heavenly afterlife. Loving your enemies and standing up for the oppressed and forgotten requires a lot of going against human tribalism and accepting the fact that you’ll be defending people polite society would rather forget.

Instead, religion has become a de facto excuse to leave things the way they are. The religion that started as a method of rebelling against the Roman Empire and offering its untouchable low-caste members a way of empowering themselves is now the champion faith of a country which shows a lot of parallels to ancient Rome. And with a growing number of other people also starting to wake up to that fact, Christmas and this alleged war on it have become the rallying cry. People are very literally camping outside of large department stores and beating each other up over artificially-priced stuff a month and a half before Christmas, and yet, there’s a big war against it that no one seems to be waging anywhere I’ve ever lived. The vast majority of the country still claims Christianity as its religion, and most of them don’t even know the Pagan roots of virtually every aspect of our Christmas celebrations, and yet, somehow there’s a war on Christmas. Both the commerce capitol and national capitol of the United States throw fucking tax money at large, prominent, and garish display decorations to Christmas, and there’s somehow a goddamn war!

If you think I’m annoyed, yes, I am, because as an atheist, people keep finding ways to blame me for this war, despite the fact that the 20 million Americans who don’t identify with a religion don’t have any lobbying power. (As opposed to Christians, the only religion-related group that does.)

Yeah, how perfect it is that Christmas is considered the primary holiday.

My Dirty Sin

Forgive me dog, for I have sinned.

I went Christmas shopping on Black Friday.

It was completely unintentional, I swear. All I needed was a haircut. I wouldn’t have minded putting it off, but my hair was already close to shoulder length, so my immediate need won out. My usual place, though, is sadly right inside McKinley Mall, at one of those giant department stores, no less. I got in, paid for my haircut, and got out with surprising ease.

After it was done, though, I needed something to do. The traffic coming in was denser than a pecan pie on Thanksgiving, so there was probably no way my ride in had gotten home before my haircut ended. There was also the little fact that I had not yet started my own Christmas shopping, which is unusual for me because I happen to adhere to a very strict policy of early bird Christmas shopping. It’s one of the infallible laws of my personal code to be absolutely finished with all necessary Christmas shopping by the beginning of November and completely avoid holiday season shopping like the plague that it is.

Unfortunately, this year, I had to wait until my student loan refund check was in my paws before starting, and that finally happened last week. Then there was the minor matter of, you know, school itself to deal with. Yeah, my Christmas shopping went through an endless series of delays, all culminating in that one single weekend when I finally had a few minutes to go out and do something to let my mind wander. A couple of hours of worthless mall wandering fit the description nicely.

I already had a few gift ideas in mind when I set out, but I was looking for that one “bingo!” idea that set off the light bulb floating atop my head. So being of open mind and little to no sanity, I set out, looking in places both usual and unusual for the people I buy gifts for. I checked out the Made in America store, which, by the way, I truly believe is nothing more than a brand name now that I’ve been there. It was populated with awful people; not just awful people of the usual stripe who shop on Black Friday, but people I wanted to fucking kill after hearing handfuls of their conversational snippets. I journeyed up, down, left, right, and every corresponding diagonal in between.

In one store, though, I saw it. That perfect gift that a certain person really wanted, ringing up at a very reasonable price. I didn’t know if there was a sale or not, but I’m very well-known for my ability to get the most out of a dollar, and so I decided there was no better time to make the purchase than right there.

I’ve rarely felt dirtier.