/Threaded/ Crazy Christmas
20/01/2007 | Filed under Discover > Threaded
Tired of the advent rush? Just spend the festive season on the web and get inspired for an alternative Christmas.
“You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot. Happy Christmas your arse, I pray God it’s our last.” Kirsty MacColl and Shane MacGowan hit the nail on the head. Why else would Fairytale of New York top polls of the best Christmas song every year? It’s because it’s true – Christmas sucks.
Christmas is full of fakes, freaks and frauds. And if you didn’t know this by now, log on to the web, where you can monitor the festive madness in all its glory. Take the light shows that some people turn their houses into, for example (collected at www.uglychristmaslights.com and www.houseblinger.com). Two years ago, one Alek Komarnitsky in Colorado claimed you could use the web to switch the 17,000 lights on his house on and off and monitor the event with a webcam (www.komar.org/christmas). It was a hoax (the webcam images were generated by a computer program) but the following year, Alek was back, claiming that this time you really could control the lights (by now a whopping 26,000). As if this wasn’t enough, he lets you inflate or ‘melt’ a huge Frosty the Snowman as well as a 12-foot Santa on his front lawn, thanks to some X10 modules and Perl code. Alek, who operates a similar installation around Hallowe’en and uses the popularity of his site to raise funds for celiac disease, has taken seasonal obsessive disorder (SOD) to new heights. Cheers, Alek, and we’re sure your neighbours are well chuffed to have you next door.
The best thing to do around the festive season is to shut yourself away. You don’t need more than the web anyway. It’s the place to do all your Christmas shopping (unless you enjoy fighting your way through crowds). It’s calmer, there’s more choice and no queues. For instance, you can get USB mince pies (www.usbmincepies.co.uk) or very special Christmas trees. In fact, having an upside down tree seems to be the latest rage (tinyurl.com/9fsvm and www.hammacher.com/publish/72376.asp). It might be a bit weird-looking and certainly not cheap, but on the plus side, you have more room for presents underneath. Don’t let people tell you it’s sinister: it’s just evoking a 12th century tradition from Central Europe, when hanging fir trees upside down from the ceiling was a symbol of Christianity. And if you’d planned on spending a bit less than $599.95 on a Christmas tree, there’s always the exact replica of Charlie Brown’s pathetic Christmas tree (tinyurl.com/cfh4y) or the embodiment of Christmas gluttony, the cream puff Christmas tree (tinyurl.com/yyylwo).
Now you’ve got your tree, you need to decorate it. Real geeks don’t use ball ornaments, though, but memory modules and CPUs (www.mediatinker.com/blog/images/cpuTree.html), and they download a video of a yule log to their iPod (tinyurl.com/qyprk). Next, you need some music to get into the mood, but another rendition of Last Christmas just fills you with rage. What about a very special version of The Twelve Days of Christmas sung by the Twin Peaks cast instead (“On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a body ... dead ... wrapped in plastic”, www.glastonberrygrove. net/texts/tp12days.html)? Or some nice Christmas mashups such as Santa’s Acid Hawaiian Space Disco (www.djbc.net/christmas) or DJ Riko’s annual Merry Mixmas (www.djriko.com/html/tunes.html)?
Now it’s time to settle down with a glass of mulled wine and see what kids put in their yearly Christmas letters to Christopher Walken (www.brandonbird.com/walken_letters.html). To round it all off, treat yourself to 10 minutes of Santa Santa Santa, the Christmas edition of Weebl’s legendary Badger Badger Badger Flash cartoon (www.weebls-stuff.com/testy/AdventCalendar/day24.html). If you still don’t agree with Kirsty MacColl and Shane MacGowan, you’re not a real Scrooge. Move on.
Comments
Chad Patton / 27/03/2008 / 01:37 / http://www.iondetoxpro.com
That was hilarious I especially liked letters to Walken. Great links my favorites folder just got a little bigger. Thank goodness for the internet from a shopping stand point at Christimas I can waite till the last minute and ship the stuff right to the person. No traffic, no lines, no crowds and no wrapping paper.
