Twelve Posts of Christmas #1: Goodnight, my Deer

My Christmas gift to all of you this year is a dosage of satirical wit and an heaping spoonful of undeserved pride in myself. Everyday up till Christmas, you will be treated with a new installment of a short, Christmas-themed piece of writing. I guarantee they'll usher in the spirit of the season (or at least some kind of spirit. Hopefully the kind that is easy to exorcise). If you feel a measure of the Christmas spirit yourself, please leave a comment so that I know you dropped by. It's the least you could do for me isn't it?



The First Day of Christmas: "Goodnight, my Deer"

"So you see," Professor Ericson said to his daughter, as he turned off his PowerPoint projector and sat down at the foot of her bed, "It's unreasonable to think that his nose was glowing at all. The text clearly indicates that the nose was "shiny" and that we (the objective observers) "would even SAY it glowed." The physical state of the red nose probably indicated some type of dermal infection, resulting in overactive sebaceous glands excreting oil on to the epidermal surface. Or maybe swelling, perhaps to due to some kind of tumor or cyst within the nose caused the skin to be stretched tight and swollen with blood, causing both a shiny appearance and red discoloration. In any case, these maladies would not cause the nose to glow or emit any kind of phosphorescent light of its own. In foggy atmospheric conditions, ambient light would be reduced to almost nothing and certainly no more illumination would have been produced from the animal's nose. Putting him, a probably diseased creature at the head of the team pulling the sleigh was a foolhardy error that showed a serious lack of judgement. In actuality, the other reindeer were probably right to shun him."





The Professor placed his dry, chapped lips briefly on Kimberly's forehead and walked out of the room, trailing a long, glistening trail of imaginary reindeer blood. The snap of the light switch was the pull-chord of the guillotine that slid down to behead the last last vestiges of childhood fantasy. And his whispered, "Merry Christmas, sweetheart," rustled through the room like needles skittering over concrete.