Rant-Man's Notebook

By Jim "Rant-Man" MacQuarrie

Christmastime is Here, by golly

You better watch out, you better not cry
You better not pout, I'm telling you why
Santa Claus is coming to get you!

My daughter made up that little Christmas ditty when she was about four. I was so proud of her. I'm still proud of her; she's a lot smarter and funnier than I am. Last night at her youth group, she said something cynical, and another person commented that she's an optimistic little ray of sunshine, isn't she? Her response was "the glass isn't half-empty; it's filthy and disgusting and the water stinks." I'm so proud. I wish I'd thought of that.

So Christmas is here. We're all frantically running around buying armloads of stuff with which to appease our relatives for another year. (Oscar Wilde once said that "Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven¹t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die." I tend to agree with him for the most part. No, not you, Mom.) We snarl at each other in the mall (which I spell "maul") while the overhead speakers sing of peace on Earth...

Okay, so I'm cranky today.

I do have a cure for crankyness, though. It's a book. One that I highly recommend. One that I read every Christmas. It's called Red Ranger Came Calling, and it's by Berkeley Breathed. You may remember him as the creator of the late, great "Bloom County" comic strip, which featured Opus the penguin and Bill the cat.

This time out, he's telling the true story of his father's boyhood encounter with a tired old man that he steadfastly refused to believe was Santa Claus. As the evidence piles up, the bitter and sour-faced little cynic begins to believe in spite of himself, and finally works up the hope, courage and faith to actually tell old Saunder Clos his Christmas wish. You'll have to buy the book if you want to know what happens next. All I can tell you is that when I read the book in the aisle at Target (I hadn't intended to read the whole thing right there; I was just browsing), I cried when I got to the end. It has the best surprise ending I've ever seen.

For some reason, the radio station my coworkers listen to keeps playing that "I Hope You Dance" song. I can't be the only one who finds it less than sincere. Maybe the trouble is that I actually listen to the lyrics of songs. As far as I can tell, most people don't. So here's this song that reads like the kind of thing your friend e-mails to everyone she ever met, usually with animated butterflies on the page. "I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean/Whenever one door closes I hope one more opens/Promise me that you'll give faith a fighting chance/And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance/I hope you dance." It sounds like something you'd hear read at a high school graduation. I'm not arguing with the sentiment, I just think it's trite, contrived and has all the depth of a puddle of ant pee. But maybe it's me. I'm thinking of rewriting the song into one about all the junk e-mail I get...

I hope no one ever steals your kidneys,
and the Good Times Virus never eats your MP3s,
May the Cancer Kid get all the cards that he needs,
God forbid the FCC bans christian TV...

Nah, too much like work.

We've added a new wrinkle here. A while back we did a fake page called "Be a God", and I finally decided it was worth doing for real. So now you can get your own Certificate of Deity and prove that you're a god or goddess. Now, where did such a nutty idea come from?

Well, it's like this: I was listening to a radio report about the crown prince of Myanmar, the one who went nuts and shot up his family about a year or two ago. Back when he was a student in England, he wanted to get out of attending chapel, so he had the religious leaders back home issue a statement that as a member of the royal family, he was considered a deity, and as such, shouldn't have to attend a worship service for another deity. Clever, I thought.

Then I heard a commercial for one of those "star registry" companies that will "name a star" after somebody for only 50 bucks, a racket if I ever saw one. At that point I remembered the spam e-mails I get all the time offering me degrees from "prestigious non-accredited universities" and the one offering to make me an ordained minister in only 48 hours. Finally I put them all together in the only way possible, and came up with the Be a God certificate. It's every bit as valid as the diploma, the star registry, and probably the ordination, and a lot cheaper.

So order one already.

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