Snark! The Herald Angels Sing
Page 6
phrase is, a few sheets in the wind.
—H.L. MENCKEN
Brandy, n. A cordial composed of one part thunder
and-lightning, one part remorse, two parts bloody
murder, one part death-hell-and-the-grave and four
parts clarified Satan.
—AMBROSE BIERCE
There ain't no devil, it's just god when he's drunk.
—TOM WAITS
I do like Christmas on the whole…. In its clumsy
way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill.
But it is clumsier every year.
—E.M. FORSTER
Christmas is a time for remembering. So that's me, f**ked.
—OZZY OSBOURNE
You've Had Too Much Holiday Cheer When…
1. You strike a match and light your nose.
2. A duck quacks—and it's you.
3. You tell your best joke to a plant.
4. The fish bowl looks like a punch bowl.
5. You mistake the closet for a bathroom.
6. When you leave a party, the door locks behind you.
7. You ask for an ice cube and put it in your pocket.
8. While mimicking the biggest bore in the room, you realize it's actually you in the mirror.
Remember: During the holidays, you're not
drunk…you're mulled. And people always notice
when you linger under the mistletoe.
—ROBERT MCCAMMON
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink,
then the drink takes you.
—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Come, woo me, woo me; for now I am in a holiday
humor, and like enough to consent.
—WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE
I have the same resolution every year: I decide to drink
heavily. Because I know I can do it, which will build up
my self-esteem.
—BETSY SALKIND
Christmas Fact
“Wassail” comes from the Old Norse vesheill—to be of good health. This evolved into the tradition of visiting neighbors on Christmas Eve and drinking to their health…until you pass out. It's also the sound you make as you projectile-vomit a heady mix of nog, gin, wine, and beef jerky.
New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no
particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for
promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and
humbug resolutions.
—MARK TWAIN
Christmas Toasts
May your Christmas be full of friends and booze and no socks.
A merry Christmas to all my friends except two or three.
To a fruity, flatulent Christmas!
Merry Stressmas!
Forgive us our Christmases as we forgive them that Christmas against us.
There is a remarkable breakdown of taste and
intelligence at Christmastime. Mature, responsible
grown men wear neckties made of holly leaves and
drink alcoholic beverages with raw egg yolks and
cottage cheese in them.
—P.J. O'ROURKE
Nourishment
(FOOD)
IN WHICH THE AUTHOR REVELS IN THE CONSUMPTION
OF MASS QUANTITIES OF SUGAR AND CARBS—
REVEALS THE OPENING OF OLD WOUNDS BETWEEN
MOUTHFULS OF MASHED POTATOES—AND MAKES
THE DISCOVERY OF BRUSSEL SPROUTS WRAPPED IN A
NAPKIN AND ROLLED INTO A BALL—FOOD AS A MEANS
OF SURRENDER
THE HOLIDAYS ARE ABOUT EATING. End of story. For weeks on end, there are sweets and pies and chocolate and turkeys the size of doghouses and stuffing and wheelbarrows of potatoes and…and …and…all as far as the eye can see. And all devised to make you forget about logic in the name of celebration.
The Christmas dinner might be both the worst and the best part of the holiday. More so than the everyday preparation of food, this dinner takes so much work …hours/days/months of buying, mixing, prepping, and is gone in a matter of minutes. Except for leftovers. Lots and lots of leftovers.
You can't make everyone happy. “What happened to the carrots you used to make with the little marshmallows?” “This turkey's too big/not big enough/too dry/not cooked enough…” “Why didn't you do your usual stuffing?”
“I hate…[pick one—or more] yams/cranberries/brussel sprouts/figs.”
People who spend the year watching their weight let it all go during the season.
“Hey, it's the holidays. You're dead a long time. I'm gonna just eat what I want and diet be damned. I'll start again in January.” Which you never do.
Snark can help.9
Nothing says holidays like a cheese log.
—ELLEN DEGENERES
Thanksgiving is a magical time of year when families
across the country join together to raise America's
obesity statistics. Personally, I love Thanksgiving
traditions: watching football, making pumpkin pie, and
saying the magic phrase that sends your aunt storming
out of the dining room to sit in her car.
—STEPHEN COLBERT
9 Snark as a digestive.
I finally finished eating the gingerbread man. The last
thing I ate was his foot and on the way down my gullet,
he actually kicked me.
—GROUCHO MARX
Hey kids! I made your favorite cookies: Christmas
trees for the girls and bloody
spearheads for Bart.
—MARGE, THE SIMPSONS
Thanksgiving, man…Not a good day to be my pants.
—KEVIN JAMES
The best way to thaw a frozen turkey? Blow in its ear.
—JOHNNY CARSON
The Christmas dinner was fairly ghastly…the
turkey was passable, but there were no sausages with
it, no rolls of bacon and no bread sauce, and the roast
potatoes were beige and palely loitering.
—NOËL COWARD
The turkey has practically no taste except a dry fibrous
flavor reminiscent of warmed-up plaster of Paris and
horsehair. The texture is like wet sawdust and the
whole vast feathered swindle has the piquancy of a
boiled mattress.
—WILLIAM CONNOR
Last Thanksgiving, I shot my own turkey. It was
fun. Shotgun going, “Blam! Blam!” Everybody at the
supermarket just staring. Why track them when you
know where they are?
—KENNY ROGERSON
I love Thanksgiving turkey…it's the only time in
Los Angeles you see natural breasts.
—ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER
A number of other truly remarkable things show up in
holiday dinners, such as…pies made out of something
called “mince,” although if anyone has ever seen a mince
in its natural state, he did not live to tell about it.
—P.J.O'ROURKE
Consider Christmas—could Satan in his most
malignant mood have devised a worse system of
graft and buncombe than the system whereby several
hundred million people get a billion or so gifts for
which they have no use, and some thousands of shop
clerks die of exhaustion while selling them, and every
other child in the Western world is made ill from
overeating—all in the name of Jesus?
—UPTON SINCLAIR
Dear Lord, I've been asked, nay commanded, to thank
Thee for the Christmas turkey before us…a turkey
which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird…a social
being…capable of actual affection…nuzzling its
young with almost human-like compassion. Anyway,
it's dead and we're gonna eat it. Please give our r
espects to its family….
—BERKE BREATHED
Christmas Pudding: festering gobs of adamantine suet
that the Brits think of as fun food.
—JOE QUEENAN
You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard,
a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.
There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever
you are!
—CHARLES DICKENS
Grammy Moon's famous plum duff is a pudding boiled in
a cloth bag. She had a secret ingredient. She'd soak it for
hours in rum, then ignite it in a blinding flash. As soon as
she came out of the kitchen with no eyebrows, we knew
dessert was ready. To this day, the smell of burning hair
puts me in the holiday spirit. Merry Christmas!
—DAPHNE, IN FRASIER
I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I
invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we
had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took
their land.
—JON STEWART
Women used to make great mince pies and fake
orgasms. Now we can do orgasms, but have to fake
mince pies. Is this progress?
—ALLISON PEARSON
You can tell it's the Christmas season. Stores are selling
off their expired milk as eggnog.
—DAVID LETTERMAN
The holidays can turn into a year of overeating. There
are some who gain 20 or 30 pounds over the year. Their
mind-set is “Why not keep going?”
—LESLIE FINK
“Never, ever ask a former clergyman to say the blessing
over a holiday dinner. Not if you like your dinner
warm, anyway.”
—MARY KAY ANDREWS
“Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare.
They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take
twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.”
—ERMA BOMBECK
The Best Christmas Cake Ever
Ingredients:
1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
4 large eggs
1 cup dried fruit
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup nuts
1 or 2 quarts of aged whiskey
Before you start, sample the whiskey to check for quality. Good, isn't it?
Now go ahead. Select a large mixing bowl, measuring cup, etc. Check the whiskey again as it might be just right. To be sure the whiskey is of the highest quality, pour 1 level cup into a glass and drink as fast as you can.
Repeat.
With an eclectic mixer, beat 1 cup of butter in a large fluffy bowl.
Add 1 teaspoon of sugar and beat the hell out of it again. Meanwhile, at this parsnicular point in time, wake sure the whixey hasn't gone bad while you weren't lookin’. Open second quart if nestessary.
Add 2 large eggs, 2 cups fried druit an'beat'til high. If druit gets shtuck in peaters, just pry the monsters loosh with a drewscriver.
Example the whikstey again, shecking confistancy, then shitf 2 cups of salt or destergent or whatever, like anyone gives a schit.
Chample the whitchey shum more.
Shitf in shum lemon zhoosh. Fold in chopped sputter and shrained nuts.
Add 100 babblespoons of brown booger or whushevers closhest and mix well.
Greash ubben and turn the cakey pan to 350 decrees. Now pour the whole mesh into the washin’ machine and set on sinsh shycle.
Check dat whixney wunsh more and pash out.
Merry Cishmash!
If you're at a Thanksgiving dinner, but you don't like
the stuffing or the cranberry sauce or anything else, just
pretend like you're eating it, but instead, put it all in
your lap and form it into a big mushy ball. Then, later,
when you're out back having cigars with the boys, let
out a big fake cough and throw the ball to the ground.
Then say, “Boy, these are good cigars!”
—JACK HANDEY
Christmas is a major holiday. Hanukkah is a minor
holiday with the same theme as most Jewish holidays.
They tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat.
—ANONYMOUS
Turkey: A large bird whose flesh, when eaten on certain
religious anniversaries, has the peculiar property of
attesting piety and gratitude.
—AMBROSE BIERCE
I came from a family where gravy was
considered a beverage.
—ERMA BOMBECK
After a good dinner, one can forgive anybody,
even one's own relatives.
—OSCAR WILDE
Here I am, 5 o'clock in the morning, stuffing
breadcrumbs up a dead bird's butt.
—ROSEANNE BARR
Every Christmas, I feel like a child. But we
always get turkey.
—TERRY JONES
The worst gift is a fruitcake. There is only one
fruitcake in the entire world, and people
keep sending it to each other.
—JOHNNY CARSON
It took me three weeks to stuff the turkey.
I stuffed it through its beak.
—PHYLLIS DILLER
Women have fun baking for Christmas. Jewish women
burn their eyes and cut their hands grating potatoes
and onions for latkes on Hanukkah. Another reminder
of the suffering through the ages.
People are so worried about what they eat between
Christmas and the New Year. They really should be
worried about what they eat between the New Year
and Christmas.
Can I refill your eggnog for you? Get you something to
eat? Drive you out to the middle of nowhere and leave
you for dead?
—CLARK GRISWOLD, CHRISTMAS VACATION
We're having something a little different this year for
Thanksgiving. Instead of a turkey, we're having a swan.
You get more stuffing.
—GEORGE CARLIN
My cooking is so bad my kids thought Thanksgiving
was to commemorate Pearl Harbor.
—PHYLLIS DILLER
You know that just before the first Thanksgiving
dinner there was one wise, old Native American
woman saying, “Don't feed them. If you feed them,
they'll never leave.”
—DYLAN BRODY
Recovery
(HANGOVER)
IN WHICH THE REVELERS CONSUME MASS QUANTITIES
OF ANALGESIC PRODUCTS—WINCINGLY RECALL
CONVERSATIONS AND DEEDS THAT SHOULD NEVER
HAVE HAPPENED AND CAN'T BE UNDONE—AND THE
EVENTUAL OATH OF “NEVER AGAIN” IS HEARD
ONCE MORE
THE DAY AFTER…YOU MIGHT want to take a deep sigh of relief; but remember, the shit never ends. Now you will be looking straight into the jaws of exchange lines, longer than they ever were to buy stuff; using gift cards in stores with no inventory; boxing up the ornaments, trying to hit the “under” in the breakage betting; tossing the tree, seeing who can be first or who can be last; pulling even more fruitcake wrapped in napkins from the folds of the couch; dieting, even as the fridge is full of food gifts and leftovers.
Finally, after the last toast, it's back to work, glorious work…ah, sanctuary!
The day after Christmas is like the day after the senior prom, everybody asking each other, “What did you get?”
Given the choice, where would you rather be this
Christmas—in your kitchen with your hand shoved
up a turkey's bottom, or somewhere as far away from
tinsel, turkey, and tree as possible? Simply tell everyone
you're going away, buy a boatload of TV dinners
and DVDs, take the phone off the hook, close the
curtains…and wake up on December 27th.
—BERNICE DAVISON
Next to the presidency, detrimming a tree has to be the
loneliest job in the world. It has fallen to women for
centuries and is considered a skill only they can do, like
replacing the roll on the toilet tissue spindle, painting
baseboards, holding a wet washcloth for a child who is
throwing up, or taking out a splinter with a needle.
—ERMA BOMBECK
The day after Christmas: when we all have
two more ugly sweaters.
—CRAIG KILBORN
I love Christmas. I get a lot of wonderful presents I
can't wait to exchange.
—HENNY YOUNGMAN
Much like sex, the event ends with a sad flatulent
realization that these things are better imagined than
enacted, better anticipated than performed.
—STEPHEN FRY
Many people look forward to the New Year for a new
start on old habits. Good resolutions are simply checks
that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
—OSCAR WILDE
New Year's Day: Now is the accepted time to make
your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you
can begin paving hell with them as usual.