Jingle Bailout, by Arthur Tebbel & Chris Toia – Pop Art… and Chris #4

December 23, 2008 Arthur Tebbel & Chris Toia 9 Comments

Dear Art and Chris,
I made some bad investments this year, and my holiday season might be a little tight.  I have a lot of people to provide gifts for and I feel like I’m going to let them down when their stockings are light, their tree barren.  How can I provide Christmas cheer on a budget?
-Santa Claus

Dear Santa,
If a man who can travel around the entire world in a night on a sleigh driven by magic reindeer can’t make money in this market what hope do the rest of us have?  Our first piece of advice, especially after watching the senate debate the auto bailout, is that you have to crush any form of union your elves might have.  They didn’t go to college, so you don’t owe them a living wage.  Also think about the children, the Chinese children who could make your products for far less money.  Everyone does it, in fact the rest of this paragraph will be written by Chinese labor.  I bet you haven’t noticed any decrease in quality, you do however now have lead poisoning.

The easiest way to cut costs would be to reduce output.  You give away too many toys.  We’ve all heard the claim that naughty children will not get what they want but you never seem to follow through.  The only houses you seem to skip, apparently the naughtiest of them all, are the poor kids.  With money so tight maybe you should think about a few 16 year olds in the Hollywood Hills who shouldn’t get cars this year instead of keeping a Slinky out of the hands of a kid in Compton.  Furthermore, you have to stop giving bad kids coal, with the energy crisis in full swing you might as well leave them hundred dollar bills.  Give them something useless, perhaps a Palin 2012 bumper sticker.

We don’t want to call you out or anything but maybe working only one day a year might tie in to your fiscal problems.  As we said before, you have the most sophisticated delivery system on the planet.  You can hit every house on earth in the span of a few hours.  Given days UPS has problems delivering to our apartment.  License that technology out; you don’t even have to do the deliveries yourself.  If you don’t think Detroit would love to put out a flying-reindeer-powered-car, then you’re insane.  Hay is cheaper than oil and emissions go from being something that kills the planet to something you have to shovel out of your garage.  We would tell you to give your whole “knows when you’ve been bad or good” think to the CIA but from what I’ve seen, under the Bush Administration, they may have lapped you.

Finally, don’t you think that establishing a paradigm where people base their happiness solely on the things they receive might be part of what got us into this mess?  If people were content with the love of their family and what they have instead of trying to get the biggest house possible and then refinancing that house to buy the biggest car we would never have had a mortgage crisis.  We should return to the true meaning of the season: family, togetherness, and being thankful that the dragon isn’t going to eat the sun.