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Mr. Kringle,
Hi, this is the dry cleaner calling about your red suit. You were right—it’s a bullet hole.
Shouts & Murmurs — January Messages for Santa: http://nyr.kr/XjuYUW
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"The presents were tangible expressions of love and sorrow in response to intangible grief."
— Sasha Weiss on Christmas Day in Sandy Hook: http://nyr.kr/Ve9Au4(Source: newyorker.com)
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Cartoon by Carolita Johnson. For more from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/RlC1dL
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Cartoon by Roz Chast. For more: http://nyr.kr/V9yUAL
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"If pressed to describe what happens during “A Civil War Christmas” (at the New York Theatre Workshop), I couldn’t really say. But if asked to relate what the two-and-half-hour production was like, I could go on about the narcotizing effect that playwright Paula Vogel’s political correctness had on at least one audience member…"
—Hilton Als reviews “A Civil War Christmas”: http://nyr.kr/11GjUks
Photograph by Carol Rosegg.
(Source: newyorker.com)
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A carolling cartoon of the day. For more cartoons from this week’s issue: http://www.newyorker.com/humor
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“When I was five years old, I would go with my mother to midtown Manhattan,” Eric Drooker says, “and there’d be a bearded Santa Claus ringing a bell. And then we’d go back downtown, and I’d see another Santa—but this time a skinny one. I think that’s what tipped me off. If you’re living in a small town or suburb, I suppose there’s just one Santa in the shopping mall. But for a city kid, once he notices that there is more than one Santa, he starts to wonder: Who’s the real one?”
- This week’s cover artist, Eric Drooker. To see this week’s cover and a slide show of more New Yorker covers featuring Santa: http://nyr.kr/rueKFP
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SantaLeaks
The New Yorker is off for the holidays, but we’ll leave you with this confluence of current affairs and Christmas:
SantaLeaks: an analysis of more than a hundred thousand documents recently leaked by a disgruntled elf has revealed several surprising facts about the North Pole’s most famous citizen.
· Santa and several top elves colluded to circumvent a ban on Chinese-made toys, despite pressure from the North Pole community to deliver only toys made locally.
· Santa has, over the years, acted to undermine potential successors, privately disparaging one of his nephews as “lazy,” another as “not really committed to the whole Christmas thing,” and yet another as “incapable of growing a beard of the appropriate size, if you know what I mean.”
· Senior North Pole officials were astonished when an elf in Santa’s cabinet proposed halting a long-standing program monitoring pouting and crying. “For years, we’ve been telling people that they’d better not do this,” one said in a confidential cable, “and now we’re removing all restrictions? What’s next? Decriminalizing the failure to watch out?”
· After Santa suffered a serious hip injury, in the late seventies, the Prime Minister of Norway offered him access to several chimneys to conduct entrance and egress exercises.
· A reported mixup in 2004 that brought eleven-year-old Jack Keller, of Seattle, a book of math games instead of a football was not accidental: Santa was sending a message.
· During home visits last Christmas, Santa spied on the C.E.O.s of several Fortune 500 companies, and collected personal data including but not limited to credit-card and frequent-flier numbers.
· The song “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” has more basis in truth than was previously thought; elves worried for years about Santa’s philandering, which began to decrease only recently, after Mrs. Claus discovered an illicit text message from an Arizona school-board member.
· Santa doesn’t enjoy going to certain St. Louis suburbs. “They just give me the creeps,” he told one top elf.
· Most cookies left out for Santa end up being fed to the reindeer.
· In 2007, Santa suppressed the delivery of gifts to more than a thousand residents of Los Angeles as a result of his displeasure with the movie “Fred Claus.”
· Just this year, Santa accepted a payment of twelve million dollars to keep Charlie Sheen on the “nice” list.
· A potential environmental disaster was kept secret by the North Pole in 2008, after a large bag filled with painted blocks from Vietnam fell from Santa’s sleigh into the Anglezarke reservoir, in Lancashire, raising fears of lead contamination. Elves with scuba gear and flashlights were sent in to retrieve the blocks under cover of night.
· Contrary to popular belief, Santa cannot really tell when you’re sleeping or when you’re awake, but he will fly into a rage if his ability to do so is questioned. ♦
