In just a few more days, Old Saint Nick will be breaking and entering all around the world to gorge himself on cookies and milk until it becomes painfully obvious that he’ll spend the rest of the year on the toilet recuperating.  But when he does stop in for a visit, he’s got gifts a plenty, including shit to jam into the sock you left out.  Why do we leave socks out on Christmas?  God only knows.  That’s true, in fact.  Leviticus 3:9 says “Verily, I do know why thou must place a stocking on thine mantle, I just ain’t saying.”  Crazy.

While stockings are by and large just an excuse to cram a few small presents somewhere other than under a tree, they also have a nasty habit of attracting some straight up ridiculous shit.  In fairness, socks usually only get feet stuffed in them and feet are about as desirable as Renee Zellwegger, so anything is generally considered a step up.  But not much.  So here’s a list of things to be on the lookout for this Christmas that may or may not weasel their way down to the toe of your stocking and force you into the position where you have to smile and feign gratitude.

Fruit

For some reason, Christmas and oranges have a long, sordid history together.  Maybe it has something to do with oranges being one of the only exotic fruits our lily white, Pre-Industrial relatives could get their hands on so it was like the awesomest thing ever to find one jammed in your stocking on Christmas morning because the other 364 days of the year were strictly dedicated to getting scurvy and liking it.  And while that’s all fine and good, it’s 2009.  Have you seen the shit we have in supermarkets?  Açaí?  Persimmon? Dragonfruit?  Goji? Oranges can’t compete with that.  Açaí may taste like crap and maybe some shipments recently stopped on their way into Canada contained generic Viagra, but man is it popular these days.  Oranges are the Jimmy Fallon to açaí’s Seth Rogen.

 

Terry’s Chocolate Orange

This is potentially the most awful chocolate in the world.  Sorry Terry, you’re probably a really nice person.  Oranges, as we stated, are a bum wrap for Christmas.  But don’t you dare try to substitute a fake orange made from chocolate and orange flavoring that costs $5, that’s insulting.  Orange chocolate is like bacon lube.  On their own, neither thing is awful.  Together, fuck you.  Straight up.

Dollar Store Items

This is a broad stroke entry because dollar stores literally stock one million pieces of utterly worthless shit.  You’d think that something that costs $1,000 must have a considerable markup and something that costs $1 would potentially be a better value insofar as there’s only 100 monetary units in that dollar that could account for the actual cost of the dollar store item.  It had to have a production cost, a shipping cost, labor costs and the profit taken by the dollar store.  And yet nothing at the dollar store is worth a dollar.  Every goddamn thing is a rip off.  When you take away all those fees, whatever sum of pocket change you have left, we’ll guess 30 cents, is indicative of the psi that the manufacturers of that product imagined using when fucking you in the ass.  Don’t buy shit from the dollar store.

Ornaments

It’s already Christmas, no one needs an ornament now.  The tree is decorated and if it’s not, your timing is atrocious.  Just unforgiveable.  Plus, an ornament has to go on the tree.  You’re giving people something that they can use once a year, that they have to put on a tree and just leave there.  That’s like giving someone a pinecone or sap.  Fucking sap.

Underwear

This one is all strategy.  Kids hate getting underwear, but what do kids know?  If they were so smart they wouldn’t be so short.  Sometimes you need underwear but the stocking is not the place for it because that shit takes up a lot of room.  If you jam gitch into a stocking that’s taking up valuable real estate and basically making the whole stocking a let down as, after undies, you’ve got room for one shitty chocolate orange and a dollar store enema kit and that’s it.

 

Christmas Themed Chocolate

Lots of companies seem to wait the whole year to sell a box of chocolates at Christmas that will by and large disgust whoever eats them.  You know the ones – they come with a goddamn map so you can try to avoid the landmines but for some reason “asparagus crème” seems mildly enticing so you try it and somehow it’s actually worse than you imagined. In the entire box there will be like 6 chocolates that don’t suck, and half of them will be eaten by someone else and for some reason you’ll feel proud when you find one that you can manage to swallow without grimacing.  But we’re not even talking about those chocolates, although we should.  Maybe next entry.

Here, we’re talking about M&Ms.  Or Snickers.  Or whatever candy you can buy every other day of the year but for a limited time has been released in only red and green colors or with coconut snow on top or some other thing like that.  This is the candy industry being horribly lazy but trying to assure you that yes, your ass does need another layer of nougat this holiday season, why not go for our “exactly-the-same-as-always-but-not-quite” variety?

 

Boxed chocolates

See above.  We should have planned this article better.

Deodorant

Toiletries in general are a terrible idea for stockings because this is the kind of thing you should be keeping up on all year.  Christmas is not the time to get festive and think “Man, let’s ring in the new year with a noticeable lack of stench!”  If you put deodorant in a stocking, you’re opening the door for toilet paper, tampons, toothpaste, mouthwash and a loaf of bread.

Soap on a rope

This is a sublisting of the above because it seems to have been invented for and marketed every Christmas.  But why?  WHY?  It’s soap.  You should bathe all year and if your soap needs some kind of anchor, you may need to Google the fundamentals of bathing to see where your approach is falling short.  If you feel a loved one requires improved sanitation, Christmas morning is not the best time to address that issue.

Mugs

Like chocolates, every Christmas the mug industry in Taiwan gets together to crank out Christmas-themed mugs featuring whimsical little elves, Christmas trees or maybe a dog dressed hilariously as a reindeer.

Fact:  No ne has ever needed a mug.

There has never been a time in anyone’s life when they’re plans were even slightly altered due to the poor availability of mugs, let alone Christmas themed mugs that forbid use at any other time of year for fear of looking mildly challenged.  If you’re drinking out of a mug, it’s because you’re depressed and alone.  It’s either early morning and you’re having a coffee, or you’re by yourself watching Wrath of Khan with some hot chocolate because that’s what you do on Friday nights now.  In any event, you have the mug angle covered, just like everyone else and the addition of a new Christmas themed mug is going to prove nothing.

Chap Stick

Chapstick may be the single most insulting gift anyone has ever presented to anyone else in the history of all time.  Pictures of an adulterous affair you’re having with the giftee’s spouse would not be so unwelcome.  Actual, still-warm feces you produced yourself after a night of low cost Chinese food and homemade wine would not be so offensive.  Chap stick is the absolutely bottom of the barrel when it comes to handing someone a gift that is meant to represent anything other than incalculable apathy and uncaring.

Chapstick, or any lower class lip balms, are made from wax.  Wax is a byproduct of bees, and not even a good one like honey.  It’s just some shit they secrete to hold their houses together.  It’s bug mortar.  And someone mixes it with artificial cherry flavor and some camphor which comes out of a goddamn tree and you put that on your lips because your face is shattering in the cold, dry winter air in the hopes it will stop you from bleeding every time you smile.  There is no gift more depressing.

Do you know where you can buy chapstick?  Of course you do, you can’t not buy it anywhere.  It’s at every fucking store.  It’s in bathroom vending machines.  If you searched the pockets of a junkie who passed out in his own frozen piss in an alley you’d get poked by a needle and then find some urine-stained chapstick.  No effort has ever gone into finding chapstick and its continued existence demonstrates how much the manufacturer loathes you as a person which doesn’t even come close to matching how much the person who gives it to you as a gift just doesn’t give a shit.