Once My Looks Go, I've Got Nothing

Christmas is a time of family, traditions, family traditions, and the looming specter of insurmountable debt. And nothing shrieks "tradition" like Christmas music, which has not evolved one bit in hundreds of years, give or take. In my family, one of our annual Yuletide traditions was listening to the album Christmas Comedy Classics , or Triple C if you're of the Guy Fieri school of thought regarding abbreviations. A collection of humorous holiday favorites, this compilation got innumerable spins on our CD player, which was a new technology at the time. And to be honest, I was never sure whether or not I liked it. I found some of the songs hilarious, some of them annoying, and most of them either depending on my mood. As such, I decided it was time to take a look back at this album now that I'm a Big Mature Adult and determine once and for all whether Christmas Comedy Classics is overflowing with Christmas cheer or merely a lump of coal being pounded into your ea

           It all started one day when I was browsing the recent headlines on The A.V. Club . I was stopped dead in my tracks by the following: " Lifetime Seeking to Gross Everyone Out with a New Adaptation of Flowers in the Attic ." Now, I had heard of Flowers in the Attic , and was familiar with the most basic aspects of the plot: kids get locked in an attic by their psychotic relatives. Every once in a while, in a social situation, I'd even used it as an esoteric reference/punchline. I recall getting some odd reactions to this, which never made a lot of sense to me. Perhaps this article would explain why! That element of mystery, plus my shameful fascination with the grotesque & with Lifetime movies (redundant?), made me click on that link lickety-split. I had no idea what path this fateful decision would lead me down.      The first sentence of the article was about as perversely fascinating as they come: "Lifetime is bringing terrifying incest back to th

          When I was young, I lived in a mobile home park. It was a wonderful place not unlike Disneyland, that is, if you replaced the cute cartoon characters with meth and the rides with arsons. It was a fascinating little social bubble, where nearly every married couple consisted of a morbidly obese wife and a skinny, geeky husband. This is a phenomenon that I have labeled "Jack Sprat Syndrome."      Our home life there was interesting. Possums would sometimes run into the house through some sort of crawlspace, the location of which I was never able to ascertain. My sister used to tell me that the ghost of an old woman would visit her at night, sitting on the edge of her bed and talking to her. I never saw any ghosts, but the walls of my room were laden with toxic mold. My lungs are still haunted by those abundant spores.           One Sunday morning, my mother went to go get the newspaper, leaving my sister and I home alone for a few minutes. I was about