- Bah, humbug — not to Christmas but to these two.
It’s December, so the holiday season has officially kicked off. And it seems not everybody is particularly happy about that.
In the last few days, we’ve seen a couple of Christmas haters resort to extreme measures to make the season a little less jolly for others. One included a firearm while the other was just in general poor taste.
In Kentucky, Santa got shot. Fortunately, nobody gunned down a Mall Santa or anything, but someone put a bullet through an inflatable St. Nick in an apparent drive-by shooting.
Meanwhile, in Texas, a man in an appropriate Grinch outfit decided to steal Christmas from a bunch of children. He stood in front of an Amarillo elementary school with a sign denouncing Santa as a lie and telling the kids to turn to Jesus instead.
Look, we kind of get it — even some of us here at Oddee think Christmas has become intrusively commercial. But stuff like this would make even pre-ghost-encounter Ebenezer Scrooge ask what is actually wrong with you.
Who Murdered Santa?
The holiday cheer of Donald Nelson got seriously deflated on Sunday, November 26. Just days earlier, Nelson had finished setting up the usual Christmas decorations outside his family home in Lexington, Kentucky.
One of those decorations included a brand-spanking-new inflatable Santa. The eight-foot-tall balloon stood proudly in Nelson’s front yard.
Yet, around 8:15 p.m. on that Sunday night, Nelson and his wife heard what they described to The Independent as a “small bang.” He went outside to investigate and found his new Santa lying empty on the ground.
At first, Nelson didn’t think much of it. Maybe he’d just bought a lemon.
He quickly changed his mind, though, when he checked his home security camera footage to see if something like a bird had hit the balloon.
The captured footage shows an unknown car pulling into the cul-de-sac in front of Nelson’s home. The vehicle turns around and the camera’s microphone catches a pop that, in hindsight, reminded Nelson a whole heck of a lot of a discharging handgun.
Right at that same moment, the video shows the giant Santa bursting and falling to the ground. Inspecting the balloon, Nelson found a large 18-inch rip of an exit wound on Santa’s back.
One of Nelson’s neighbors has offered to sew the inflatable back together, but the man is understandably hesitant to put it up again. Not only that, if the Santa was actually shot at, that means somebody fired at Nelson’s house.
What if he or his wife had been standing out of sight behind the Santa doing some yard work?
Nelson said he has filed a police report, but the cops have little to go on. If the suspected shooter comes back, Nelson hopes he or his neighbors will manage to catch the car’s license plate.
St. Grinch, or Something
The day after the Kentucky Santa shooting, the Grinch arrived in Texas. Yet, it wasn’t the green grouch himself — this spoilsport was David Grisham, a local Amarillo resident who was only donning a Grinch outfit.
He sure could’ve led us to believe he was the real Grinch with his behavior, though. Wearing his outfit, Grisham went to stand in front of the Sleepy Hollow Elementary School during the morning drop-off hours.
In his hand, he held a sign reading “SANTA IS FAKE JESUS IS REAL.”
Understandably, the parents dropping off their kids weren’t particularly thrilled about Grisham’s stunt. Several people confronted the man, with one dad even yanking the sign out of Grisham’s hands and hurling it to the ground.
As Grisham kept loitering around, someone eventually called the police. The cops tried talking to the Grinch, but when he wouldn’t leave, that was it on their part — he wasn’t breaking any law by standing on a public sidewalk.
Grisham later told ABC 7 News that he understood why the parents were upset.
“They’re upset because they’re prideful and don’t want to admit that lying to their child is wrong in spite of what God’s word says,” Grisham ranted.
“They double down on the lie because of pride and they are angry because they want to blame the person telling the truth than the one who told the lie that prompted the truth to expose the lie.”
We can only assume that the Grinch is some kind of divine messenger or holy warrior in this scenario.
Like we said, we kind of get it on some level. But going and ruining kids’ fun like this?
That doesn’t make you a crusader. It just makes you an a**hole.