AN X-MAS CAROL © 2025 Christopher E. Metzger
It was not the Best of Times. It was the Age of Foolishness, the Epoch of Disbelief, the Winter of Despair. At the same time It was the Age of looking into I-Phones, the Age of Artificial Intelligence, the Deprivation of Privacy, the Epoch of Wealth Disparity, and the Time of Extreme Cruelty.
It was also the Time when X-Mas was coming. In fact, the night before X-Mas, the President of the United States (who we’ll call ‘DJ’ ) was visited by the Ghost of his old friend (who we’ll call ‘Jeffrey’), who had become very rich in life by doing terrible things to young people. Jeffrey’s Ghost had been sentenced to wandering the earth to warn very bad people to end their evil ways and make amends. DJ had no idea why Jeffrey’s Ghost came to him, of all people. The Ghost told DJ he was soon to be visited by three spirits and to pay close attention to their good council. Then Jeffrey wafted away, carrying a heavy load of files with him.
Since last X-Mas, 42 million people in DJ’s country had little to no food on the table because they had lost their food stamp assistance. Family bankruptcies were high, medical costs way up…but all this was affecting only the working classes. It was in this environment where The Ghost of X-Mas Past chose to visit DJ.
This wretched looking Ghost took DJ to look through the window of the Jones family to see last years X-Mas dinner. Mr. Jones had lost his job during the DOGE cost cutting efficiencies. Mrs. Jones, had lost her job because she was Latino and had probably been hired by the DEI woke people in the first place. Their son, Tiny Tim, was a little boy. The table was silent, though heads were bowed.
“What a bunch of losers” said DJ peering through the window.
“I hate DJ” said Tiny Tim under his breath. His mother said, “Tiny Tim, you should wash your mouth out – if we had any soap to wash it with. Hate is a terrible thing.” Mr. Jones muttered something about how he loved America and hoped this awful period of political madness would end and “…maybe the President would be forced to resign from office due to his mental condition…but then JD would become Prez and that could be worse…” and Mr. Jones driveled on and on and nobody could stop him. Tiny Tim yelled “I dislike you DJ, very much!”
In response, DJ tried to yell through the window, “You are a bunch of traitors and I will make sure you are visited by ICE and maybe even sue the s*%*t out of you.” (pardon his French)
And then DJ was back home, alone in bed with his iPhone and was about to tweet off a message on Truth Social. He was banging out a message regarding his soon to be hosting an X-Mas dinner at his Pleasure Dome in Mar-a-Lago for a million dollars per head. DJ was about to add the meal would be “Tariff Free”. It was at that moment when the scary looking Ghost of X-Mas Presents came floating in. Without any pleasantries, he carried DJ back to the Jones’s family house to eyeball this year’s X-Mas dinner gathering. Mrs. Jones must have lost 40 to 50 pounds during the past year.
”I wonder if she’s taking the same stuff I’m taking.” Thought DJ.
Mr. Jones was muttering, like he did the previous X-Mas, to no one in particular: “…why do they only shoot the good guys like King, and the Kennedys?…The Decorator-In-Chief is a demented puppet to those two Project 2025ers in the White House… puppet or no – how did the stupidest man in the world become the most powerful man in the world?…” He kept driveling on. Nobody paid attention to him. As for Tiny Tim, he seemed a bit tinier, if that were possible; but he did have the strength to yell out “I am unhappy with you DJ!”
Immediately, DJ yelled back, “You all are a bunch of Losers and I am going to sue the living (then a bunch of unprintable bad words erupted from his mouth) out of you and send ICE over to you and ship you to El Salvador or put you on a Venezuelan fishing boat and blow you up…” The Ghost of X-Mas Presents was very embarrassed by DJ’s behavior and pulled him away from the window, realizing he had met his match in this hefty living flesh of a man named DJ.
But wait! There is a new twist to this age old story. That very night The Ghost of X-Mas Future came floating in while DJ was astride his Golden Toilet. Now this ghost was extremely attractive. Blond, youngish, the type DJ would like to have dated every once in a while, if she were not a ghost. DJ was happy to be escorted by her, back to the Jones’s window.
However, the Jones’s were not there. They had been evicted because they could not afford to pay the rent. Currently, it was a BnB and was packed with tourists from Venezuela or Columbia, or from some s@#$t-hole country like that. (Pardon our French – but everybody is talking like that nowadays, now that our President is talking like that). It is possible the tourists were drug runners; but they were well dressed and they pre-paid the BnB owners, so they were OK.
DJ, looking though the window, was tired and became extremely confused and realized he was having a bad dream. He tried to remember the words: “Person, man, woman, camera, TV”; but nothing came up…finally, he thought of “Elephant, Tiger, Giraffe” and he knew he was alright. Actually, he thought he felt better than ever, better than anybody had ever felt before. He looked around and saw he was still balancing on his Golden Toilet and the blond escort had not really taken him to the deadbeat Jones’s and all that X-Mas Ghost stuff had been a HOAX. In a few minutes he was going to speak to the nation about what a great job he had done in the, the …he couldn’t remember how many days it had been, but maybe he stopped 12 wars and single-handedly put X back in X-Mas…X meaning Twitter, did you know that?…maybe he’d take the ‘Mas’ out and just re-name the whole thing “X” and then he’d show them how the the price of food had gone down 200% because of the tariffs. …And in a few hours there would be a 1,000 million dollar “X” dinner in the new and improved Trump East Wing Ballroom and all was right with his world.
As we said in the beginning of this tale: It was not the Best of Times.
