A holiday tradition like no other
The holiday season is a time when people all around the world pause from their hectic daily lives to participate in cherished holiday traditions that have been handed down from generation to generation, no matter how stupid they are.
Take, for example, the Yule Goat. We are not making the Yule Goat up. It is an actual holiday tradition over in Sweden, a foreign nation that is also known as “Denmark,” or, for short, “The Netherlands.” According to Wikipedia, the Yule Goat -- in Swedish it’s the “Gävle Goat” — dates back to ancient pagan festivals, but in 1966, “the tradition got a whole new life after someone came up with the idea to make a giant straw goat.”
Ha ha! What a fun idea “someone” had! Make a giant goat statue out of a highly flammable material, during a time of year when people are consuming a lot of alcohol! What could possibly go wrong?
Arson, for one. Wikipedia states that the Gävle Goat “has been the subject of repeated arson attacks, and, despite security measures and the nearby presence of a fire station, the goat has been burned to the ground most years since its first appearance in 1966. As of December 2019, the goat has been damaged 37 times.”
In other words, the Gävle Goat is a mostly successful holiday tradition, in the same sense that the Titanic had a mostly successful maiden voyage.
Here in the United States, we may not set fire to giant straw livestock statues, but we have our own unique holiday traditions, such as:
The tradition of violently stabbing the “off” button whenever “The Little Drummer Boy” starts playing on the radio, to avoid being subjected to 37 minutes of heliumenhanced voices shrieking “RUM PA PUM PUM!”
The tradition of spending Christmas Eve attempting to assemble large complex toys that come in hundreds of pieces, with “instructions” consisting of cryptic wordless drawings that for all we know illustrate the reproductive system of a
AAwombat.
But for sheer stupidity, no holiday tradition can compare with our annual Holiday Gift Guide. This is a curated collection of unique gift ideas that we painstakingly select via a “vetting” process that can take us as long as ten minutes, including a fiveminute snack break. Every item in this guide is a real product that you can, for whatever depraved reason, actually buy. We know this because we personally purchased all of these items with the Miami Herald’s money, such as it is.
We have also thoroughly inspected each item from a safe distance with our entire body drenched in hand sanitizer. That is why we are able to offer you our legendary Quality Assurance Warranty of Guaranteed Quality Assuredness: If you purchase any item featured in this gift guide, and you are not completely satisfied, simply place the item in its original packaging and drop it onto a concrete platform from a minimum height of 200 feet. Our operators are standing by.
But enough legal “mumbo jumbo.” Let’s take a look at the items that “passed the audition” for this year’s Holiday Gift Guide.