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# GUEST COMMENTARY BY DANNY GALLAGHER Maybe Christmas carnage is just an expression of love
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/guest-commentary-by-danny-gallagher-maybe-christmas-carnage-is-just-an-expression-of-love/
- Published: 2006-12-19T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T23:24:28.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Santa Monica, #archive-import, Homeless

Christmas is that special part of the year when all of America takes time away from their busy days of flipping burgers, yelling at the imaginary people in our television sets and auditing homeless people to leave their homes, get together and battle each other in mortal combat for the cheapest, most thoughtful gifts they can find.

If you haven’t seen a busy Christmas shopping season with your own eyes because you shop online and don’t worry about lonely hackers using your credit card information to buy the entire anime aisle at Best Buy, take this year off and go to a store near you. It is a sight to behold. This is what the apocalypse will look like, only there’s less blood. The best thing that could happen is it will haunt your memory for years to come, and make you marvel and wonder at the depths that humanity has sunk. The worst thing that could happen is it will make your head explode in your car and you can finally put that window squeegee that Aunt Nippy bought you last Christmas to good use.

Witnessing the Christmas carnage will make you believe that man has evolved from lower species, and can revert back just as quickly when they are placed in the appropriate setting. If George W. Bush, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson did their own Christmas shopping, they’d put down “Stop pushing intelligent design” as one of their New Year’s resolutions.

The mall is the best example of holiday de-evolution. Malls aren’t my favorite place to shop because they’re more flashy, impersonal and expensive than Terrell Owens. But when it comes to Christmas shopping, I don’t mind hanging around them because the behavior of the customers is downright comical. It’s Abbott & Costello meets Abercrombie & Fitch.

Shopping in them is another story. It’s like stepping into “Dawn of the Dead”except George Romero’s zombies move faster and have more decency for their fellow man. Women fight each other for sale sweaters the way starving caveman would fight over the carcass of a sabertooth tiger. When a parent refuses to buy a toy for their son or daughter, the little snot machine turns into a human car alarm. People claw, reach and gnaw on each others’ bodies for a chance to max their credit cards out on junk that’s just going to be given right back to them next Christmas.

Toy stores give the best armageddon audition in the bunch. If you’ve ever seen a child up close in the wild, you know what I mean. The world spends billions upon billions of dollars convincing them to buy crap that isn’t worth the sweatshop wages it took to make it. Of course, they can’t buy it, so they go their parents who, despite being bigger and able to smack them so hard they would be able to communicate with dead relatives, actually camp out in front of these stores for a slim chance of buying one of them. Do children have mutant, pyrokinetic powers or weapons of mass destruction now?

But maybe there’s a manner for all this madness. Maybe there’s a basis behind the bloodshed. Maybe there’s a cause for all this Christmas carnage. Christmas isn’t just about getting gifts. It’s about giving them, and part of the giving comes from the journey it takes to get them. Maybe all the fighting and clawing and kicking and biting and stabbing is an expression of love just as much as the gifts they are buying.Would you shoot a man in the shin with a crossbow to buy a non-spill coffee mug? I didn’t think so.

What we witnessed wasn’t chaos. It was the Christmas spirit.

Danny Gallagher is a freelance writer, reporter, humorist and all-round nice guy. His Web site is www.dannygallagher.net.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 19, 2006.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/121906.pdf?ref=smdp.com)