My fondest holiday memory involves my dad and stepmom’s long-haired dachshund shitting mad diarrhea under the dining room table while my aunt, who smoked two packs a day until she passed away, turned the screws on my dad’s temper by arguing at full volume that of course his kids masturbated—Don’t you kids? Jesus, yes, you do—and that he should not pretend we didn’t. Then, like I said, the dog, whose name was Cody, and whose voicebox had been surgically removed because he barked all the fucking time and which therefore couldn’t be used to intimate, “I have to crap,” made a huge puddle of shit under the table. Everybody freaked out and my dad didn’t know where to focus his anger, so he yelled at my aunt, “Goddammit, Bonny,” causing her to laugh smoke. The whole house stunk so bad that no one wanted dessert. I was 9 years old and I did not yet masturbate.

Glenn Beck‘s The Christmas Sweater, which you can find for sale in National Review Online’s “Santa’s Sleigh Runs On Hate ‘N’ Coal” X-mas store,and which contains “a poignant tale of family, faith and forgiveness—based on actual events in [Beck’s] own life,” makes me wonder if I could write a children’s book about Cody and Aunt Bonny.

I would call it The Christmas Wet Vac.

“Infamous shitting dog oil on masonite” courtesy of Greg Celenze’s Outsider Art Project.