You may have heard of “Elf On The Shelf” as being a Christmas tradition. Supposedly derived from some kind of vague German holiday ritual, in truth it is a book written in 2005 which comes with a toy elf. A two-buck Chinese toy plus a small Christmas story equals $29.95 of pure Christmas profit.

I’m not surprised; after all, this is America, the magical land where sick people are a source of profit. If you can turn a group of people who arguably need the most compassion and help from their fellow humans into a rag soaked with money to be wrung out, you can surely push Christmas down that last flight of stairs from the temple of humanity. Get out, Christmas, and stay out until you’ve fixed the economy, and if everyone doesn’t have a job by the end of the year it’s YOUR FAULT.

This hand-painted cat statue is $90,000.00. That’s ninety thousand dollars more than an actual cat. But that’s not the best part. The description, written in some sort of hybrid ebay dialect, includes the nugget “(c) 1992.” Which means this person’s been trying to sell this ninety thousand dollar cat for twenty years.

Why was the Oreo Barbie removed from toy stores almost as soon as it was released? Could it have been the fact that they labeled a black woman as an “Oreo”, and that’s offensive and demeaning?

Yes, that’s exactly why, as a matter of fact.

Many years ago, in the Before Times, you couldn’t call just anyone on the telephone. If they lived close enough, you could call them for “free”, but if they were far away, you might get charged several dollars a minute. Many people had long-distance calls intentionally turned off on their line for this very reason. If you wanted to meter how long you stayed on a long-distance call, you could use a phone card to buy ten bucks’ worth of telephone time. This might be enough for a half-hour to a not-so-distant city, or a minute and a half to a foreign country.

All of this was, of course, done on a telephone attached to the wall, with a separate handset you pulled off of a hook using a curly cord.

For those who want to live in the nostalgia of the inconvenient, backwards-pants-wearing years of the early 90s, you can purchase a used telephone card for only $200 as a collectible.

Hanukkah is coming tonight, and so begins the crowbarring of secular, present-based Christmas into the Jewish holiday. Why not put a Star of David on top of your tree, or hang a Hanukkah stocking on your mantel? You could even, as in the picture above, reference Christmas and Hanukkah while honoring neither by wearing a horrible sweater, with anthropomorphic dreidels. We thought there was only 1 bad sweater in the closet, but there were 8. It’s a miracle.

Now, you can have the artificial barfy watermelon from Jolly Ranchers belched through your house in clouds of sooty smoke. But that’s not all. No, if you click through to the product description, it says it’s frequently bought with… well, I’ll let you see.

If you’re banking on society ending on December 21 like some people said the Mayans said, now’s the time to order your Survival Pallet of Chicken. It’s ninety-eight pounds of chicken for $6,720, so I suppose you’re mostly paying for the cans. But it’s going to be great to get some protein in between when you hide in the dark basement and when someone kills you for your canned chicken.

The manufacturer also offers a pallet of ground beef and a pallet of pork, but my money’s on the chicken. I mean, it’s not actually on it, because I’m not stupid and I don’t think the world’s going to end this month.