This week, you will be visited by three holiday-themed urban legends. Unless you don’t have an RSS feed set up. In that case, you’ll have to come to them. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday – a Very Weird Things Xmas.

Today: But What Does the Bed Represent? – The Allegorical Baby Death That Stole Christmas Back

If I go over to someone’s house for a Christening party, and they tell me I can just throw my coat on a bed, would I think to check that bed for the guest of honor? The bad news is that, in today’s story, which first began circulating en masse via chain emails during the early ‘00s, the hypothetical partygoers do not. The good news is that no baby has ever died because its parents 1.) Randomly plopped it, unattended, on a bed before hosting its Christening party; 2.) Started directing guests to just launch their crap onto the bed (i.e., the only piece of furniture in the house with a living human baby/party honoree on it); and 3) hosted a soiree full of spaced-out machine people with no peripheral vision who enter a house, doff their jackets and initiate some kind of Ctrl+Throw Coat commands without at least glancing at their target to calculate outerwear trajectory.

Plot-wise, you get the picture – a baby accidentally suffocates at its Christening party after its parents get so caught up in making sure the appetizer display is symmetrical that… well, you know. Dead baby. Unlike Monday’s tale of a dad’s misadventures in asphyxiation, this story isn’t necessarily presented as an actual tragedy that tore a real family apart, but rather as a symbolic tragedy that’s actually tearing the country apart. See, the christening party is Christmas. The baby? It’s Jesus! And the coats are all of the lights and booze and gifts (in this instance, the coats are only metaphorical for those people who didn’t buy or receive a coat for Christmas) that America uses to suffocate the baby Jesus on what’s meant to be a celebration of his birth. I know! Christ – how badly are you wishing that it was really just about some stupid moron’s dead idiot baby?

(By the way – I’m not just yanking that interpretation out of my brain’s butt like I do with everything else – an explanation of the story’s meaning is appended to many versions of the email; I guess it’s a necessary evil, like how in Act V of the Crucible, all the characters break the fourth wall and act out a spirited gang fisting of Joseph McCarthy. Oh wait… that doesn’t happen.)

Yes, I repeatedly bemoan these facile polemics that employ blatant scare tactics and brutal imagery to sear an otherwise half-cocked notion of moral sentimentality onto our greedy, capitalist brains, but seriously – this one doesn’t even really work. It sucks as an evangelizing Platonic allegory because it doesn’t offer anything that would ever cause you to relate yourself to the parents or the guests (unless you’re actually a completely oblivious imbecile, in which case you probably misread it as an advertisement for coat racks). It sucks as an urban legend because the scenario isn’t wacky or gruesome enough to warrant re-telling alongside the likes of Chick Who had Baby Spiders Hatching Out of Her Face or Chick Who “Fell” on a Hot Dog. And, even with the spelled-out explanation, it sucks as a Christmas email because it’s about a newborn baby dying. So… UGH!

Friday: Less ranting

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