Column: Free Press now 100 percent safe for kids

Life always gets a bit crazy as Christmas approaches, but this past week has been one for the books.

For starters, I wrote a little tongue-in-cheek column about Santa Claus that incorporated the Tiger Woods debacle, and I received two types of responses: Huge belly-laughs and utter disgust.

As I sat at my daughter’s Christmas play Friday, a very nice woman in her 70s grabbed my arm and told me how much she enjoyed my columns. Later that day, somebody got on Kinston.com and basically wrote that I was the most evil thing to come down the pike since Adolph Hitler and Paris Hilton.

While I thought it was odd that two people could look at the same thing and have such disparate reactions, I took solace in the fact that the latest school official/student controversy would divert attention from me. While that story did grasp everyone’s attention for several days — so much so that we had to shut the bulletin board down — it didn’t stop the little Santa column from continuing to fester and transmogrify into this strange creature with half a smile and half a frown.

On Tuesday morning, the Santa controversy was still brewing. While at the courthouse in the morning, three officers stopped me to say how hard it made them laugh, while a lady in the clerk’s officer told me how much she didn’t care for it.

The maelstrom caused by this column has been so strong that the higher-ups at The Free Press have decided that reporters will no longer report on murders, shootings, beatings or robberies; you know, to protect the children.

Murders will now be referred to as “theft of life,” beatings will be classified as “roughhousing” and robberies will be written up as “forced sharing” — you know, to protect the children.

When I got back to the office from my morning rounds, there was a huge basket of cookies waiting for me at the front desk. I opened the card and it was from none other than the world’s tallest elf, Santa Claus.

“I read your article and thought it was very funny; too bad some folks have no sense of humor. See you on the 24th! Love, Santa,” the note read.

With a chest full of pride, I made the uncharacteristically charitable decision to share the cookies with my Free Press coworkers. I walked around the office and encouraged everyone to get a handful. Bryan Hanks cheated by using a giant foam “We’re No.1” hand he got from an ECU game, but I didn’t care, because Santa Claus liked me, and all those folks that hated on me were wrong.

About an hour later, I started to feel a little woozy; my stomach was queasy and I was so dehydrated I was unable to summon the tears needed for my bi-weekly payday sobbing session.

I looked around the office and noticed that my coworkers were a little green around the gills as well. Johnny Hussey was hugging a trash can like it was a cheerleader on game day. Chris Lavender ran into the bathroom and barricaded the door shut. The most shocking thing that happened was when Paulette Burroughs poured the moonshine out of her Robitussin bottle to fill it with Robitussin.

After a group trip to the emergency room, we returned to the office with our freshly-pumped stomachs and a new appreciation for Santa. I called his lawyers and told him that I’d write a retraction. They agreed to drop the charges if I agreed to run the following statement in the paper:

“At no time has Santa Claus ever indulged in any extramarital affairs. He has been committed to Mrs. Claus for hundreds of years, and with the exception of a brief period of experimentation in the mid-1970s, the couple have maintained a wholesome, Norman Rockwell-esque relationship.”

Let this be a lesson to you kids; if you mess with Santa, he’ll make you splorch.

Jon Dawson can be reached at 252-559-1083 or jdawson@freedomenc.com. Check out Jon’s blog at http://jdawson.encblogs.com and his web site at www.jondawson.com.