A 1900s greeting card reading ‘Greetings from Krampus!’

I received a letter special delivery this past weekend from Krampus including a very long list of naughty children for 2023. There are more than I can possibly talk about this week, but I’d like to mention just a few stand-outs.

On the world stage

Putin has been an extremely naughty boy this year from beginning to end. He continues to elicit a wicked-crazy level of unruliness and “does not play well with others.” He is a big bully who still wants to take all his neighbors toys: the best grain-producing lands in Ukraine; art and culture, if he can get his hands on it; all the lovely beaches for vacationing in the Crimea (tinyurl.com/jfbckx3t); even other countries’ journalists. (Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, and Alsu Kurmasheva, a Prague-based Russian-American radio journalist, are somewhere withering in Russia.) Putin tends to kill his country’s journalists so he keeps needing a fresh supply.

He and his buddies have also been very rude at all the United Nations meetings. Some call him an elitist because he has turned up his nose at the entrance of Ukraine into this special club. It’s as if once he made it into the treehouse, he wants to pull the ladder up so no one else can get in. (Five countries sit on the UN Security Council — China, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Russia. They have a secret handshake that allows them to nix the notions of any other UN members.)

Another problem child is Viktor Orban, prime minister of Hungary, who said he would borrow the reins of power during the pandemic emergency a couple years ago; but now he has decreed “finders keepers, losers weepers.” He’s decided that “rule by fiat” is the best for his people and his now crumbling democracy. I guess his Fiat doesn’t have room to carry anybody else.

Krampus’s note on international bad-boy gangs was so hot this year there were black holes burned right through it. I believe I even saw some names washed away by his own tears (a rare occurrence indeed).

Back at the ranch

Now a tiny bit closer to home — what about that governor of Texas? As we know everything is bigger in Texas, which broadcasts a kind of over-sized magnetism. That must be why all those people carrying little babies are trying to get into their state. (Or is it because they are starving where they used to live?) Anyway, what can they be thinking? C’mon — buck up, butter cups! Or, alternatively, let’s just ship them to Chicago in the middle of winter. (They can thank us later.) And, BTW, Texas — Krampus says good on you for making Kate Cox, who had a non-viable fetus that threatened her ability to have more babies, travel to another state to get an abortion. Bravo for your courageous stand on family values! It got you on the misbehavin’ list this year.

Let us not forget Kevin McCarthy who has a minor notation on Krampus’s roster. He tried the patience of the House of Representatives in January by making them sit through 15 rounds of voting before he could come out on top. You’d think if he just needed to get his dance card filled he could have kissed up to more people a little more efficiently. Then, after all that, he up and left his top seat because some of his cronies got bored with trying to craft legislation. I mean, what gives with that? You’d think making rules in a democracy requires compromise or something! And now — he has just taken his ball(s) and gone home.

A slap on the hand goes to Penn prez M. Elizabeth Magill either for answering a question too truthfully or for giving in too soon after being raked over the coals by Elise Stefanic in a congressional hearing trap set up to catch wily woke college presidents who are too smart for their own britches (or skirts, as the case may be). A little too much blowback got in her eyes.

Stefanic’s “One down, two to go,” may be prescient as Harvard’s Claudine Gay, who is not gay, may have too many “black marks” against her too. Meanwhile, Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth is on Krampus’ “might be naughty list.” The verdict is still out.

Liz Cheney is definitely on the naughty list for calling out Donald Trump. Trump only has two impeachments, 91 felony counts, four indictments, and an insurrection against him so — I ask you — how can he possibly not be qualified to be our next president (tinyurl.com/3mvcy94y)? And who does she think she is anyway, trying to sully the record of someone else when she is the daughter of a VP who actually shot a friend with a 28-gauge Perazzi while out quail hunting? The idea. She probably has whiplash that damaged her brain because of this turn-around after voting for Trump twice, in 2016 and 2020. Or maybe she just wants to clear the runway for her own candidacy after the smoke clears in the primaries.

What about us?

Krampus gave me a very special list of naughty kids from the Peninsula but unfortunately these were written in disappearing ink, and I only caught a quick glimpse of them before they evaporated into the fog last week. But I do remember just a few comments he wrote in an addenda.

First, the Megler Bridge has been a very very bad bridge for killing people this year, and even after Oregon Department of Transportation did all that work on it! I suggest two big well-lighted signs with Skull and Crossbones — one on each end of the bridge — that say, “NO PASSING YOU IDIOTS.”

On my own personal naughty list is still all the people responsible for closing the Nahcotta Post Office. (You know who you are.) Now it’s been suggested that I use the Ocean Park zip code in order to receive mail or packages in my relocated Nahcotta post office box — an indignity that I know signifies the beginning of the end for Nahcotta. (I have new next door neighbors who do not know where Nahcotta is — and they live here!). And I know I’ve talked about this before, ad nauseum, but I’m not letting it go, despite advice from my therapist.

And finally, who the heck decided that we needed new terms for the weather? Atmospheric river, pineapple express, bomb hurricane, bomb cyclone, derecho, snownado, fire tornado, etc. I do know that we require seventeen ways to describe the rain — it’s Gordon McCraw’s specialty! — but where did these other expressions come from? In a final note, Krampus warned me that we’ll be needing even more dramatic nomenclature in the future. He rather likes the weathermen and women as purveyors of doom.

OK, that’s all the ranting we have time for this week. Here’s hoping you’ve all had a great holiday with aunts, uncles, friends and frenemies. See you in the new year.