ArcaMax

What I've got is an "LED Santa Blow Mold With Warm White Light & Light Skin."

He stands a little over 2 feet tall.

So, what is it I've got?

It's one of those plastic Santas you put in your front yard, hopefully just during the Christmas season. The rest of the year, he lives in your garage, next to the bin for recyclables, just across from the lawn mower.

It's not much of a life for Blow Mold Santa. From Thanksgiving to New Year's, he's out in the cold air, looking at the stars, perfect in the iron dark, out there with the block's Christmas trees and inflatable grinches.

As a side note, people need to stop buying those big inflatable lawn decorations.

Oh, sure, they look cheerful when they're inflated, but you deflate them when you're not home, and I drive by, and they're lying limp on the ground like the aftermath of some horrible Christmas mass shooting.

"Oh my God," I say, driving past your house, looking at the crumpled Santa corpse on your lawn. "They got Santa. Oh, God! Snoopy, too! Is that, is that, the Baby Jesus!"

And it's not like I live in a country where you can't imagine the Baby Jesus riddled wih bullets. Hell, I can imagine the Virgin Mary taking one in her pregnant belly a couple months before the Blessed Birth.

It's that kind of country. Toughens you up.

I have Blow Mold Santa because we just bought a new house, a house in the suburbs, and I admired him very much on a home store's webpage, and my wife bought him for me as a surprise. I figure this means she loves me, getting me a nice Blow Mold Santa like that, one with "warm, white light & light skin." He cost about $40, which is how much she loved me that day, and that doesn't make me feel bad at all. I don't have $40 on me right now.

Blow Mold Santa suits us pretty well, too. My wife has a kind of warm white light to her, and we both have light skin. We don't have light skin like what Black people mean when they say, "He's light-skinned." We have light skin like white people have light skin, but the importers of Blow Mold Santa don't want to put "White Man Santa" on the website.

I wonder what happens if I walk into the home store looking for White Man Santa.

"Hey, I need a White Man Santa for my yard," I could say to the clerk. "And, oh, yeah. I need a Baby Jesus who doesn't look too Jewish."

The guy probably wouldn't even blink.

"White Man Santa and Aryan Jesus are in aisle 6," he might say. "And you might want to stay out of aisle 8. That's where the elves are, and they're all illegal immigrants."

"What?" I'd ask.

"C'mon, bruh," the guy would say. "No one knows how the elves got to the North Pole, they do factory work, and they live in a dormitory. Wake up!"

Blow Mold Santa looks great on my front porch, glowing with the light of a star seen from a great distance. Merry Christmas!

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.