Ho, Ho, Ho, F— You

I know Fisking Maureen Dowd is like shooting fish in a barrel. Actually, it’s like shooting a blue whale stuffed into a swimming pool with a rocket launcher from point-blank range. Yet there’s just something about MoDo’s embittered Christmas rant that just screams “Fisk me, Jay! Fisk me!” Either that or I shouldn’t have eaten that green bacon this morning. In any event, they say that it’s best when you write what you know, and that’s why MoDo’s at her best when she’s being an embittered whiny bitch. So, without further ado:

If I hear “Frosty the Snowman” one more time, I’ll rip his frozen face off.

Frosty was relieved that she didn’t mention cutting off his snowballs.

It’s a scientific fact, or should be, that Christmas music can turn you into a fruitcake. It either sends you into a Pavlovian shopping trance, buying stupid things like the Robosapien, or, if you hear repeated Clockwork-Orange choruses of “Ring, Christmas Bells” drilling into your brain with that slasher-movie staccato, makes you feel as possessed with Christmas spirit as Norman Bates.

She’s just bitter because the Robosapien she bought last month got her Roomba pregnant again.

I’ve never said this out loud before, but I can’t stand Christmas.

Wow, MoDo holding back on sharing her bitter rants with the world? Has Satan been ice skating this long?

Everyone in my family loves it except me, and they can’t fathom why I get the mullygrubs, as a Southern friend of mine used to call a low-level depression, from Thanksgiving straight through New Year

Mullygrubs sounds like a Cockney term for a venereal disease.

“You’re weird,” my mom says. This from a woman who once left up our Christmas tree until April 3, and who listens to a radio station that plays carols 24/7 all month.

Being the mother of Maureen Dowd would be enough to drive anyone mad.

My equally demonic sister has a whole collection of rodents dressed in holiday clothes that she puts up around her house. There’s a mouse Santa Claus and mouse Mrs. Claus and mice elves and a miniature Christmas village with mice, and some rat Cinderella coachmen in pink waistcoats and rats in red velvet vests and more rats, wearing frilly red-and-white nightshirts and nightcaps and holding little candles, leading you up the steps to bed. It’s beyond creepy. I keep fretting that it’s going to be like “Willard” meets “The Nutcracker,” where they come alive and eat her like a Christmas pudding.

OK, so I admit this one was worth a laugh or two… touché to you, Ms. Dowd.

My mom and sister both blissfully sat through “It’s a Wonderful Life” again on Thanksgiving weekend, while even hearing a mere snatch of that movie makes me want to scarf down a fistful of antidepressants – and join all the other women in America who are on a holiday high – except our family doctor is a Scrooge about designer drugs, leaving me to self-medicate as Clarence gets his wings with extra brandy in the eggnog.

Personally, if I were Ms. Dowd’s physician I’d be prescribing a regular Valium enema just to keep her quiet.

And remember, every time a bell rings, a washed-up old Times columnist gets its wings, then bitches about the fact that they clash with their Prada handbag.

I’ve given a lot of thought to why others’ season of joy is my season of doom – besides the obvious fact that yuppies have drenched the holidays in ever more absurd levels of consumerism.

Because you’re a miserable old hag?

I think it has to do with how stressed out my mom and sister would get on Christmas Day when I was little. I remember them snapping at me; they seemed tense because of all the aprons to be sashed and potatoes to be mashed. (In our traditional Irish household, women slaved and men were waited on.)

…and one day Daddy got so drunk that he nearly beat the priest to death with a coal shovel and kissed Mommy on the foot.

It might be exacerbated by the stress I feel when I think of all the money I’ve spent on lavishing boyfriends with presents over the years, guys who are now living with other women who are enjoying my lovingly picked out presents which I’m no doubt still paying for in credit card interest charges.

Actually, all of Maureen Dowd’s former boyfriends have either become institutionalized or flamingly homosexual. Before dating Maureen Dowd, interior decorator Christopher Lowell was a champion rodeo cowboy.

My sympathies lie with the poor bastards who had to endure a relationship with Maureen Dowd. Thanks for taking one for the team, guys.

I was embracing my Christmas black dog the other day when I read a Times article so scary it made my hair – and my genes – curl.

Someone please call the ASPCA.

It was about how severe stress can make a woman age very rapidly and prematurely, looking years older than her chronological age, because the stress causes the DNA in our cells to shrink, and sort of curl down on itself, until the cells can no longer replicate. “When people are under stress they look haggard, it’s like they age before your eyes, and here’s something going on at a molecular level” that reflects that impression, said one of the researchers, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California at San Francisco.

So now, on top of all the stress related to having a president and vice president who scared us to death about terrorists to get re-elected, I have to be stressed about the fact that my holiday stress might cause me to turn into an old bat – instantly, just like it happened in Grimm’s fairy tales, when a girl would be cursed and suddenly become a crone. Or just like this Christmas doll my sister brought home once that had an apple for a head; her face looked all juicy and white at the start of the week and then by the end of the week, it was all discolored and puckered.

Turn you into an old bat? Trust me, you achieved that milestone a loong time ago.

Besides if that were true, Dowd would have melted like the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark by about 1AM on Election Night this year…

I flipped through the hot new self-help book by Gordon Livingston, a psychiatrist from Columbia, Md., “Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now.”

#1: People who try to rip off Dorthy Parker without having the wit or cleverness to do so quickly make fools of themselves.

One of them is the cardinal rule of anxiety: Avoidance makes it worse; confrontation gradually improves it.

And going on a killing spree gets rid of it entirely.

Yep. I definitely need to rip Frosty’s face off.

This morning Dowd was found dead off of Park Avenue, a corncob pipe shoved up her ass and her eyes ripped out and replaced with two pieces of coal.