Coast to Coast Christmas

Generally speaking, I go home for Christmas. That's the one day of the year you can count on me being home. In 20 years of driving a truck, I had only missed one Christmas at home, and that was due to getting stuck in bad weather. This year, however, I decided to stay out on the road and collect that nice bonus that my company offers for those drivers who are willing to shred their last ties to humanity and go full blown vagabond for the holidays. My hand was up, count me in. And that is how I came to the realization that there literally nothing on the 200+ channels on SiriusXM radio on Xmas Eve, so if you'll humor me I wanted to take a minute to complain about the one refuge I found in this entertainment desert.

I tuned in to Coast to Coast AM on the trucking channel and they had the weekend host on. And yes, of course, it was the weekend. I will say this for George Noory, who I am generally speaking not a big fan of. He's the antithesis of Art Bell. He was hosting on Friday before Christmas Eve, when every major nationally syndicated radio host was off, but on Saturday we get the regularly scheduled weekend host, which is some broad from Louisville. I forget her name, but who cares? She does a decent job and is generally pleasant to listen to. Her guest was a Priest who was speaking about the history of Christmas and answering questions from the radio audience. All of this was generally boring, but better than anything else on so I listened.

Here is what drove me nuts. Coming out of every break the host gives us the update on Santa's travels. You know, the stupid NORAD thing where they track Santa and keep you updated as to where he is? Because apparently, the North American Aerospace Defense Command has nothing better to do than to track imaginary characters on make believe journeys in an attempt to lend credence to a lie that parents across the nation tell their children every year. You know, something along the lines of "If you don't stop lying, Santa isn't going to bring you presents this year". Yeah, that kind of thing.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't care that NORAD does this. Correction. That was a lie. It's stupid, and they should knock it off. That aside, I can live with NORAD doing this, but does a radio show that is intended for adults really have to inundate me with this information? Best case scenario, assuming I live on the west coast, the show is on from 10pm to 2am. Shouldn't anyone old enough to believe in Santa Clause already be in bed? Knock it off already.

And that's when it dawned on me. I tune into Coast to Coast to hear otherwise functional adults call in and talk about how they were abducted and impregnated by aliens. They talk about entities that travel thousands of light years just to mutilate a cow, bend some crops into a pattern, abduct some random rebellious youth that stayed out to late, and then turn around and go home. They talk about bigfoot, lake monsters, shadow people, lizard people, government mind control experiments, and all sorts of conspiracy theories that make little to no sense. They believe in communication with the dead, alien abduction, undiscovered civilizations living exclusively under the crust of the earth, and that the moon landing was faked. And yet, knowing all of this, it never dawned on me that perhaps they also believe that there actually is a fat guy who lives on the North Pole and exploits child labor to make presents for all the good little girls and boys living around the world? I stand corrected.

So perhaps Coast to Coast AM is the most appropriate place for me to be hearing about the annual trek of Santa Clause, but at the risk of being called Scrooge or the Grinch, I would still like to think that NORAD has something better to do with their time. I don't know, like maybe Aerospace Defense or something? And what about CNN, FOX News, and every other news network that wants to be thought of as legitimate couriers of actual news stories, and yet the dedicate air time to help parents spread a known lie? You would think Coast to Coast would be on top of this. "See? I told you they were lying to us! They're tracking Santa? With what? Stolen alien technology!"

Perhaps not all hope is lost. We have Trump now, and he has been talking about getting rid of government waste. Perhaps the NORAD Santa Tracker will be on the hit list. It would certainly make my day if it were. And can we please finally be done with the idiotic pardoning of the White House turkeys, for crying out loud?