n awkward pause lasted a full 30 minutes on basic cable Friday night when Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott appeared on BET for a second time to ask forgiveness for remarks made at Strom Thurmond's birthday party two weeks previous. Despite stepping down from his position as Senate Majority leader earlier in the day, Lott felt it necessary to stress the sincerity of his regret for the ill-received comments—this time, garbed in FUBU clothes and sporting bad street lingo, Lott offered "the sizzincerest apologizzies."

It was a stark contrast to Monday night's appearance, where Lott was reserved, even self-effacing as he made an on-air apology directed to African-Americans. In addition to that apology, in which Lott claimed his remarks had been misconstrued as pro-segregationist when they were not intended that way, Lott tried to explain his long history of voting against legislation supported by African-Americans, including affirmative action and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

On Friday, Lott was decidedly more in-your-face, despite claims he was "just chillin' on the B to the E.T." Though in his previous interview with Ed Gordon Trent claimed he was not a racist because he did not feel superior to Gordon, the Trent Lott in attendance Friday did suggest he was the mack daddy of riches and bitches.

"Yo, Ed G., it ain't no secret—T-Lo pulls all the fine bitches like motherfuckin' gravity. The honies love power and T-Lo's got it. You down with G.O.P.? Yeah, you know me."

When pressed about his voting record, Lott was less apologetic than Monday's interview.

"It's all good, Ed G. The plain truth is I ain't up in them cap-hill offices readin' all day like Muhammad or sumptin'. I'm just there to get pizzaid, and I just click the buttons until the checks is wrote and I get the fuck out for the weekend. Know what I'm sayin'? Just up there, trying to keep it real."

Interviewer Gordon questioned Lott on his strange new attitude, but Lott insisted the change was not inspired by polls stating his apologies were ineffective.

"It's all me, G. The real T-Lo got tired of puttin' on that whack suit-and-tie bullshit. That ain't the real Trent Lott, know what I'm sayin'? That was just frontin' 'cause I thought white America wasn't down wit' me otherwise. But, y'know, fuck all y'all who don't like the real T-Lo. Y'all just weak-ass perpetrators."

As for his earlier pro-segregationist remarks, Lott was quick to dismiss them.

"Yo, yo, yo, Ed G., that was some crazy-ass shit I said, I know that. But what you expect me to do? They asked me to say somethin' at this old-ass Strom Thurmond motherfucker's birthday and I had to come up with somethin' fast. Everybody'd be all pissed at me if I said he looked like Redd Fox's nutsack, right? So I just spun some mad bullshit about supportin' his presidential bid and shit—I ain't know what fuckin' 'segregationist' mean, sounds like the name of Prince's new band or somethin'. I said the shit, I'm truly sizzorry, homeslice, what you want from me? This shit done blown all outta proportion."

Lott stressed that he has drastic plans for change when he returns to Washington, including hiring an entourage of 10 leather-clad bodyguards, shaving his initials into his hair, and "tryin' to hook up wit' that fine-ass Beyoncé." As for legislature, Lott promises all his future Senate-floor speeches will be freestyle rhymes and he promises to have a joint holiday for Biggie and Tupac on the national calendar before the end of 2003.

Officials in the black community, in the meantime, have stressed that they liked Lott much better when he was on the clearly opposing side.

collective Charlie Brown-style "Auuuuugh!" sounded around the world upon the release of the newest economy figures Friday. In addition to the disappointing early returns for the Christmas season, and spending figures falling below already-low projections, initial reports suggest that one industry not suffering this year is lousy Christmas gifts.

Lousy Christmas gifts, a sub-industry all its own, is notorious for maintaining steady sales from year to year, apparently never suffering from the effects of recession. However, 2003 marks the first year, if early indicators are correct, that crappy Christmas gifts will actually be on the uprise.

"The old adage about the recession," said some hobo who claimed to have a background in economics as we fed him a can of creamed corn, "is that the fluff industries are all the first hit. Luxuries, things like that. But there are rock-like reliables in all areas of the economy, and Christmas gifts are no exception. When the country hits on hard times in the yuletide season, cool gifts are the first things to go. No one's going to shell out for costly electronics when cheap, affordable, crappy gifts are available. Most Americans are tightening the belt—which, ironically enough, is one of the first crappy gifts to see a boost in sales."

Most holiday shoppers bear those theories out.

"I would have liked to bought my son that MP3 player he's been talking up all year," said Syracuse, New York-area housewife Mabel Donner. "But with things looking so bad for the economy it doesn't look like a good time to buy some new-fangled radio. So I'm getting him that book of inspirational sayings I saw in the mall."

Books of contrived sentimentality are not the only Christmas gifts with a sharp rise in sales this year. Also seeing an increase are socks, underwear, courderoy slacks, snow pants, gay sweaters, suspenders, and T-shirts and hats certifying they were purchased by grandparents.

Outside of clothing, food is also seeing a sales boost, especially cheese and sausage gift packs and giant tins of caramel-covered popcorn. Sales of advent calendars featuring dried, nasty chocolate alone have provided a much-appreciated lift to the German economy. In addition, minor sales increases have occurred in virtually every area of the economy for crappy gifts; even crappy video games like Pokémon Pro-Skater and Mary Kate & Ashley Olsen Virtua Fighter are seeing a sales spike.

Most kids have yet to experience the nightmarish reality of Christmas morning, 2002 as of yet; but some, like Craig Sharmet of Ledervehn, Pennsylvania, have already seen early warning signs.

"Grandma gave everybody their Christmas gifts yesterday," said Sharmet. "I got a Jesus calendar. It's a calendar. And it has pictures of Jesus on it. For every day of the year. All next year. Jesus."

Alice Keeler of Tumasca, Arizona, can sympathize.

"Aunt Sandy showed up Wednesday with presents for everybody and said we could open them, and we were all flipping out 'cause we were so happy. Then we opened them. I got a glitter puff T-shirt with the American Idol logo on it. I'm not sure what's worse—that people would think I like American Idol the TV show enough to wear a T-shirt of it or that people who don't know the TV show think I'm saying I'm an American idol or something. The possibilities are terrifying. And I had to thank her for it."

On the brighter side of the story, all forecasts indicate that shopping traffic will increase significantly just after Christmas, when the stores fill with the countless consumers attempting to return Shania Twain CDs and subscriptions to Teen People.

Though it might surprise the ignorant, the holiday of Christmas was celebrated long before Christ came along and limp-wristed his way into the history books, or at least the history books that are available at most major motels. They didn't call it Christmas back then, since that would just be spooky, but regardless, the winter solstice was celebrated for eons before Christ laid the golden turd.

In northern lands, ancient peoples celebrated the passing of the midpoint of winter, looking ahead to longer days and the return of the light, which would remind them just how ugly their neighbors were. With the light came the melting of the snow, which rang in the springtime removal of the dead bodies of all the dumb assholes who had frozen to death over the winter. Hence the term "spring cleaning" was coined, though over time it's somehow come to mean some yuppie sponging out his microwave.

The Norse in Scandanavia celebrated Yule, a vague holiday that involved eating and went on for however damn long they wanted it to. Anyone who asked if the holiday was over yet was eaten, and as a result it often dragged on for months.

The ancient Germans didn't celebrate, since they were German, but they were scared shitless of the pagan God Oden, who they placated by never going outside. The exchange of goods in the winter months consisted of things being thrown from one house's window to the next. This usually worked fairly well but mishaps did occur, and most houses had at least a few frozen chickens stuck to their outside walls. The biggest problem was that if the town butcher threw his back out, the entire town would starve, since Germans don't believe in vegetables except for sauerkraut.

The Romans had their own insane version of Christmas, which basically involved everybody getting naked, fucking, and throwing up all morning. They had a few other traditions rolled in there, but mainly they were just thinly disguised excuses for fucking.

In the early days of Christianity, Easter was the only holiday, and it got so out of hand that they were afraid to add any more. The early Christians were known for having an extreme early version of Attention Deficit Disorder, and as a result the celebration of Christ's resurrection soon morphed into a mutant strain when somebody thought they said procreation and they started dressing up like rabbits, and then somebody brought a bunch of eggs because he didn't have a rabbit costume and didn't know what else to do, and then somebody else said "Fuck eggs, I like chocolate!" and the modern insane Easter was born.

In the fourth century, the church decided it was safe to make another go at it and they added a celebration for the birth of Christ. There was a slight problem in that nobody had any idea when Christ was born, and the Bible just said something about there was tallow in the Eastern bung and nobody knew what month that was supposed to mean. The problem was solved when Pope Julius I scratched his nose for a while and then declared that Christ was born on December 25th. When scholars argued that this ran counter to all available evidence, he pope-slapped them and told everyone that if they wanted to piss off Oden, that was their own prerogative. Everybody agreed it was December 25th after that.

Julius I's real motivation was a clever one. By throwing the celebration for the birth of Christ at the same time when all of the non-Christians were celebrating the winter solstice by balling their brains out, he could confuse people into thinking that they were celebrating Christianity by drinking a lot of beer and nailing everything in the house to a tree, a deception that still stands to this day.

Once the Puritans took over England, they outlawed Christmas, and anything else that people liked to do. This lasted for about ten seconds before the people rose up and kicked their gay asses out of the country. They washed up in North America, complaining constantly about being religiously persecuted, and then outlawed Christmas there, too. The problem was that the Native Americans didn't know what Christmas was, so the Puritans had to teach them how to decorate their teepees with popcorn and nuts and little ballerinas on the outside, and then tell them never to do it.

Living with the Puritans eventually drove the Native Americans to drinking, which the Puritans had taught them to do so they could tell them not to do that, either. Eventually the Puritans died out after they decided that opening their eyes was sinful and then were all eaten by bears at night. But because of them, generations of Americans grew up without traditional Christmas orgies.

Eventually Charles Dickens wrote The Christmas Carol, which he completely pulled out of his ass during a wild weeklong acid binge. Naïve American readers believed that he was talking about real holiday traditions, and were pissed that none of the immigrants had told them about the fun of Christmas. Several immigrant-bashing why-didn't-you-tell-us-about-Christmas riots followed, and America's new arrivals quickly learned to make up traditions on the spot to appease the custom-starved masses.

Soon the entire country was celebrating a bastard amalgam of made-up holiday customs, believing that the Dutch or Ubangi or some goddamned people had actually strung lights up in trees and drank fermented egg snot for hundreds of years. The church was quick to remind everyone that Christ was born on Christmas, too, and they skylarked a story about three traveling salesmen giving presents to baby Jesus to make it all sort of tie together.

You might wonder how Santa Claus came into all of this, but that was all just a Coke commercial that everyone assumed was referencing an ancient tradition. To this very day, the guys at Coca-Cola are still kicking themselves that they didn't name the guy Santa Coke. Scandinavians may argue that Santa was based on their ancient myth about an elf named Jultomten who delivers presents in a goat-drawn sled, but that's just stupid.

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