A Christmas Gaylord

A tale from St. James family legend to warm the cockles of your cholesterol-clogged heart this Christmas.


Ebenezer Gaylord was widely acknowledged as the biggest shit in Victorian London: his favourite way to relax at Christmas time was to gather together all the homeless children in the city, bind them together with manacles, and then pitch them headfirst into the foggy Thames. As their screams for mercy petered out into the gargled pleas of infantile death he would guffaw himself so hoarse that his urine-sodden breeches would simply dissolve, revealing his awful genitalia and causing women in big hats to faint. He really was a turd.

But one particularly genocidal Christmas Eve, so the story goes, he was lounging in his whore-lined mansion when a strange visitation literally came upon him. He immediately wondered if he had become the unwilling centrepiece of history’s first bukkake, but his visitor turned out to be another type of ectoplasm altogether – the Ghost of Christmas Past. Terrified - yet another pair of breeches were, by this point, beyond hope – Ebenezer sat in rigid fear as a series of scenes from his boyhood swam before him: a damagingly tight handjob from his mentally ill nursemaid...the sight of his kindly schoolmaster’s impressive anus...his aunt calmly locking the door one Easter and hacking everyone to death with a spoon. As quick as these visitations had appeared, however, they vanished again, leaving Ebenezer alone in a cold room with just his thoughts and a pair of breeches that were quite honestly past a joke. His ordeal wasn’t over, though, because over the next hour two more apparitions of the spirit world visited him – the Ghost of Christmas Present (which was, inexplicably, the Victorian version of X Factor playing on and on and on and on into an unbearable eternity) and the Ghost of Christmas Future, where Ebenezer learned that by continuing down his current route of cruelty and heartlessness he would one day become head of the European Central Bank and his great-great-great grandson would be the leading portrayer of psychologically-unstable fathers in late-70s Hollywood. Once the ghosts had gone, Ebenezer vowed never to turn from his current path and, if anything, to actually become more despicable. With great self-satisfaction and not a little relief, he changed out of his breeches and retired to his bedchamber.

History does not record what happened next, but rumours suggest he eventually became Jack the Ripper. Every year my family gather together on Christmas Eve and regale friends with this old, proud tale of our ancestor Ebenezer Gaylord, after which we sit in cold, empty silence and secretly wish each other dead. It is our favourite tradition.

Merry Christmas.