The rich have funny Christmases. They put giant fake plastic evergreen wreaths on all the brick columns making up the fences outside their immense homes. They have to know the poor can't see the thick steel wires making up the main body and will get all scratched up when they run in and swipe one drunk on vodka from $10 plastic half-gallons still coherent enough to realize it would take longer for the cops to show up even there than to get out and back into anonymity.

It's not really as festive as it appears.

The poor don't do too bad. They put those stupid wreaths for which they honestly have no use on the vacuum cleaner in the living room since they don't have anywhere to actually hang a ridiculous thing like that; or, a closet for the vacuum anyway, and are kind of nervous about someone seeing it if they just dump it in the communal dumpster behind their apartment buildings after they sober up the next morning.

We'll all get through the holidays somehow though.


David S. Atkinson is the author of Apocalypse All the Time, Not Quite So Stories (2016 Best Book Awards Finalist: Fiction — Short Story), The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes (2015 National Indie Excellence Awards Finalist: Humor), and Bones Buried in the Dirt (2014 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist: First Novel Under Eighty-Thousand Words). He is a staff reader for Digging Through the Fat and his writing appears in Bartleby Snopes, Literary Orphans, Atticus Review, and others. His writing website is davidsatkinsonwriting.com.