At the beginning of 2010, I compiled a list that included 1,034 predictions for the coming year. I later went through and narrowed it down to the top 500 that I was absolutely certain would happen. Even after cutting the list down, though, I only managed to achieve a 67 percent accuracy rate. (Unfortunately, I forgot to post that complete list so my claim is difficult to verify.)

This year, in an attempt to get 100 percent correct, I’ve cut my list of predictions to the ones that I’m absolutely sure will come true. Some of these are leftover from last years prediction, but I’ve added them since I am absolutely certain they will happen in 2011:

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While I’m willing to agree with Michael Barone that at least some of the heat in the culture wars has been turned down a bit (but see this post for a qualification), a lot of interesting things have been said recently about marriage, some of which I noted here.

In the first place, I want to call everyone’s attention to my friend Matt Franck’s nice summary of the exchanges generated by this important article.  As he notes, these are serious and civil exchanges that ultimately focus on the question concerning the nature of marriage, rather than simply on name-calling. 

At the core of the dispute is whether marriage requires at least the possibility of procreation.  For Robert George and his co-authors, it does.  For their critics, marriage might well be a significantly more malleable social construct.  If they’re right, then we would, I think, have a hard time limiting the definition of marriage on any ground other than arbitrary fiat: marriage would be whatever the majority wants to make it.  Or do the critics of George and his co-authors wish to invoke other natural or ontological categories to limit the capacity of the majority to assert whatever it wishes?  (I suspect they do: social constructs  made by majorities–rather than, say, judges–probably wouldn’t at the moment serve the interests of those who favor same-sex marriage.)  They would, of course, have to justify why their particular natural or ontological categories deserve legal recognition and protection, and not those invoked by George and his co-authors.

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A man who grew up in a Communist family in Puerto Rico describes his movement out of the party and its anti-Americanism, as well as his observations on racial politics and the Left in America.

While a memoir of the Gulag, and of European anti-semitism, has just appeared in English, 53 years after it was written.

Several major social conservative groups are boycotting February’s Conservative Political Action Conference because the group “thinks social conservatism is the red-headed stepchild they don’t want to have around,” as one social conservative put it.

A new study finds that there are 6.5 million Jews in America, 20% than other studies had found.

A writer for New York magazine argues against libertarianism, in both its rightist and leftist forms.

A writer for the Washington Times lists the most influential pop starts of 2010.

Stanley Fish reflects on the meaning of True Grit, both versions.

Iran, it seems, is experiencing a textbook case of conflict between the aggressive and absorptive power of the secular state and religious authority.

In today’s Financial Times, Najmeh Bozorgmehr reports that Iran’s highest ranking cleric is getting sideways with the officially Islamic regime in Tehran, a symptom, perhaps, of clerical unhappiness with the tendency of the modern state—especially those that claim religious sanction—to become the sole arbiter of all dimensions of society, including the sacred dimensions.

The particular issue is narrowly legal. Grand Ayatollah Hosein Vahid Khorasani has told his students that self-incriminating confessions made under the duress of imprisonment are not valid. This bears on the controversy surrounding a woman condemned to be stoned to death after confessing to having engaged in an adulterous affair.

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Mississippi governor Haley Barbour has issued one of the creepiest statements ever issued by a state government:

The Mississippi Parole Board reviewed the sisters’ request for a pardon and recommended that I neither pardon them, nor commute their sentence. At my request, the Parole Board subsequently reviewed whether the sisters should be granted an indefinite suspension of sentence, which is tantamount to parole, and have concurred with my decision to suspend their sentences indefinitely.

Gladys Scott’s release is conditioned on her donating one of her kidneys to her sister, a procedure which should be scheduled with urgency. [emphasis added]

First of all, if the women deserve to have their sentences indefinitely suspended, it should be based on some other criteria other than the prisoner is sick and costing the state too much money. Second, you don’t make a condition of release that you give up a vital organ.

According to the statement, Gladys Scott has already agreed to donate the kidney. Why then did the governor feel the need to add in the Orwellian language about making it a condition of her release? Is that even legal? It’s certainly not moral.

I’m all for saving taxpayer dollars, but you don’t do it by giving prisoners a “Get Out of Jail Free” card in exchange for body parts.

UPDATE: On Twitter, reader John M. writes:

You steal bases … how is it immoral to make X a condition of clemency (i.e., a thing a person is by definition not entitled). If X is not itself immoral, is generally agreed to be a good act, is not motivated by malice, and was consented to by all parties.

Let me first say that Ms. Scott’s williness to donate an organ to save her sister is praiseworthy. And the governor of Mississippi would have also been worthy of praise had it decided that a woman who was already deserving of clemency should be released as soon as possible in order that she may save her sister’s life.

But that is not what was said. Perhaps Gov. Barbour was afraid of appearing to be too compassionate a conservative and so decided to say that the motivation behind the decision was for the state was to save money. While I’m sure he thought he was appealing to the Tea Party sensibility, it merely makes him look crass and hard-hearted. Barbour also crossed a clear ethical line by making the organ donation a condition of Ms. Scott’s probation.

Presumably, if Scott has a change of heart and does not go through with the procedure she’ll be thrown back in jail. This is why the the ethical line has shifted between consent and coercion. As the Christian bioethicist Dr. Gregory Rutecki notes, “The hallmark ethic of organ donation has always been informed consent. Informed consent must be free of any hint of coercion.” [emphasis in original] Consent to donate an organ must able to be freely revoked at any time. If Ms. Scott is returned to prison because she had second thoughts on her way to the OR, then that is coercion.

Paying people to donate an organ has long been considered an unethical practice that is fraught with potential for exploitation (and is almost universally considered immoral by Christian bioethicists). Congress has even outlawed the practice to prevent the wealthy from taking advantage of poor people by enticing them to sell their organs. How then can we justify a state governement using its extensive influence and control over a prisoner to entice them to exchange a vital organ for parole?

The fact that Ms. Scott included such a stipulation as a condition of her release raises serious questions about the legitimacy of her ability to freely consent. No doubt the love she has for her sister leads her to make such a sacrifice willingly. But the fact that her continued freedom is depending on the donation muddies the moral waters.

Max McLean’s one-man show, “Mark’s Gospel,” a word-for-word dramatic recitation of the entire Gospel of Mark, is now available online in its entirety.

Justin Taylor has collected all sixteen videos in this post. As Taylor notes, “All said, it runs about an hour and a half in length. I think you’ll find hearing this interpretation—and hearing the whole book at once, rather than just piecemeal—to be an enriching, edifying experience.”

Happy eve of New Year’s Eve! For the occasion, R.R. Reno explains in his On the Square column why he’s never liked New Year’s Eve celebrations and why you shouldn’t either:

New Year’s Eve is an essentially pagan holiday of renewal, one that celebrates our collective ability to leap from one year to the next without falling into the abyss of death.

I’ve been to some New Year’s Eve parties, even stayed up to bring in the New Year on a few occasions. The atmosphere has always struck me as tinged with desperation. Sand is flowing out of the hourglass. In those final hours, we’re suddenly more aware that the past and present—all that we know—are slipping away. Then, at the stroke of midnight and to the relief of all, the Fates grasp the timepiece and suddenly turn it upside down to begin again.

Not only desperation but also anxiety pervades efforts to ring in the New Year. Days shorten through the fall as the year winds down toward its end. Pages are torn from the calendar until we reach that thin final page. It’s as if life hangs on by the same thin margin, and a gaping void of nothingness waits for us as we draw back the curtain of time.

In France, civil unions are becoming more popular than marriage:

Some are divorced and disenchanted with marriage; others are young couples ideologically opposed to marriage, but eager to lighten their tax burdens. Many are lovers not quite ready for old-fashioned matrimony.

Whatever their reasons, and they vary widely, French couples are increasingly shunning traditional marriages and opting instead for civil unions, to the point that there are now two civil unions for every three marriages.

When France created its system of civil unions in 1999, it was heralded as a revolution in gay rights, a relationship almost like marriage, but not quite. No one, though, anticipated how many couples would make use of the new law. Nor was it predicted that by 2009, the overwhelming majority of civil unions would be between straight couples.

One of the primary reasons the French are avoiding marriage is because the institution is linked, in their minds, to Christianity:

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I apologize for my long silence.  Between traveling to a family wedding in southern Maryland (along with some sightseeing in D.C. and a visit to the Naval Academy—my fifteen-year-old son’s current collegiate aspiration), furiously grading all the papers and exams that didn’t get graded the long weekend we were out of town, Christmas, and a post-Christmas visit from my parents, I’ve had no time to impose my views upon an unsuspecting world.

But, like it or not, I’m back in the saddle.

As I was operating this morning’s swim taxi, I was listening to a conversation between Bill Bennett and David Gelernter, at the end of which Bennett asked Gelernter about the significant lacunae in the education of his Yale undergraduates.  Gelernter’s answer (as I distractedly remember it—apologies to those more attentive or with better memories than mine): his students were unfamiliar with America’s greatness (especially as expressed in the U.S. military) and with religion.  Undergraduates at most of America’s elite colleges and universities have little contact with military life.  In addition, all too many of them exhibit little serious engagement with religion and theology.

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An NPR article on the prospect of creating a part-time Congress (unlikely) begins by describing “hordes of conservative Republican lawmakers” descending on Washington. Hordes? Yes, hordes of Republicans, all conservative, are about to fracture the previous hold that “hordes of liberal Democrats” had on Congress. This inspired a Google search for the phrase and I found four pages filled with “hordes,” “Republicans,” and “conservative.” From the look of the entries most were attributable to different blog sites feeding off one another. I cannot say if NPR picked the phrase up from the bloggers or whether it was the other way around, but in any case, there you go, “hordes.” Perhaps in some political lexicon of style, “horde” is the word of choice when writing about the new Republican legislators coming to Washington. “Gang,” “flock,” “crowd,” “pack,” “host,” or “multitude” might serve but they all lack, I think, the certain chill factor “horde” evokes, undisciplined barbarians, ruffians each, laying waste to everything truly civilized about life.

I Googled also for “hordes of liberal Democrats.” That phrase does show up but it is limited to only one page plus an over-spill of a mere two entries on a second, not nearly as many as for the conservative Republican horde. I think it is safe to say this clearly is a shameful indication of the media’s bias toward liberal hordes. Simple fairness, real impartiality, everyone will agree should give as many hordes to the one as to the other.

I do note — and perhaps in some way this will mitigate any advantage the media gives to liberals — that “hordes of liberal Democrats” is frequently preceded by an adjectival qualifier. “Sycophantic,” “corrupt,” and “rabid” do tend to focus one’s eye.

Speaking of hordes, tuck this in your minor facts file. When I worked in Congress in 1972-73 there were only eight thousand congressional staffers for both the House and the Senate. Of course that figure had more than doubled from the decade previous. Today there are twenty-five thousand, give or take a thousand or so, inhabiting the congressional lair. That is chilling.

First Things attracts smart readers. The discussion of how we should present and read the bible in worship has been very interesting, bringing out some interesting differences.

For example: chanting scripture vs. studied efforts to read the bible with nuanced emphasis.

While a graduate student in the 1980s, I attended Christ Church in New Haven, a high Anglican parish that featured a great deal of sacramental punctiliousness. The implied theology of worship was best described as a commitment to the objectivity of grace—ex opere operato.

In the liturgy at Christ Church, the Old Testament reading was read aloud in a plain, unadorned, and almost monotone style. The Epistle and Gospel readings were chanted in accord with an assigned trope. This approach fit with the implied theology. We encounter God and fall under his regime of grace by virtue of his ordination of the Church (word and sacrament) as his instruments of salvation, not by virtue of our faith or the faith of the Church’s ministers.

My few years at Christ Church were very important for my spiritual development. I was an inwardly confused young man, eager to become faithful, but mostly pagan in my sensibilities. Worshipping amidst the incense and listening to the chants had the effect of making my experience of Christ more impersonal, which was exactly what I needed, because it brought home to me of a very, very important Christian truth, one greatly emphasized by St. Augustine in his polemics against the Pelagians: It’s not about me.

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Why do we think students should learn French and German, wonders linguist John McWhorter, rather than Arabic and Chinese?

Out of the 6000 languages in the world, why is it so vital for smart people to learn the one spoken in one small European country of ever-waning influence and its former colonies? Isn’t the sense of French as a keystone of an education a legacy of when few met foreigners who spoke non-European languages, French was educated Europe’s lingua franca, and the elite who went to college often had plans to do the Grand Tour?

That is, is knowing French really so obviously central to engaging what we know in 2010 as the world, or is it that French is a kind of class marker? You know: two cars, a subscription to the Times, and mais oui, Caitlin knows some French?

Read more . . .

David Mills sees in Santa Claus a confusion of two things “that ought never to be confused or blended,” Christmas as a secular holiday and Christmas as a Christian holy day. To honor that distinction, he would abandon to the secular side of Christmas what amounts to the most famous icon of Saint Nicholas, because the secular side has defaced it. It has painted over his features to make them over into something more in its own image, the figure we now know as Santa Claus. Even the name has been painted over, although thinly. Is there anyone who really needs to be reminded what the etymology of Santa Claus is?

I say let’s scrape the paint off and take the icon back. Let’s restore it.

Maybe my loyalty to my patron saint predisposes me to see him in Santa Claus when other people no longer do. I love Saint Nicholas. He used to be venerated more than he is. It’s been said that in medieval art he shows up more often than any other saint except Mary.

Where did he go? Think about it. In our time, is there a saint whose image is more common than that of Santa Claus? Mary again, as in the Middle Ages, is the only one you could plausibly argue outranks him in that category.

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Communist Manifesto, U.S. Constitution; potato, po-tah-to:

Can the young people you know tell the difference between James Madison and Karl Marx? Sadly, a new national poll reveals that 42 percent of Americans wrongly attribute Marx’s famous communist slogan, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” to one of the country’s Founding documents. Nearly one in five Americans believe this phrase can be found in the Bill of Rights, of all places. You can take some solace in knowing that among young adults, only six percent made this mistake, though 30 percent of them believe Marx’s statement can be found in either the Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution.

Seriously, pollsters, please stop asking questions about what’s in our historical documents. We don’t know, okay, we haven’t gotten around to actually reading them yet. Give us a break, we just finished reading Atlas Shrugged last week. . .

In 2010, First Things published over 300 articles for our On the Square section. While I read every single piece, I suspect most readers may have missed one or two of them.

In case you missed them the first time around, here’s your chance to catch up on this year’s top twenty-five most popular OTS articles:

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Our senior editor David Goldman discusses the “two stories within the terrible history of Germany and the Jews.” The first, he writes, “is the story of the German Jews, Europe’s most assimilated community, who contributed to German civic life in vast disproportion to their small numbers. The other story is the meeting of German culture and Jewish religion.”

“Generation X is 11 percent smaller than the Baby Boomers with about nine million fewer people,” not enough to replace the taxes paid by the Baby Boomers, upon which so much public spending seems to have been calculated.

In which case, we need as healthy a society as we can get, and “maybe the way to control health care costs is to encourage Americans to turn to God.” A Gallup Poll found that “even after controlling for other kinds of demographic and geographic variables, Americans who say that religion is an important part of daily life and that they attend religious services weekly also report having much healthier habits than people who self-identify as moderately religious or nonreligious.”

“If giving up revenge and resentment were sufficient to yield forgiveness, then one could forgive simply by forgetting, or through counseling, or by taking the latest version of the nepenthepill,” writes a philosopher. “But none of those really seems to qualify as forgiveness properly speaking” because “forgiveness is neither just a therapeutic technique nor simply self-regarding in its motivation; it is fundamentally a moral relation between self and other.”

“One day the first principle was feeling a bit down, / his glumdiferous magnificence turned in a frown,” begins Dr. Seuss Does Gnosticism.

Austen Ivereigh reports on an English television production of The Nativity, whose writer began work as an agnostic and now believes the story is true.

Brian Saint-Paul of Inside Catholic explains at least part of the reason towns and states are running out of money.

Ismail Hernandez of the Freedom and Virtue Institute lists the ten premises of modern political discourse.

The cardinal in charge of the Congregation for Divine Worship describes Benedict’s goals.

An Irish writer reflects on the continuing power of childhood carols after hearing on the radio Once in Royal David’s City sung by a choirboy, while blogger Maclin Horton reflects on the need for a real Christmas to sustain our culture.

Finally, some owners of Border Collies have started renting sheep for them to herd.

Thanks to Mary Ellen Kelly and CatholicCulture.org for links.

Looking at a selection of conservative political cartoons, I saw one published on Christmas day showing Santa Claus poking his head through a poster saying “Happy Holidays” and apparently shouting “Merry Christmas.” At first glance, it seems like a simple way of pushing back against the public retreat from the religious particularity of the holiday we are in fact celebrating.

But then I thought: Wait, why is Santa Claus the symbol of Christmas? Even if the use of “happy holidays” is a retreat, having a Santa Claus say “Merry Christmas” in response seems a corruption. There’s something wrong with this.

He’s at best a derivative figure, and is in fact really more a commercialized image more closely related to secular American culture than to anything significantly Christian — to anything, that is, that signifies Christ. At this point, he’s only derived from the Christian feast day as some over-sweetened kid’s artificially-flavored grape drink can be said to be derived from good red wine. When he says “Merry Christmas,” he’s not really saying what the Christian means by it.

I can’t quite figure out why this bothers me, but it has something to do with the use of a secular symbol in defense of Christianity as if it were a Christian symbol. The cartoonist has confused two things that ought never to be confused or blended.

Yesterday I argued for a hefty Bible at the lectern. Weighty truths, its seems to me, are fittingly stored in weighty tomes. That doesn’t mean that I’m opposed to pocket Bibles or bible verses that you can call up on your cell phone—or for that matter to any form of scripture. Sometimes convenience speaks in favor of various media.

But as one reader observed: Catholics place the blessed sacrament in a prized place within the Church, and we ought to do something analogous with the Word of God, which after all makes Christ present to us in the ancient scriptures of Israel and in the apostolic witness of the New Testament.

But another reader, the Assistant Village Idiot (it’s a tough job, I’m sure, and requires assistance), pointed out that recitation of scripture from memory is also a very powerful symbol. To which I say: Quite right!

On a couple of occasions I have attended churches where the lectors did not read but instead recited scripture from memory, and it was indeed a powerful experience. Once, in fact, the lector (who apparently had a stage sense), began the reading (Genesis 22, as I recall) at the lectern, but then, after the first verse or two, stepped away and toward the congregation to complete it from memory. It sent chills down my spine.

Actually, reciting from memory and reading from a big Bible share in a common symbolism. Both remind us of the powerful permanence of God’s truth. Memory fixes God’s word in our minds, giving it weight within, while the bulky big bible does the same outwardly.

So by all means memorize. I think it’s an excellent idea for youth ministries to invest a good bit of time in preparing kids to recite memorized passages as lectors in the regular liturgy of the church. Memory is the storehouse of the soul, and it’s very good to have life-giving provisions ready at hand.

“We have allowed silence to become a gift forgotten, one we only consent to unwrap when all of our alternative bows and strings have been unraveled, and our diversions have been utterly played out,” writes Elizabeth Scalia in today’s “On the Square” column, For 2011:  Unwrap the Silence.

Our inability to be silent puts our minds and our souls at a disadvantage, because it robs us of the ability to wonder, and if we are not wondering at the impossible perfection of the world in its creation—if we are not wondering at spinning atoms and Incarnations—then we are lost to humility, and to experiencing gratitude.

There is a way, she explains, to regain this silence.

An intriguing—and potentially significant—archaeological discovery in Israel:

Israeli archaeologists said Monday they may have found the earliest evidence yet for the existence of modern man, and if so, it could upset theories of the origin of humans.

A Tel Aviv University team excavating a cave in central Israel said teeth found in the cave are about 400,000 years old and resemble those of other remains of modern man, known scientifically as Homo sapiens, found in Israel. The earliest Homo sapiens remains found until now are half as old.

“It’s very exciting to come to this conclusion,” said archaeologist Avi Gopher, whose team examined the teeth with X-rays and CT scans and dated them according to the layers of earth where they were found.

He stressed that further research is needed to solidify the claim. If it does, he says, “this changes the whole picture of evolution.”

The accepted scientific theory is that Homo sapiens originated in Africa and migrated out of the continent. Gopher said if the remains are definitively linked to modern human’s ancestors, it could mean that modern man in fact originated in what is now Israel.

The Ghent Altarpiece, or Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, by Jan van Eyck is considered the first great painting of the Renaissance—and apparently the most coveted:

It’s the size of a barn door, weighs more than an elephant, and is one of the most famous and coveted paintings in the world.

It’s the Ghent Altarpiece — also called Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, after a central panel showing hordes of pilgrims gathered to pay homage to the Lamb of God.

Other panels depict the Annunciation, Adam and Eve, the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist and a crowned Christ in detail so exacting that you can pick out individual hairs in a beard, or dirt on a pilgrim’s foot.

Artist Jan van Eyck completed the Ghent Altarpiece around 1432. Author Noah Charney tells NPR’s Guy Raz that it’s arguably the single most important painting ever made.

“It’s the first great oil painting — it influenced oil painting for centuries to come,” Charney says. “It’s the first great panel painting of the Renaissance, a forerunner to artistic realism. The monumentality of it and the complexity of it fascinated people from the moment it was painted.”

Charney’s new book, Stealing the Mystic Lamb: the True Story of the World’s Most Coveted Masterpiece, traces the painting through six centuries of war, theft and intrigue.

(Via: The Presurfer)

ROFTER Yair Rosenberg sends the following:

Google Books has a new feature which allows one to graph the occurrence of particular words or phrases and track how frequently they appear in a given literary corpus over the last century. Using this tool, I have managed to encapsulate our civilization’s trajectory in one simple graph.

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Reproduction, we are now told, is a fundamental right.  That sounds good.  We don’t want government preventing people from having children.

But under this theory, the right to reproduce has become more than just the right to have children. Women who don’t want their babies can abort–multiple times if they want, as many do.  Couples–even if fertile–use IVF not just to have a baby, but the baby they want using techniques such on pre-implantation genetic diagnosis.   Research is ongoing to permit more than two people to be biologically related to the child.  Women who don’t want to carry their own babies can hire a surrogate uterus.  In this regard, biological colonialism uses destitute women in countries like India and Pakistan as so many brood mares.  Some say that reproductive cloning should be a right once it is “safe.”  All of this moves having babies from (ideally) an act of selflessness and unconditional love to one focused almost wholly on the desires of parents and what they want from a baby.

And now, we learn that some women are planning premature birth–not because of health reasons, but convenience.  From the story:

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New York is digging out from a big snowstorm, which means a quiet day at the office, allowing me to catch up on some of my reading, including Verbum Domini, the Apostolic Exhortation concerning scripture and interpretation put out by Pope Benedict last fall.

There’s lots of rich material about the important ways in which biblical interpretation needs to be integrated into a life of prayer and worship. But I’d like to flag a no doubt less important but more practical aspect of the document, which was crafted by Benedict as a summary and elaboration of themes raised at the Synod of Bishop that met in October 2008 to discuss the Word of God in the life and mission of the Church.

It concerns the way in which the Bible is read in church. Benedict reports that one “suggestion that emerged from the Synod was that the proclamation of the word of God, and the Gospel in particular, should be made more solemn” (para 67).

I’ll second that. Call me an insufficiently Catholicized Protestant, but I tend to cringe when I see people reading the assigned passages from the Old Testament and Epistles from loose sheets of paper—or whatever. Why is it that lectors in Catholic parishes always seem to be reading from a flimsy booklet or a bulky binder, as if the Word of God were a temporary memo fittingly reproduced in throwaway forms.

I’ve wondered sometimes: Is there something in canon law that prohibits the permanent presence of a big, fat Bible at the lectern? I doubt it. And so I find myself baffled. A hefty Bible conveys visually the fact that the Word of God contains weighty truths. So why neglect the symbolism?

Some might say that it’s awkward for the lectors to have to find the passages. All those minor prophets get confusing, and perhaps most Catholics don’t know where to find Ezra and Nehemiah. I don’t buy it, and in any event, I’ve always liked it when the lector has to flip a bunch of big pages to find the right place—it adds drama.

So, I have a suggestion that might add a bit of solemnity to the proclamation of the Word of God. Catholic Churches should put a royal folio-sized Bibles on their lecterns, the kind that makes a gratifyingly audible swishing noise when the pages arch and then cascade like a breaking wave when they are turned.

Oh, and will our dear bishops please release us from dreary New American Bible, a translation that goes out of its way to make the holy scriptures sound banal and stupid.

I wonder what Rene Girard would make of this Smithsonian magazine article on the history of snowmen being treated as scapegoats:

Some of these early postcards show snowmen being bludgeoned by two-by-fours and stomped on by tots. There are examples of snowmen being held up by gunpoint by little girls and stabbed with brooms. At one point, a snowman is dragged into a studio and forced to pose with kittens—while not violent, it was certainly humiliating. But the ultimate indignity would have to be a holiday card showing Santa Claus in a convertible racing car running over a horrified snowman, who is screaming for dear life.

To add insult to injury, the snowman somehow became a spokesperson for any product of an embarrassing sort, appearing in ads for every personal hygiene problem imaginable: dandruff, gas, hangovers, constipation, and bad breath Add this all up and you have a Frosty with a pretty shaken psyche. We literally built him up only so we could, apparently, knock him down and use him as a piñata. It’s no wonder the snowman turned to booze.

(Via: Zoë Pollock)