The True Story of Winter
Once upon a time, everyone in the world was happy all the time. Except for one person. His name was Winter. He was an Old Man.
Winter walked dejectedly through the fields of blooming happiness, stomping on any convenient plant life in his way. Everyone was so warm and happy, and that irritated him. Looking up, he spotted a farmer tilling a field. With firm resolve, he decided his should spread his unhappiness, not because it would make him happy, but because it would make him feel better and that was the sort of thing miserable dejected people did.
He approached the farmer and said, "Hello, Farmer. My name is Winter and you should worship me, for I can bring you wonderful things."
The farmer looked at the dejected old man and took a step back, horrified, and said, "Look, my name is Joe, not 'Farmer.' This isn't some sort of lame parable you tell children where everyone addresses everyone by their profession, so you could at least call me by my name."
Winter look confused for a moment, then decided to ignore the unexpected response and replace it with one in his head, in which case the farmer said, "Hello, dear Winter. What is it you can do for me?"
Regaining his confidence, Winter replied, "I can kill these horrible weeds for you, Farmer." Winter then began stomping on nearby vegetation like a stupid angry baboon. The plants withered and died.
"No, you daft fool!" the farmer screamed, "Those are my crops! Stop it!"
Winter stopped, then looked thoughtful for a moment. "I'll bet this sun makes you too hot to work?"
The farmer replied under his sun hat, "Well sometimes, yes, it does get a little warm."
Winter grinned. "If you worship me, I'll cover the sky with thick gray clouds six days a week and weaken any rays that slip through so that you will never experience any warmth again. Ever."
The farmer gave Winter a sideways glance. "That sounds... a little extreme to me. And my plants need sun to grow anyway!"
Frustration mounting, Winter looked for any sort of hook. "These bugs... they're horrible! How about I kill them all!"
"That's going to kill all the plants again too, isn't it?"
Grasping for straws, Winter kicked at the dirt. "Erm... this dirt... it's a little too loose isn't it? Wouldn’t it be nicer if it were rock solid?"
"I think you'd better leave."
Winter knew when a change of tactics was in order. Scanning the ground, his eyes found a rusted metal pipe. He picked it up and brandished it menacingly. "Look, if you worship me, I'll make that pain in you knees stop."
The farmer, who was a little slow on the uptake, asked, "What pain?"
Winter promptly ambushed the farmer and began beating the poor hard worker in the kneecaps. The farmer, who wasn't that slow on the uptake, screamed "Okay, okay! I'll do what ever you want!"
Winter stopped and said, "Excellent!"
Lying dejectedly on the ground, the farmer hugged his knees and said, "They still hurt!"
Winter gave him a sideways look. "I can make them not hurt more."
And thus, Winter gained his first follower.
Following the success of his pipe tactic, Winter employed its use on a great number of the farmer's neighbors, gaining a significant number of followers (even if they were lame). Soon, he hired a midget by the name of Jack Frost to help out. Jack was fond of vandalism, and often chiseled incomprehensible motifs on peoples' windows. When their owners screamed at him to stop, he would then stab them in the fingers and toes with unhygienic needles he found in the garbage. Jack formed a gang of his own, and everywhere vegetation died and people fell into deep depression because they were trapped indoors, too afraid of the outside where they might get gang-banged by anthropomorphic personifications of seasonal change.
Soon Winter had quite the following, and decided he would travel around and spread his special kind of misery to other lands. He hired a herald by the name of Autumn to go ahead of him arrive in his target destinations early and announce his coming. Autumn was an artistic, creative sort, so decided to accomplish this by spraying powerful pollutants on all the trees that would kill the leaves and make them become odd colors. When he was done, he pointed to his masterpieces of decay and said, "Look at what I did! Aren't the colors beautiful?"
And people scratched their heads and said, "Well, maybe a few are a pretty red or yellow, but that only lasts like three days and then they're mostly a hideous brown and, oh look, their corpses are all littering my yard now. It's going to take days to clean this up..."
Too which effect, Autumn said, "Ha ha!" and then ran away.
Soon Winter was powerful enough to demand offerings from his followers, so decreed everyone bring him a gift and they all sit around a bonfire in the frigid woods in a pagan ritualistic sort of way. Because most of the population had become depressed alcoholics by then, they all offered him alcoholic drinks of some sort, which Winter drank all at once and became very sick.
Sitting around the bonfire, the farmer said. "My knees still hurt."
His friend the carpenter said, "Mine too, but I'm thankful he's not making them any worse."
The farmer nodded gravely, then huddled under his 20 pound parka, which he was also grateful he constantly had to wear, because wearing extra weight constantly was an enjoyable thing. "Indeed."
The banker, who had noticed Winter dizzily stumble towards the podium, put his hands on the shoulders of the previous two and said, "Shhhh-- the Old Man's going to give a speech. Don't want Jack to beat us for talking again."
Winter's ascension to the podium was erratic. The old man stumbled around drunkenly, then leaned heavily on the spartan stand the villagers had assembled for him (made of frozen animal corpses). His congregation held their breaths, transfixed at the personification of their worship about to address them.
Winter blearily blinked at them, then he went cross-eyed and his cheeks bulged. He opened his mouth, but instead of speaking, he vomited.
"BLEEEEEEEEEEGH!!!!!!!!"
It spewed out like a white mist, covering the assembled masses, who cried out in disgust and terror. It came out as an unstoppable, torrential wave. He couldn't catch his breath before he lifted his head skyward and spewed out another blast of powdery white flakes.
"BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEGH!!!!!!!"
The vomit fluttered through the skies. It covered the ground. It covered the trees. It covered houses. It was cold. It hurt when you touched it. Some people probably died.
A man who had missed attending the ghastly ceremony stood upon his front porch the following morning, looking upon his property, mouth agape in horror. The powdery white vomit had covered everything several feet deep. The (dead) grass was covered. The (dead) trees were covered. His pathway was a mess. He fell to his knees and cried, "This is horrible!"
Jack was there with Winter's pipe. He usually couldn't reach the knees, but was pretty good with the shins.
The man promptly stood and cleared is throat. "I mean, beautiful! Just look how... erm... white everything is!"
Jack glared at him.
The man began to sweat, which turned to ice crystals and stung his face. "I mean, look at how the... erm... vomit covers up all the dead plants and brown decay so we can' see them any more! Like a hospital blanket covering up a corpse! Very... erm... pretty?"
At that moment, the man's wife appeared behind him, saw Jack, then put on her best uncomfortable nervous smile. "Honey," she said through clenched teeth, smiling, "we can't get the cart out of the driveway, so we can't get supplies. We're going to starve."
"Ha ha," said the man, matching her nervous grin. "Lovely!"
"Also we got word that Uncle Hank's cart slid down an incline and crashed into a tree and he died. Turns out the vomit is extremely slippery when compressed, ha ha."
"Ha ha... lovely!"
"Also, the carrier pidgin that brought us the news died of hypothermia, so we can't use it to send for help, ha ha."
"Ha ha! Indeed... ha ha..."
Satisfied, Jack nodded to the two, then chiseled some graffiti on their window and left in a hurry since his gnomic sense or whatever told him his pipe was needed elsewhere.
It was about this time that the mighty Lady Summer caught wind of the crimes being committed while at her luxury resort escape. Enraged, she hitched up her Valkyrie armor and grabbed her flaming sword and kicked open the gates to her retreat, screaming, "I shall put and end to this!"
But the scene before her caused her mouth to gape in horror.
"Lady Summer, are you all right?" asked Pollen, one of her chief advisors.
Lady Summer stammered. "There... there's... vomit everywhere!" Dropping her flaming sword, she retreated to her bedroom and locked the door, where she could not be coaxed to come out for another three or four months.
Meanwhile, Winter, who had taken fondly to the drink and had broken every Guinness World Record ever for vomiting, received a visit from a fat man.
"Hello," said the fat man, "You have a nice operation here, but I think you're missing something."
Muzzily, Winter looked at the fat man and tried to think. His head hurt. "Missing... something? You mean, there's some people left who are still happy?"
"Well, no. That's the thing. People should be happy. If they're not happy, you should make it a law that they're happy. Also if they're happy, but in a different way than you specify, you should screw over their schedule and make sure they're happy in exactly the way you specify, because people should follow a hive-minded mentality in regards to happiness and no deviation should be allowed. Also, we should make money off this." The fat man held out a mitten to shake. "The name's Satan Claws, ho ho ho."
Winter coughed a bit of phlegm, which clung to Mr. Claws' beard in a frozen misty sort of way, and then shook the proffered mitten. "Intriguing. Tell me more."
Mr. Claws spoke of a plan to bribe children with toys, brainwashing them into liking the cold and also making them greedy little terrors. A key factor in the scheme was that people absolutely needed to give each other things, whether they liked it or not and whether they needed things or not. Also, family members who avoided each other for good reason had to get together. It was brilliant.
The plan was a success. People got together and pretended they were happy by bribing each other and staying away from the cold by huddling together in front of fires (which they forgot they didn't have to do before). Some people were quick on the uptake however and asked, "Wait, I don't need anything and neither do you, so all we're doing is wasting a lot of money here. Also, doesn't the fact that we have to give gifts on this specific day, instead of them being spontaneous unexpected thing things, sort of destroy the meaning behind the gifts? Especially since we don’t really know each other as well as we pretend to and there's little chance of us getting each other something useful? Can't we just skip this whole thing?"
To which they were gang-banged not by Jack and his minions, but by their own friends and family members who said, "How could you not mindlessly follow tradition? Your not wanting to participate means you're a grump and therefore unlikeable!"
To which the original offenders replied, "But this is the first time we're doing it!"
To which the family members replied, "Well it is now! Shut up and like your socks! Your giving an honest assessment of their practicality OFFENDS me!"
Mr. Claws made off well, having owned stock in all the major retail market chains, and bid Winter good luck and promptly abandoned the old man and traveled to Australia, where the people were confused by the sleigh theme (Winter never traveled here due to it being so far out of the way) but fell for his scheme nonetheless.
In the following months, Winter's binge drinking only grew worse, and the people even more dejected due to the increased vomiting and having no break from the solid cold since they used up their holiday time early on and now had absolutely nothing to look forward to in life. Sure there was some Italian guy, Valentino or something, who decided there should be a day that people should be forced to love each other and therefore try to poison each other with unhealthy candy and people who chose to live alone should be mocked, but the incident was very brief compared to Mr. Claws' scheme.
During this time Winter slipped on his own vomit and cracked his head open, and out popped a son in standard god-birthing fashion. Winter decided to name his son Spring and promptly began teaching him in the ways of binge drinking. Spring looked up to the old man and aspired to be as cranky and cold as him in every way possible. Though he wasn't quite as effective, Spring could still hurl some mean flakes at times.
After several more months had passed, Lady Summer, with the help of her psychiatrist, overcame her intense depression and hitched up her Valkyrie armor and drew her flaming sword once more and decided enough was enough a second time and it was time to storm Winter's citadel of frozen animal corpses and other physical manifestations of unhappiness. Equipping herself and her army of beautiful winged people (some called them "hot") with hazmat suits, they plunged through the powdery vomit, disintegrating it with their radiance until they reached the realm of the Annoying Yet Necessary Component of the Circle of Life Bug Warrior Riders to plead their case and form an alliance. Having secured a strong swarming air force, Lady Summer met up with Pollen and his flowery horde and, christening themselves the Alliance of Warm Happiness, then turned to storm the citadel.
Winter was taken entirely by surprise and hit extremely hard. He panicked and fled, the Alliance of Warm Happiness following closely in his wake. For a time all the vomit melted away, and people peeked out of their homes to look at the sun. Tentatively they came out and asked each other, "Is it really over?"
And then Spring popped out, drunk, and vomited all over them and said, "Ha ha! FAKE OUT!"
Spring, who had been left behind after the assault, knew he wasn't as strong as his father, so took to sort of guerrilla warfare tactics. The bulk of Lady Summer's forces were away in hot pursuit of Winter, so Spring was left to rampage mostly unchecked. Whenever he encountered resistance, he would simply pull away and then life would return to the land, but he would come right back as soon as he was able and vomit over everything. Or at least try and breathe on people and make them uncomfortable.
Eventually though even Spring's efforts were stretched too thin, and after a few months he was exhausted and out of beer, so he couldn't do much anyway and left in the direction he knew Winter had gone. At long last, happiness had returned to the land.
Until, two or three months later, Autumn came in from the other direction. It turned out that Autumn was a bit of a coward, and ran first and fastest when the Alliance hit. He had run clear around the world and, having quite a bit of distance between himself and danger, took to casually spraying his pollutants on trees, because Winter was right behind him and needed to be heralded. And thus the cycle of misery repeated itself. Forever.
THE END
Moral: Move to blasted Australia.
