To all my Jonny Pals, Thanks for stopping by this, the 24th annual installment of the Jonny Christmas Extravaganza. This year's edition is partly a sequel to last year's story Jonny's Same-Sex Marriage Christmas and mostly an homage to what I consider to be the funniest TV show ever made: Star Trek. My hardcore fans will recall that I wrote and directed a musical send-up of Star Trek a few years ago called U.S.S. Pinafore and because I'm lazy, this story relies on a lot of the same jokes. You'll read frequent references to that show so if you never got around to seeing it, try not to break down in tears when you can't follow all the online banter on Facebook in the weeks to come. At least you'll be able to appreciate the usual cameos by my legion of Jonny Pals that I know is the only reason anybody looks at this idiotic thing. And peppered throughout is the unique brand of toilet humor that has made my social life the lonely black hole that it is. I hope you enjoy the 2013 Jonny Christmas Extravaganza and know that it was created as a special holiday treat for the people I love. Thanks for another glorious year. Happy Holidays,

This story is dedicated to the rockin' awesome Nichelle Nichols.

Special thanks to Tony Potter for designing the bridge of the U.S.S. Pinafore.

Hover your cursor over underlined text for an explanation of its meaning.

Once upon a time (I’m not sure when because we had switched over from the Julian Calendar to something that the Vulcans had devised called Star Date, which was supposedly hyper-accurate but that you needed a Ph.D. in Astronomy just to figure out what day of the week it was), there was an organization called Starfleet. It was an altruistic, high-minded outfit whose mission was to protect the collection of celestial bodies known as the United Federation of Planets and to seek out new life and new civilization and boldly go where no man has gone before.

Everyone who worked there hated the dump. Oh, it was fine for the people with the elite positions who wore gold or blue uniforms that signified the Science and Command divisions. They all came from rich, well-connected families and graduated from the prestigious Starfleet Academy, and knew their future was secure in high-paying science jobs at which they would never so much as glimpse the surface of some desolate planet that looked suspiciously like Vasquez Rocks and was crawling with angry, homicidal aliens. Unless they were narcissistic, thrillseeking dicks who commanded the ship that is, when they would beam down with a landing party made up of grunts wearing red shirts who would all be slaughtered within twenty minutes of arrival, always leaving the pretty-faced college boy in the gold tunic without a scratch and ready to bang whatever green woman happened to living on the surface.

The vast majority of Starfleet was made up by guys wearing the red uniforms of the doomed Engineering division. The “Red Shirts,” as they were commonly known, were the heart and soul of Starfleet but their positions were almost impossible to fill because everybody knew that as soon as they enlisted, they’d be lucky to have six weeks before they were transported home in a body bag. It got to be so bad that Starfleet would fill its ranks with the lowest scum and muck they could find to wear the red shirts: high school dropouts, intravenous drug users, and men with cartoonish foreign accents who comically only drank alcoholic beverages identified with their nationalities. But even that flotsam and jetsam of humanity was reticent to sign up for the certain death of Starfleet when they knew that they could still find menial, soul-crushing employment at fast food emporiums or with the U.S. Army.

“What are we going to do about enlisting more Red Shirts?” demanded The Rt. Hon. Sir Joseph Porter, the uber aristocratic Commodore who ran Starfleet. “The coffins are piling up at the warehouses and it’s getting to be a scandal of such proportions that Jon Stewart is making us a weekly feature on The Daily Show so that I cry myself to sleep every night. What can we do? Offer recruits more money?.

“Money is no incentive for a man who knows that he is destined to be extraterrestrial roadkill within a month of signing up,” said Admiral Tèt Kòk, the odious head of Sir Joseph’s personal secret service. Everyone respected Kòk’s massive intellect but was intimidated by him because his specie’s heads looked like a big scrotum and they knew they could get in trouble with Starfleet Human Resources if anyone ever referred to it in his presence. But it was hard to work with a guy whose head looked like a giant penis and pretend there wasn’t anything weird in the office so Tèt Kòk was held at arm’s length, and his massive wang-shaped brain was always quick to exploit the fleet’s basest instincts.

The admiral and Sir Joseph worried that the Red Shirts were being killed off faster than they could be replaced.

“I have been looking at the medical files of Captain James T. Kirk,” said the admiral as Sir Joseph pretended to adjust his epithets to avoid looking at Kòk’s disturbing penis head. “He is a capable officer but his file is riddled with a history of STD after STD, and all because he can’t keep his cock out of green space women.”

Sir Joseph’s face finally softened at the mention of the erotic delight of green space women, but said nothing.

“Perhaps we should put out a marketing campaign that if you enlist in Starfleet," pondered Kòk, "you would not only see the galaxy but your chances of hooking up with green women increase by hundreds of percent. Have you ever been with one? I once had a greeny jump on my head and rotate. Five more minutes and I would have put on a red shirt and gone onto the planet’s surface if she’d ask me to,”

“It’s an interesting idea,” replied Sir Joseph. “And with Christmas coming up, our enlistment is going to plummet because hostile aliens seem to go ballistic around the holidays and start taking out Red Shirts by the hundreds. But with all that carnage and the risk of a certain, unbearably painful death, who could we find who was sexually desperate enough to enlist as a Red Shirt just for the possibility of hooking up with a green woman?”

At about this time, a young muse named Jonny M. was crying hysterically and cannon-balling vodka in his squalid apartment. The muse was devastated because Peaseblossom, the adorable green elf who had married him at the end of Jonny’s Same-Sex Marriage Christmas last year left him a farewell note that she was unable to handle his binge drinking or humiliating sexual fetishes so she was leaving him for Hermey, the little turd dentist at Santa’s Village who she met when he implanted a diamond Batman logo in one of her bicuspids. Jonny was devastated; he had never imagined that he would ever get a girl in one of these idiotic stories so after finally winning someone’s heart and then having his own savagely ripped out of his chest cavity was too much to bear. And to lose her to a character made famous in the beloved holiday cartoon Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer made it even worse. The muse took to holing up in his foul room and pouring vodka down his throat while watching reruns of Lost in Space on late-night TV as his long-suffering pug Winston looked on.

“Don’t you think you’ve had enough to drink?” asked Winston. “Contracting cirrhosis of the liver won’t bring Peaseblossom back.”

“Hey, if I wasn’t this drunk, I wouldn’t even be able to hear you!” countered Jonny, who could only engage in conversation with Winston when he was hammered enough to hallucinate the other side of the discussion. “Anyway, Peaseblossom loved cirrhosis of the liver. She often said that if anything got cirrhosised, she liked it to be the liver. Now go lick your own balls! Oh, I forgot…you can’t because they’re in a jar at the vet’s office! So maybe you should just shut up!”

Winston looked sadly at his friend’s despair and turned his attention to the TV where a commercial was playing that featured Sir Joseph Porter and some poor slob in a red Starfleet uniform (Winston recognized him as an actor they had seen in a rerun of Cheers the night before) who had supposedly just signed up. It depicted the Cheers actor sitting odiously in the transporter room of a starship with tears welling up in his eyes. Sir Joseph sits compassionately beside him and puts an avuncular arm around the Red Shirt’s shoulder.

A recruitment commercial for Starfleet came on TV.

“What’s the matter, little buddy?”

“I have to beam down to the planet, sir,” replied Red Shirt. “It’s common knowledge that when you set foot on the surface of a planet wearing this uniform, you’re as good as dead.”

With that, Sir Joseph let out a laugh so hearty that the shrunken head on top of the TV vibrated.

“You mean that you’re as good as laid, son,” snickered the Starfleet leader. “Do you know what’s down there? A bevy of desperately horny green women that would do anything to meet a man in a Starfleet uniform. And I mean anything. And ironically, green women are color blind so that they don’t know if the shirt you’re wearing is command gold, science blue or dead man … I mean Engineering… red. That means they’re going to work just as hard to get you to impregnate them for a Starfleet free ride as they would a commodore with a million credits in his trust fund!”

“So I won’t be killed the minute I set foot on the planet?” asked the Red Shirt hopefully.

“Oh, you may be killed,” smirked Sir Joseph with a wink. “But what a way to go!”

Winston snickered at the transparent pandering of the ad as the address for the nearest Starfleet recruitment center came on the screen, but Jonny suddenly became frantically excited and hurriedly wrote down the location. The next morning, the pug was surprised to find Jonny dragging him over to the office on Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard to talk about enlisting.

“I won’t lie to you,” said the recruitment officer who was safely attired in a blue science uniform, “most of the work the Red Shirts do is unskilled labor and pretty heinous labor at that. Cleaning latrines, peeling potatoes, mopping up puddles after Vulcans still the burning of their lustful blood with the ritual of Pon Farr. If you’re looking for something glamorous, this isn’t the place for you. And the death rate is high; only 5% of the enlistees with red shirts survive a year. And those who manage it survive because they fill the Federation’s minority hiring requirements – usually an African woman or a Scotsman. We find them cushy jobs as communications officers or chief engineers to keep them out of harm’s way so that the EEOC doesn’t crawl up our asses. Anyone else wearing this uniform is regarded as chum for aliens.”

Jonny didn’t seem to hear any of that.

“What about meeting green women?” asked the muse.

It was only then that the enlistment officer noticed the photograph of Peaseblossom that Jonny was clutching pathetically.

“Green women?” he said, rifling through his desk to find the script that the head enlistment office supplied for him to discuss the topic. “Oh, yeah! You’ll meet lots of green women before you die…I mean, before your tour of duty is up. Statistics show that over two-thirds of the widows collecting on Starfleet life insurance policies are green. Just sign these papers.”

“This will show Peaseblossom!” exclaimed Jonny as he scrawled his signature on the Starfleet enlistment forms. “I don’t suppose I can take my pug with me?”

“No problem,” smirked the officer. “Last week I signed up some primordial ooze from Alpha Laputa IV as a transporter repairman to a colony on one of the moons of Nibia. Your pug could be officer material.”

The recruiter filled out the paperwork for Jonny and Winston to join Starfleet.

“This is going to be great!” laughed Jonny as Winston warily made a paw print on the form. “When do we ship out for basic training?”

“Are you kidding?” scoffed the officer. “With what you’ll be doing, you’ll just need to take an online course that takes about twenty minutes to finish. You’re reporting to your new ship tonight.”

“Oh, boy!” said Jonny as he threw Peaseblossom’s photo into the wastebasket. “Which ship are we on? The U.S.S. Enterprise? The Excalibur? The Deep Space Nine?”

“Those are Federation flagships,” said the officer as he filed Jonny and Winston’s forms into the Dead Men Walking folder. “Only the most accomplished and elite service people are assigned to them. You’ll be on the garbage frigate the U.S.S. Pinafore.”

Jonny was slightly stunned but quickly pulled himself together and gave Winston an optimistic wink as he envisioned the bevy of green beauties who would soon be making Peaseblossom eat her heart out. The pair made for the door to begin taking their online training when they were stopped in their tracks by a final word from the enlistment officer.

“I almost forgot. Here are your red shirts.”

When Jonny and Winston beamed up to the U.S.S. Pinafore, they had never encountered such a morose group of people in their lives. The crew people in red uniforms had their faces twisted into an odious pall spread over them as if the foul stench of death wafted from their every crevice. The ones wearing gold and blue shirts quickly averted their eyes when they saw Jonny and Winston’s scarlet kit, as if they were making every effort to avoid human contact so as not to create a relationship that would only be devastated at the end of the two or three weeks that they had to live.

Fortunately, the muse was oblivious to any of that since he had thrown Winston and himself a going away party that afternoon and was plastered out of his mind on Saurian Brandy when they came onboard. Every lifeless face that Jonny encountered trying not to make eye contact found their gaze magnetically redirected to the muse’s infectious smile. And even hardened veterans who were able to keep their eyes pinned to the floor couldn’t help but have their spirits lifted by the sight of Winston’s enormous ass being made to seem even larger by his form-fitting uniform. There was no doubt about it, everyone thought: These new Red Shirts were bad news. The sooner they met their grizzly end on a planet’s surface, the better it would be for everyone.

Jonny and Winston had each taken aptitude and intelligence tests in their online training to determine their jobs on the ship. The pug was assigned to the weapons department with the delicate task of arming and disarming photon torpedoes. Jonny was placed on latrine duty.

Jonny met his new supervisor in the ship's Feces Removal sector.

“I’m Ensign Jean-Luc Le Pétomane, supervisor of the Feces Removal sector,” said the brusque alien who Jonny reported to. “I’ve been wearing a red shirt in Starfleet for twenty years, which is a record for somebody who isn’t a hottie communications officer who’s banging the captain to keep from having to go on a planet’s surface. I retire in four months; on Christmas Eve, as it happens (giving this particularly idiotic story its first tenuous connection to the holidays), and I’m not going to let some moronic rookie like you get me killed before I do. Is that clear”

“Yes sir,” said Jonny, holding a handkerchief over his mouth to filter the stank of the rotting fecal matter. “But when I am going to meet the captain?”

Le Pétomane stared at Jonny in horror.

“Don’t ever let the captain know of your existence!” he warned. “It’s bad enough that most of us never hear his voice except when it comes suddenly over the loudspeaker alerting us that the ship will be self-destructing in thirty seconds as a power play against some alien that we didn’t even know he was talking to on the viewscreen. Once the captain sees you hanging around in your red shirt, you’ll be accompanying him down to some heinous planet’s surface before you can say ‘Doctor Who’. Then, it’s goodnight Mary!”

“But this is a garbage frigate,” answered Jonny. “What would we be doing fighting aliens?”

“All Starfleet ships fight aliens,” responded Le Pétomane. “The captains talk about ‘finding new life and new civilizations,’ but all they’re really interested is rushing balls out onto some godforsaken planet with their phasers set to kill. You show me a Starfleet captain and I’ll show you a man with a string bean for a penis. That’s why I’ve stuck with latrine duty for twenty years. The captains never come down here so they never order me onto the planet surface with them.”

“I guess you’re safe down here,” said Jonny as he dry-heaved into his handkerchief. “But the stench is brutal.”

“Safe!” barked the engine. “We’ve got twenty-seven different species of creatures on this ship, and every one of them has solid waste of a diverse chemical composition. If the fecal matter is kept separated, it’s safe as silly putty. But if some are combined, the result can be a disaster. For instance, you’re from Earth and I’m from Uranus. If your human poop and my Urinal poop were to be mixed together, the results would be worse than ten atom bombs.”

“That sounds like an exaggeration,” smirked Jonny.

“Well it’s not,” countered Le Pétomane. “And I want you to remember it for later in the story.”

Jonny tried to make the best of his time on the U.S.S. Pinafore. He realized that the stench of the feces holding tanks was no worse than his own body odor, and he even grew fond of Ensign Le Pétomane. But Peaseblossom weighed on his mind. There were plenty of women of every conceivable nationality and alien species on board, all wearing Starfleet-issued uniform mini skirts that showed off their rockin’ bodies to good advantage. But while there were women whose skin was white, black, yellow, red, blue, and even one chick with a transparent epidermis like those creepy “Visible Man” models that were always collecting dust in middle school science classrooms, Jonny didn’t see a green woman on the entire ship. And no one who held a candle to his Peaseblossom.

None of the women on the ship held a candle to Peaseblossom.

Jonny dealt with his depression the same way he dealt with every dilemma that ever confronted him: by drinking himself into a stupor until he passed out in a pool of his own vomit. Fortunately, his drunkenness allowed him to talk things out with Winston and actually hear a sentient reply.

“You only pine for Peaseblossom because she’s not around anymore, so you selectively remember only the positive things about the relationship” said the pug while simultaneously licking the tiny stub that his testicles once hung from. “The reality is that when you were together, you did nothing but bitch about what a pain in the ass she was and how you wanted out.”

“I was an idiot then,” slurred Jonny while desperately trying to suck out the last drops from a bottle of Romulan Ale.“I didn’t know a good thing when I had it. If only she’d come back, I’d change everything. Peasblossom! How I miss you! PEASEBLOSSOM!!!”

By this point, the muse was on his knees tearing at his red tunic like Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Winston was unimpressed.

“You’ll soon realize that there are other women besides Peaseblossom,” said the pug. “Give it time.”

“Never!” sniveled Jonny. “I’ll never find another woman in her beautiful shade of emerald green ever again. I’m going to die alone!”

With that, Jonny stuck his tongue inside the ale bottle to give the interior rim a final lick and then collapsed in a pile of Andorian guano that was scheduled to be beamed into the Klingon neutral zone later that afternoon. Winston looked sadly at his master resting his head on an alien dingleberry, and wondered if he might be right.

But the one thing that never failed to buoy Jonny’s spirits was the idea that Christmas was approaching. The muse would frequently sit in the ship’s mess hall with the other Red Shirts and talk excitedly about the Yuletide and its traditions, rituals and memories. And he was surprised to learn that all the aliens – regardless of what planet they were from – each had a holiday that fell on or around Star Date 309046.5753424658 (the day on the calendar on which Christmas fell ever since we converted, which made life hell for lyricists who tried to come up with rhymes for new Christmas songs), and they were all celebrated with exchanging presents, singing of songs, and the throwing of wild parties. Jonny thought it was wonderful until Le Pétomane set him straight.

“Most of these holidays aren’t even celebrated on our home planets,” said the feces ensign cynically. “But everyone saw what a blast the Christians were having with Christmas, so they pulled some seasonal holiday out of their asses and put it on the same level as Christmas so they wouldn’t feel left out. The Vulcans have Tal-Shanar, the Klingons have Jaj Shit vItuQmoHlu'jaj , and the Wookies have Life Day (which is a really funny reference to anyone who’s sat through The Star Wars Holiday Special). On Uranus, we have an obscure holiday called The Festival of Flashlights where somebody’s Eveready batteries lasted a few days longer than they expected them to so one of our holy men picked a slow news day to proclaim it as a miracle. Hardly anybody even observes it at home, but our kids saw the Earthlings getting Christmas presents so they wanted a holiday too. It’s all marketing hype.”

“No, it’s the power of the Christmas season!” countered Jonny. “Don’t you see? The Yuletide has become such an overwhelming part of the unity within God’s family that we don’t need only celebrate the birth of Jesus to let it flow into our souls. Everyone can taper that universal joy and celebration to be part of their own customs and society. The Christians celebrate Christmas, the Urinals celebrate the Festival of Flashlights, and I celebrate my birthday on December 15th in which gifts of alcohol are the traditional tribute. The point is that we all – regardless of what planet we’re from or how we give thanks for the gifts that our Creator has made for us – do it at this special time of year to come together and celebrate that the greatest gift we have is each other.”

Jonny sat down as his fellow Red Shirts looked at him in awed silence, stunned by the power of his words. Or at least that’s what he thought had silenced them until he noticed an unfamiliar shadow looming over his shoulder. The muse looked up to see Captain William Schwenk “Binky” Corcoran, commander of the U.S.S. Pinafore, gazing down at him.

An unfamiliar shadow appeared over Jonny's shoulder.

“That was a very nice speech,” said the captain as the Red Shirts squirmed uncomfortably in his presence. “You should all remember it. Especially you, Ensign …”.

“Le Pétomane, sir,” replied Jonny’s supervisor through gritted teeth. “Feces Removal sector.”

“Le Pétomane, of course,” smiled the captain. “As I said, I want you to remember this man’s words today. I know that I will.”

Corcoran took a moment to coldly appraise the uncomfortable faces around the table and then turned wordlessly to return to the bridge. As soon as the captain was out of view, Le Pétomane turned furiously to Jonny.

“Twenty years,” sneered the ensign. “In twenty years,, no captain has ever seen my face. Now this one knows my name! And all because of you and your sentimental babbling about Christmas. If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll get even with you for this. And it probably will be the last thing I do!”

Le Pétomane stormed out of the mess hall as the other Red Shirts backed their chairs away from Jonny.

Jonny did his best to apologize to his boss over the next few days but Le Pétomane refused to even speak to him. The muse was sad about the rift between him and his friend but it all became moot when Jonny received new orders taking him out of the Feces Removal sector. Apparently, his speech had made more of an impact on Captain Corcoran than he realized because Jonny was given papers ordering him to report to the bridge as the new navigator of the U.S.S. Pinafore.

The frequent deaths of Red Shirts made such promotions commonplace, but Jonny was worried that he lacked the education or mental capacity to navigate the ship. He was relieved to discover that the vessel was so computerized that he only had to twist around a joystick to steer it. And since Winston had been promoted to the Pinafore’s chief weapons officer within a week of reporting for duty, there was already a friendly face on the bridge. But with little to do but occasionally push a few colored lights and stare into space, Jonny found that he spent most of his time daydreaming about Peaseblossom.

But the muse found that the treatment of Red Shirts on the bridge was vastly different from how the crewman in gold or blue tunics treated them anywhere else on the ship. He, Winston and the other Red Shirts on the bridge (Jonny suspected that Ensign LaKweeta, the communications officer, was having a clandestine affair with the Vulcan science officer Mr. Se'tek) were never ordered to go on landing parties; in fact the closest they ever came to doing battle was listening to Captain Corcoran, Mr. Se'tek, and the ship’s surgeon George Hatfield (who was always hanging around the bridge until Jonny suspected that he was being groomed as the doctor’s rent boy) bicker with each other.

The bridge's crew spent most of their time listening to the ship's surgeon and the science officer bicker with each other.

“Damn it, Binky!” shouted Dr. Hatfield at the captain in a typical rant. “I’m a doctor, not a SWAT officer!”

“You have your orders,” countered the captain. “We have 267 crewmen aboard this ship but almost all of them are Red Shirts, which means they don’t even have a high school diploma. Since you and Mr. Se'tek are the only college graduates on the duty roster, I need you two to go into the cargo hold and diffuse the bomb that Romulan spy planted. It’s set to explode in one minute and thirty seconds, so don’t let your humorous squabbling at each other take up too much time!”

“I'll see that green-blooded, pointy-eared robot in hell!” cursed the doctor as he bolted for the bridge’s red elevator door. “And I gave up a good career performing abortions for this!”

But for the most part, the crew on the bridge treated each other like family regardless of what color shirt they were wearing, so when Jonny’s birthday arrived on December 15th his colleagues threw him a big surprise party complete with countless gifts of alcohol that have become the traditional tribute for marking the event. Jonny had yet to see any of the green women he was promised when he enlisted, and the pain of Peaseblossom’s departure was still haunting him. But with Christmas only ten days away, the muse tried to put that behind him and concentrated on the a surge of satisfaction knowing that his estranged friend Jean-Luc Le Pétomane would soon be safely retired and finally out of harm’s way.

It looked like it was going to be the best Christmas ever. On Christmas Eve, the ship was decorated to observe the 164 holidays the various species onboard celebrated which curiously all had ritual gift-giving and consumption of brandy-soaked eggnog as part of their tradition. Jonny nervously played with a gift-wrapped package of Eveready batteries that he planned to give Ensign Pétomane to commemorate both the Festival of Flashlights and his final day as a serving member of Starfleet. Everyone on the bridge was in a wonderful mood until they noticed the gorgeous blonde in the powder blue uniform hand the captain a plastic clipboard that contained urgent orders. It was never a good sign, and the crew waited nervously as the captain read the papers and then spoke into the Casio tape recorder built into his captain’s chair to make a log entry.

“Captain’s log, Star Date 309020.7488584474,” intoned Corcoran ominously. “We have been summoned to planet Xmas-12 in the Kris Kringle galaxy; a culture based upon the earth custom known as ‘Christmas’ because it’s late in the season and we’re over-budget, so the producers wrote a script that would let us reuse the sets from last year’s Andy Williams holiday special. We will attempt to intermediate in a dispute between the local population.”

Winston rolled his eyes at how on-the-nose the planet was to the theme of this story but, knowing how idiotic the plotlines of Star Trek: The Original Series frequently were, said nothing.

“Tensions between the red men and green women who inhabit it have gotten so high that a race war is looming, and it’s our job to stop it,” the captain continued. “I’m guessing my strategy will be to lay waste to the planet since that’s always worked for me in the past. Corcoran out.”

Corcoran flipped the switch in his chair that turned off the tape recorder and turned to Jonny.

“Mr. M., lay a course to Xmas-12.”

Jonny didn’t hear him at first, having frozen as soon as he heard the planet had on it the green women that he joined Starfleet to hook up with. He snapped back after Lieutenant Lakweeta gave him an elbow in the rib cage and the muse randomly pushed at the hundreds of unlabeled lighted buttons on his console until Google Maps came up on his screen, when he typed in the name of the planet and let the ship's GPS take over.

“Course laid in for Xmas-12, sir.”

The ship’s warp engine got the Pinafore to Xmas-12 in less than an hour (somehow breaking every rule Einstein devised about the speed of light) and, just as advertised, a smokin’ hot green woman appeared on the bridge’s viewscreen.

A beautiful green woman appeared on the viewscreen.

“Merry Christmas, crew of the U.S.S. Pinafore,” said the woman as Jonny stood mesmerized in a corner and began to surreptitiously rub one out. “I am Ambassador Joyeux Noël. The conflict between the red and green people of our civilization has been going on for centuries and our society has managed to survive in spite of it, so you can imagine how thrilled we are that the United Federation of Planets - which we joined less than a month ago - is suddenly intervening by letting a captain in their military decide the fate of our entire planet. By all means, beam yourselves down.”

Corcoran and Mr. Se'tek got up to go to the transporter room to meet the ambassador when Jonny surreptitiously groped his crotch one more time while gawking at the green beauty and then jumped out of his chair.

“Permission to join the landing party, sir!” the muse screamed while awkwardly positioning his hands to cover his erection.

“Are you sure, Mr. M?” asked the stunned captain. “I’ve never had a Red Shirt volunteer to join a landing party. You do realize that you’ll probably be killed within two minutes of beaming onto the planet’s surface.”

“I’m positive, sir!” answered Jonny as his junk scraped against his black Starfleet-issue bell bottoms.

“Very well,” responded Corcoran. “But we’ll need one more Red Shirt to join us in case Mr. Se'tek and I need a human shield to get between us and the aliens. Order Ensign Le Pétomane to the transporter room.”

The Fecal Removal sector supervisor was pulled out of his retirement party to join the landing party. He had less than twelve hours remaining as a serving member of Starfleet and was white as a sheet when he reported to the transporter room. He was issued a phaser for the mission on the planet’s surface but immediately realized that, unlike the weapons worn by the captain and Mr. Se'tek, his was made out of cardboard. With the fatalistic resignation of a man knowing that he was walking into his own death, he joined the others on the transporter platform.

“Energize,” said the captain.

It didn’t bode well for Jonny and Le Pétomane when the landing party reached the surface of the planet. It had the same red, hot, rocky terrain that most Red Shirts met a grisly end on. But everything seemed friendly enough when they were met by a summit of representatives from the warring factions. The green women were led by the gorgeous Ambassador Joyeux Noël. The red men were commanded by the dour and imposing General Paulbogart.

“Each side has modeled their philosophy on a videocassette found in the wreckage of an earth ship that crash-landed here two centuries ago,” disclosed the general. “The red men emulate the 1972 TV movie The House Without a Christmas Tree, in which a bitter widower dickishly withholds anything having to do with Christmas from his young daughter. The last ten minutes were erased from the tape, but it was enough to build a society on!”

“And the green women have based our philosophy on the porn DVD I Saw Mommy Eating Santa Claus, said Ambassador Noël as Jonny scraped his tricorder up and down his forearm to keep from focusing on the expanding weather balloon in his pants. “It hasn’t been easy without the red men taking part, but we practice our sacred rituals with cucumbers, electric toothbrushes and acting out the scene where Santa’s elf played by Jenna Jameson comes down the chimney and has an all-nighter with Ashlyn Gere as the priggish aunt who’s visiting for the holidays.”

The red men and green women had each based their philosophy on a Christmas video from Earth.

“We’re able to keep our conflicts under control for most of the year,” explained General Paulbogart. “But on Christmas, it’s more than we can stand because the green women celebrate by enacting all the perversions of I Saw Mommy Eating Santa Claus while we red men follow the teachings of our 80-minute version of The House Without a Christmas Tree by being cold and bitter jerks to anyone who even mentions the Yuletide. As a result, we wage war until Groundhog Day.”

“This seems like a fairly easy situation to moderate,” smiled the captain. “We have two tiny populations with opposing points of view living on a planet approximately the circumference of Saturn. The easiest thing to do would be to beam each group on opposite hemispheres so you wouldn’t even be aware of each other. But Starfleet isn’t comprised of a bunch of bleeding heart pussies. Men, set your phasers to kill!”

Corcoran drew his weapon but General Paulbogart was too fast and threw his copy of A House Without a Christmas Tree at the captain’s head, sending it glancing against his temple.

“Ouch!” cried Corcoran, rubbing a mild bump on his forehead. “I didn’t realize they were a warlike people. Le Pétomane! M! Get between the aliens and Mr. Se'tek and me!”

Le Pétomane and Jonny inevitably placed themselves in front of the officers as General Paulbogart drew a nasty-looking ray gun from his metallic jumpsuit. Le Pétomane was so unnerved by the sight that he felt a small Hershey squirt leak involuntarily out of his alien butt crack. Suddenly realizing that the officers had been served breakfast burritos that morning, he grabbed the captain by the shoulders.

“Captain! The Starfleet pension fund is now managed by ING!”

The fake news had the desired effect. Le Pétomane grabbed the bulge of solid waste that popped out of Corcoran’s bunghole in his left hand and scooped a mound of his own fecal waste into his right.

“I’m holding handfuls of poop from Uranus and Earth,” said the ensign forebodingly as everybody wondered if anyone was even reading this stupid thing anymore. “If I mush them together, the entire planet will explode. A couple of Red Shirts may die today, but everyone else will too for a change.”

General Paulbogart cocked his ray guy and aimed it between Le Pétomane’s eyes.

“Then I guess I’ll see you in hell.”

Just as the ensign was about to clap his hands together and the general was poised to pull the trigger, Jonny suddenly ripped off his red shirt and threw it to the ground.

Jonny ripped off his red shirt.

“STOP!” screamed the muse. “I said stop it right now!”

Dazed that the irritating brightness of the red shirt was no longer burning a hole in their eyes, everyone pointed their weapons at the ground. The Starfleet guys all wondered why no one had ever thought of that before.

“You should be ashamed of yourselves,” cried Jonny. “Behaving this way on Christmas Eve! This is that most special time of year that we need to set aside our petty differences and love each other as our brothers and sisters; to forget about what separates us and focus on what unites us as members of an intergalactic family. And it doesn’t matter if you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Tal-Shanar, Jaj Shit vItuQmoHlu'jaj , Life Day, The Festival of Flashlights, or my birthday on December 15th for which gifts of alcohol are still being gratefully accepted; this is the season for love, joy and acceptance. And that’s true if you’re wearing a shirt of gold, red, blue, or any other color of the rainbow. And especially if you lack a shirt altogether!”

The adversaries looked at each other in awkward embarrassment, trying to overlook that this was essentially the same speech that Jonny gave in the mess hall scene of this moronic story. General Paulbogart dropped his ray gun and Ensign Le Pétomane let loose his handfuls of poops. Taking care to make sure that Jonny wasn’t looking, the ensign wiped off the fecal matter on the muse’s discarded shirt and offered his hand to the general. The two enemies shook.

“You know,” said Captain Corcoran, wiping a tear from his eye, “you really should take a look at those last ten minutes of The House Without a Christmas Tree. It will probably fill in a few holes about why your people hate each other so much. You can watch it in my cabin.”

“But, captain!” interjected Mr. Se'tek. “Isn’t that a violation of the prime directive of the United Federation of Planets, which orders us to never use our advanced technology to change the course of a developing society?”

“You’re right, Mr. Se'tek” responded Corcoran. “That makes the 71st time I’ve broken that rule this month. The prime directive really has become a joke to us starship captains. Remind me to write myself a stern letter of reprimand.”

“And I realize now that I was wrong when I criticized people for pulling bogus holidays out of their asses to get in on the Christmas goodie bag,” said Le Pétomane while wiping a tear from his eye. “The Festival of Flashlights is every bit as legitimate as giving out gift certificates to Bed, Bath & Beyond to celebrate the idea that an invisible deity impregnated a virgin just so the kid could be horrifically executed in his mid-thirties; and I swear to honor the season and keep it holy.”

The captain then turned his attention to Jonny.

“I’d say you’ve earned yourself some shore leave, M,” said Corcoran as he shot a lecherous glace at Ambassador Noël. “How would you like to spend Christmas Day with a gorgeous green woman?”

“That’s exactly what I was hoping to do, sir,” answered Jonny. “But I had something just a little different in mind. Permission to beam to the North Pole.”

It was Christmas morning by the time Jonny and Winston had beamed to the North Pole and gotten through customs. The muse hadn’t been to Santa’s Village since his last, ugly breakup with Peaseblossom and the tiny hamlet was quiet as the grave after finishing its exhaustive work of the past few months. They approached the thatched cottage that they had once shared with the pretty green elf and peeked in the window. The muse tasted bile rise to the roof of his mouth as the first thing he saw was that little douche Hermey handing Peaseblossom a gift-wrapped package that turned out to be a case of Colgate toothpaste. What was it with that moron and teeth all the time?

Then Jonny noticed something else. Peaseblossom gazed upon Hermey with a adoration that the muse hadn’t seen on her face in a long, long time. He took a massive swig from his flask so that he could hear Winston speak, and looked into the pug’s face with an enigmatic air of bemusement.

Jonny had never seen Peaseblossom look so happy.

“Aren’t you going to rush in and declare your love for Peaseblossom?” asked Winston. “I thought that was the whole point of our coming here.”

“No,” answered Jonny quietly. “It’s Christmas Day, a time when we need to focus on happiness. Only I’ve spent so much time thinking about my own happiness that I never considered Peaseblossom’s. And when I see her face as she looks into the eyes of that pathetic little freak, I can see that he’s the one who makes her happy. And that’s what Christmas is about.”

“What a bittersweet, thoughtful ending to what was, prior to this, a fairly lowbrow and crass story,” mulled the pug.

“Yeah,” replied Jonny as he took another swig from his flask, “well it’s Christmas. That’s the time we put the happiness of other people ahead of our own. So you and I are going to walk away from here so that Peaseblossom can share the holiday with that obnoxious little fruit she’s in love with, and return to the U.S.S. Pinafore to seek out new life and new civilizations that we can spread happiness to. But first, give me your keys so that I can scratch the shit out of the hood of Hermey’s BMW.”

So all was happiness that Christmas season. Peaseblossom got an uncontested divorce from Jonny and married Hermey, who she spent a blissful two years with before she left him for a traveling mistletoe salesman. Captain Corcoran made a fortune as the spokesman for priceline.com. Jean-Luc Le Pétomane became the first Red Shirt to peacefully retire from Starfleet and died of a heart attack five days later. The red men of Xmas-12 finally saw the last ten minutes of The House Without a Christmas Tree where Jason Robards turns into a nice guy, realized the errors of their ways, and started banging the green women with such wantonness that the planet’s population quadrupled within two years. And Starfleet finally abandoned the three uniform colors for Star Trek: The Motion Picture and cranked out one of the crappiest science fiction movies ever made.

But happiest of all was Jonny M. He took a final look at Peaseblossom’s glowing face and felt a warm satisfaction in knowing that this season existed to remind him not to try and stand in the way of her happiness. So with a satisfied wink to his beloved pug Winston, he beamed back to planet Xmas-12 and spent the rest of Christmas Day performing unspeakable perversions on the green women there.

And joy to you, dear friend. Whether you’re spending the holidays with your life partner, flying solo so that someone you love from afar can be with his or her soul mate, passing the Yuletide by watching old science fiction TV series (in which case you probably never had anything like a girlfriend at all), or celebrating Jonny's birthday on December 15th in which gifts of alcohol continue to be the traditional tribute, I hope that you will take the season to focus on happiness; both yours and on the people who surround you. And if the sources of that happiness sometimes conflict with each other, may providence help you make the choices that best enlighten your soul.

And know that you always have a loving friend in Jonny M.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Directed by Jonny M. Written by Jonny M. (and a team of ghostwriters) Illustrated by Jonny M. Costume Design HalloweenCostumes.com Best Boy Winston Caterer Anything in Jonny's refrigerator with an expiration date of 2005 or later FEATURING

Admiral Tèt Kòk Sir Joseph Porter Dead Red Shirt Peaseblossom Jonny M. First green woman Actor playing Red Shirt Second green woman Winston Hot chick in photograph Spock Recruitment officer Green woman in poster Red Shirt monitoring Toilet 5 Red Shirt monitoring Toilet 6 Jean-Luc Le Pétomane Hot chicks Khan Noonien Singh Gorgeous female Red Shirt Capt. W.S. "Binky" Corcoran Ensign Dick Deadeye Crew person of the month Lieutenant LaKweeta Dr. Hatfield Man on small viewscreen Mr. Se'tek Ambassador Joyeux Noël General Paulbogart Santa on porn DVD Woman on porn DVD Hermey

Tom Ashworth Ron Schneider Glenn "Piece of Shit" Simon Amy Ball Himself Kiki Wistone Eddie Frierson Jacquelyn Riggs Himself Carol Potter Leonard Nimoy Tony Potter Stephanie Fredricks Aidan Park Joe Colligan Mark Ringer Davida Bourland Shavanti Donna Manus Susskind Penny Psaltiras Ricardo Montalbán Jeebus Burbano Jesse Merlin James Jaeger Misha Bouvian Monica Sims Joe Mullich Joseph Bacon Ken Summers Mara Marini Wade Sheeler Dan E. Campbell Jenna Jameson Himself

         

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