“From peppermint sticks, to thick, veiny dicks.” That line alone sums up the overall experience of watching this virtual play. This is anything but a roast, because I genuinely laughed at a lot of the scenes, which is something that I did not expect from watching a zoom play. It is one of the most down-to-earth interpretation of a drunken bar full of friends on Christmas Eve taking digs at each other, without feeling forced. I thought the excessive profanity and discussion about bug porn and Blackbeard’s penis started to feel like they were catering to a specific audience a little bit, and came off as somewhat crude. But at other times, it manages to pull off the casual and crass nature of a bar conversation with relative grace.

Outside of the mostly superficial effect of the vernacular and the delivery of the lines, I think they discuss a fair few topics that have genuine emotional impact. They discuss relationships and their downfalls, and the way they are sometimes overly romanticized. I interpreted the overall theme and emotion of the play, as a jaded and “corrupted” view of a commercialized and romanticized Christmas that the holiday season has failed to live up to, year after year. So it is just a few friends, most of which have simply stopped trying to love Christmas as the way it was propagated to them as children, and simply embraced the absurd, “ritual” of it all, from singing crude renditions of Christmas carols, and discussion about beating and borderline torturing of “naughty” children. Their jaded, “doomer” take on all things things heralded as sacred, is a truly interesting view, which ends up becoming the point of resolution at the end.

Their slogan “F*ck the Krampus” is a complete 180 turn from the direction that their dark absurdist views were going. They realize how much they had desecrated the happiness of Christmas, and how the story of Krampus passed down to them had contributed to that unhappiness, and vowed to never tell the story ever again, especially to the next generation. They find meaning in their suffering, by making sure that their future children don’t end up like them.

I think there isn’t a theme more suitable than that, for one of the strangest, darkest, most grim Christmas seasons of my lifetime. The way the play dwells for so long in dark, and sacrilegious discussion about their hatred of Christmas, only to realize that this is not a fate they want to pass on to the future generation, is an incredibly wholesome resolution that is set up and executed perfectly, and is one of the best story arcs I’ve seen in any Christmas production. I would love to see this manifested in an in person play, or even a film, since this is just one of those things that make you think to yourself, “gosh, why didn’t I think of that?” This is possibly one of the most enjoyable works of art that I have been tasked to write about this entire semester, and I say that without hyperbole.