FATHER Christmas is dead because of massive skull damage inflicted by hooves, according to a new television commercial aimed at children.
The blood-soaked advert, for a tawdry catalogue shop with extortionate credit terms, shows the violent and protracted death of the jovial supernatural gift-giver.
Advertising account director Tom Logan, who oversaw the project, said: “Our brief was to make it explicitly clear to infants that they must never believe in anything except money.”
The 30-second commercial opens with Father Christmas in a snow-covered suburban garden, brutally whipping his exhausted reindeer for their inability to get back in the sky and deliver another few billion presents.
As the protracted beating escalates into an orgy of sadism, the sweat-drenched herbivores retaliate. Prancer skewers Santa on his sharp reindeer horns, tossing the red-clad pensioner around like a tubby rag doll before hurling him to the ground.
The other reindeer, who are seen to be literally salivating with hate, join in the assault, kicking and stamping on the elderly man’s bleeding, shattered body.
At one point he almost escapes, but Dancer grabs his trouser leg and drags him back into the vicious throng.
Finally Father Christmas’s bearded head splits like a coconut. Over-excited by the bloodshed, Donner urinates and then mixes it with some of the blood to spell the words ‘Happy Christmas’.
This is followed by the on-screen caption ‘Father Christmas is dead now, dead. But your mother has unlimited amounts of cash and also probably feels guilt about some neglected aspect of your upbringing.’ Then a link to the shop’s website appears.
Logan added: “Any moral qualms we had were put aside when we realised how many millions of hours children would save by not scrawling pathetic crayon notes to a corpulent fraud.”
