A Christmas Goose for You. No, Not THAT Kind of Goose.

Ready or not, Christmas is coming.  I know it's a little tough for many of you kids* out there to get in the holiday mood, what with the studying, the exams and the death-defying amounts of alcohol you are required by law  to consume in between these activities. 

Certain things don't make it any easier for a Leaf fan to get in the spirit of the season, either;  in addition to the obvious struggles of the team of late, for example, you might be seething with rage about the treatment that a suddenly stumblebummed Czech defenseman has been getting from his recently installed bench boss;   or, you might be a 42 year-old goaltender who's beginning to wonder if he could make the CNIB varsity team; or,  you might just be a gazillionaire whose shiny plaything isn't worth nearly as many bazillions this year as it was last.  Pity.

I know what you're thinking, Leaf Nation.  You're asking yourself,  "how the hell am I going to rum pa pum pum properly when I has a sad?  Also, I am emo and out of bacon.  I do not want to deck the halls;  I want instead to deck a stranger on the bus, or possibly Damien Cox  - but those things are illegal and (setting physically expressed journalistic criticism aside)  they  might make Santa angry enough to fill my stocking with reindeer feces and razor blades."  In short, you are one stressed,  depressed and distressed little muchacho/senorita, and you very much need a little Christmas kickstart or else you might instead start kicking Santa's elves in front of the children lined up at  the "castle" in your local mall.

Fear not, for I have a digital something to fill the empty spaces in your lives;  a binary boon to your Yuletide blahs;  a splendiferous wonder that promises an end to the cheerless tedium of your quotidian rigamarole. 

Step right up and download Honky the Christmas Goose (Click on the linky to download free full of win mp3!). 

You see, way back in ye olden days, before God invented "Cotton-eyed Joe"  and bazookas that launch low quality garment missiles at spectators so desperate to grab a four-dollar t-shirt that they are prepared to entirely ignore a hockey game they paid two hundred dollars to see, sporting events and the athletes who participated in them were occasionally fun.  This was almost entirely because of the stupidity of the professional athletes of the time.  Back in those days, professional athletes were paid very little actual money, owing to their limited intelligence.  Hilariously unaware of the degree to which they were being exploited, some of them nevertheless had the quaint and laughably wrong idea that it would be good to use their celebrity to generate money for the (even) less fortunate.  Thus, it came to pass that former Leafs goaltender Johnny Bower recorded Honky the Christmas Goose.

Bower, never trained as a singer, agreed to lend his vocals to the songs after [songwriter] Young told him the record proceeds would be donated to charity.

Not long after, Bower, accompanied by a chorus of kids, including his own son, Johnny Jr., collectively known as Johnny Bower and Little John with The Rinky-Dinks, gathered around the microphone at a Toronto studio, to record Honky the Christmas Goose and Banjo the Mule.

The end result was a success. Sales exceeded 40,000 which, at the time, made Honky the Christmas Goose the biggest-selling Canadian-made single ever and Bower didn’t pocket a dime. All proceeds went to charity.

Ha ha ha!  Poor dimwitted Johnny Bower made a record that went to the top of the charts and he didn't bank  a dime from it!  Oh, the fun spectators used to have attending Maple Leafs games just to point and laugh at their sadly misguided goaltender and his obviously flawed understanding of economics, marketing and other important things.

In our advanced modern age, of course, we now know that the correct approach for an athlete to take is instead to become a pornographic caricature of one's own cartoonish and boneheaded buffonery and, as a result, get paid $3.5 million for scoring 3 goals by some idiot in Dallas.

---------

* as this is not a video post, in order to get the full effect of this first paragraph, please picture me standing on my porch, pants pulled up to my nipples, waving my fist in your general direction and demanding that you refrain from entering upon my lawn.