Who doesn't love, "The Night Before Christmas"? Hell, no matter how young or old, we all do. It's great. But let's face it. TNBC's beloved author and long-time dead guy, Clement Clark Moore, has held the torch for "Christmas Poem" long enough. No disrespect intended, but 150 years after he went full-on dirt nap, it's time for someone to wrench that dusty torch from his skeletal hand, re-light it, raise it high and carry it proudly into the next millennium. Poised to do just that is author Nicholas D. Sasuta with his Christmas long poem, "The Day Santa Almost Killed Me." By definition, a "Long Poem" is at least 60 lines long and at a whopping 320 lines, "The Day Santa Almost Killed Me" more than qualifies We're not exactly calling Clement a piker but coming in at nearly 600% more lines than TNBC and with at least 1,000,000% more laughs, "The Day Santa Almost Killed Me" is ready to take its place as the new Christmas poem for the ages The year is 1973. All year long, a young boy has been on his very best behavior. His plan is to pack a years worth of devilment into just one night, Christmas Eve, when it will be too late for Santa to either know or to react. On Christmas Eve, when he's certain his family is asleep, he slips downstairs to misbehave. He begins slowly with little things like leaving the fridge open and eating too many snacks. But having been PERFECTLY behaved for an entire year, the same minor infractions which got him into trouble in the past are no longer sufficient to satiate his mania for wrongdoing. He quickly loses control of his actions: "I freaked, I cracked, I flipped, I lost my mind, it went all wrong. Could be because I'd just been too damn good for too damn long. All at once the things I'd always got in trouble for, Just weren't enough, I needed stronger stuff, I needed more." Like a glue-huffer leap-frogging over all the other gateway drugs and diving headfirst straight into heroin, his rampage quickly escalates exponentially until the entire house is in shambles, the basement is flooding and the furnace is rigged to explode Eventually coming to his senses amidst the devastation, he decides to somehow undo all the damage he's done. Instead, exhausted, he falls fast asleep. His normal, pleasant, Christmas dreams are replaced with horrible, nightmarish visions of a Christmas straight from Hell. "Hand grenade ornaments, barbed wire garland, A bomb at the top of the tree. Rusting tin soldiers with old peeling paint, formed a firing squad aiming at me. Dismembered gingerbread men On the tracks of a runaway Lionel train. Wax Christmas villagers running in terror, Were strafed by a model airplane." When the boy finally awakens, the worst is yet to come Welcome to a Christmas tale like nothing you've seen or heard before. Welcome to the vivid and colorful, twisted and wonderful world of, "The Day Santa Almost Killed Me" Take our word. After this, Christmas will NEVER be the same