That's right! The moment we've ALL been waiting for ALL YEAR LONG since the beginning of this anus horribilis is FINALLY HERE! The ANNOUNCEMENT of the WINNING ESSAY in the FIFTH ANNUAL PIGDOG JOURNAL CHRISTMAS ESSAY CONTEST! Boojho! Huzzah!

[Despite our ADMIRABLE number of essay submissions, the time has come to choose just one out of the impressive pack to be the Christmas Queen of All Essays. It should come as NO SURPRISE that the WINNING ESSAY is from none other than CHRISTMAS ESSAY CONTEST JUGGERNAUT Lenny Tuberose. His xmastide sagas have amused and enraptured generations here in these very pages, but more importantly he has made us think. And that is what the true spirit of Christmas is all about. Way to go, Lenny! Put those Guinnesses on my tab. - Mr. Bad]

A Very Orcish Christmas
by Lenny Tuberose

The Orcs continued to sweep north and east in a great arc around the forbidding forest of Smirkwood, and their hobbit captives with them. They devastated the town of Hickheim and burned Rubeborg to the ground. Likewise they had razed Knob Hollow and Stooge Ferry, and the sack of Starketon was a tale to turn a brave man's bowels to water. They had eaten a farmer outside of the Dag N'Abbit and teased a goat on the Old Minus Molehill Road for almost half a day. The hobbits were dragged or carried depending on the needs and whims of their captors, and they witnessed scenes of mind numbing horror until they gibbered and twitched and barked like geckos.

And so it was that they came to find themselves camped before the Mountains of Vague Discontent on the very night before Christmas. They built low fires of scrub and insurance salesmen and settled down for the night. They were weary out of measure, and only the growling of their empty stomachs kept them from their beds.

"It's your turn to make dinner, Blech." Ugh said.

Blech rummaged through a large, filthy sac for a few moments and then straightened, empty-handed, and scratched his pointed head with a filthy talon. "Outta food."

"Well, do we still have those skanky little hobbits?"

"Ewww...."

"We can wash them first. I'm hungry. Somebody is going to get eaten here Blech, and if it isn't them..." He let the threat hang in the air.

""Hobbit sounds fine to me," Blech assured him. He seized the nearest Hobbit in his gnarled, taloned fist and heaved him to his feet to stand on the earth before the fire. He raised his rough iron cleaver above his head to butcher the hapless Hobbit, but he did not strike. Lowering the blade he turned and said, "How do you want 'im?"

"Roasted?"

"On a spit you mean?

"Yeah because they're sort of greasy you know..."

"Oh yeah, tell me about it. They have an unpleasant odour though. It might be better to do hm in a pot with some herbs...maybe a wedge of lemon..."

"Do we have any potatoes?"

"I wish!"

" I think with a little cilantro..."

"Again with the cilantro! You put that shit on everything! I'm sick to bloody death of cilantro!"

"Sor-ry! Sheesh." Blech turned and raised his glaive once more to make an end of the hobbit, but his cruel hand wavered.

"Whassamatter?" Ugh demanded.

Ugh lowered his blade once more and looked abashed. "It's Christmas, Ugh. I can't just butcher the little guy not at Christmas. We have to find a humane way to kill him."

"A...humane way? You're kidding right?"

"No. It's..."

"...Christmas. Yeah, I know. Well how *do* you want to kill him then?"

Blech considered. It was no mean task, as the orc brain turns to thought reluctantly. "Poison," he said at last. "We will give him a potion so poisonous that he will die instantly."

"What sort of poison? Snake venom?"

"Not strong enough."

"Then perhaps the milky secretions of the pale slugs that inhabit the Forlorn Fens?"

"A potent poison, but painful and slow."

Surely not the smoking pus lanced from a boil on a balrog's bottom?!"

"I speak of a potion that o'ermatches that badass brew as the sun o'ermatches the stars!"

"You don't mean...?"

"Yes! Bongwater!"

The hobbit let out a tiny bleat of fear.

Ugh shivered. "It would be quick, I suppose..."

Blech seized the hobbit in one fist and the bong in the other and poured the brown, lumpy bongwater down the hobbit's throat.

"There, there little guy..." Blech said reassuringly as he lay the now convulsing hobbit down before the fire. Ugh was overcome by the Christmas spirit and moved to place something under the hobbit's head for a pillow. Blech noticed that the pillow had a hairy foot on the end of it.

"Ugh, where did you get that leg?"

"I found it over there," Ugh gestured back over his shoulder with a taloned thumb.

Blech followed the trail of blood to the formerly bipedal hobbit writhing on the ground.

"Ugh!"

"Yes? Oh! Right...sorry about that."

It was then that the poisoned hobbit ceased its convulsing and became rigid as a board for a few long moments, and then he leapt to his large hairy feet with a blood curdling shriek and, red eyes spinning in his head, dashed off into the darkness with such ferocious speed that he could not be caught.

The next morning when the horde moved on, Ugh and Blech found the exhausted hobbit unconscious in a nearby field and once again made him their prisoner. That night, after they made camp, Ugh and Blech once again regarded their hobbit prisoner before the cooking fire.

Ugh seized the hobbit in hands like iron bands and made to pull him apart, but Blech cried out, "Stop! It's Christmas we can't just pull him apart."

"Well, what do you suggest?"

"Bongwater."

"Bongwater? It didn't kill him last time..."

"It won't kill him, but he'll be so out of his mind that he won't know what's going on. Then we can pull him apart. C'mon, it's..."

"...Christmas. Yeah, I know." So Ugh poured the thick, brown bongwater down the hobbit's throat just as Blech had the night before. Once again the hobbit dropped as if poleaxed and began twitching and frothing at the mouth. He convulsed for some time and then went rigid. And then he leaped to his feet and took to his heels and he would have been away into the woods but Ugh was ready for him this time and caught him in the side of the head with a shovel and finished him off with a garotte fashioned from a stocking. The hobbit went down and into the pot and they made a merry meal of him, and many of their friends had some as they were making their Christmas rounds, and all who tasted the flesh of that hobbit fell to the ground and convulsed, and then went perfectly rigid, and then leapt up with a shriek and went on a rampage of unprecedented violence and cruelty that left the region blighted and scarred for a full generation.

And that's why now, every year at Christmas, orcs all over Middle Earth enjoy a traditional feast of bongwater soaked hobbit, followed by a murderous rampage.

aaron@pigdog.org