This animated short was supposed to debut tomorrow night on the holiday edition of Anthony Bourdain's Travel Channel show, No Reservations. But when executives got a look at Bourdain's take on the Austrian legend of Krampus, they quickly pulled the plug. Apparently, they felt the world was not quite ready for a stop-motion retelling of Santa's "whip-toting sidekick" who "whips and licks naughty children" with his 12-inch tongue then "carries them off in his sack" — a source tells us they cited sensitivities regarding the Penn State scandal when delivering Bourdain the disappointing news. (The leering portrait of the Pope in the background probably didn't help matters, either.)

Are you one of those Christmas revelers who goes absolutely bonkers the second December rolls around? There's nothing quite like those bright lights of Christmastime, but some have a tendency to overdo it on the holiday cheer.

You love your dog. Far more than your emotionally distant heart could ever love a human. And why not? Your dog never did anything but express an evolutionarily advantageous convincing simulacrum of love for you. You must show your love back. You must! But what to get Nibbles and Rocky this holiday season? Only the best.

The economy is crappier than a Porta-Potty at an outdoor electronic dance music festival. We've all got to pinch pennies, and the holidays are no exception. So, we present our top five gifts under five cents.

There is no better way to ruin someone's holiday than to arm their children with the tools to endlessly annoy them. Here are some suggestions.

Yesterday we showed you the kinds of gifts to buy people you hate. Today let's look at the gifts you get from people that you hate. It's a big difference, but if you buy one of these types of gifts, the hatred is justified.

Musical haircut Justin Bieber has a new Christmas song, "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town," and the video is inexplicably steampunk-themed. Sorry, steampunks: time to get a new quirky aesthetic pastime before it blows up among 14-year-old Beliebers.

Red alert in the War on Christmas: An elementary school in Stockton, California has banned poinsettias. Also, worshiping Santa Claus, and other holiday deities. The only appropriate response to this is that of Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade: "Who doesn't pray to Santa Claus?"

Champagne toasts! Chocolate fountains! Ice sculptures! Pin the tail on the urchin! Christmas season is upon us, which means well-heeled banksters will soon be gathering in the back rooms of Manhattan's finest eateries to honor Satan with shameless orgies of consumption. Tell us all about them.

Take a much-loathed corporation, add poor kids, Christmas, and a popular blog, and you've got the recipe for a perfect Internet Shit Storm. Paypal is being blasted for "stealing" money raised for Christmas presents for poor kids.

Sure, lots of people are cutting back and not throwing extravagant bashes for Christmas and those other winter events this year, but almost every company is going to have some sort of Holiday Party. Here are some rules to get you through yours and not get you fired.

Welcome to Gift Guide Week at Gawker, where we instruct on how best to fritter away your hard-won dollars on meaningless tokens of consumerism, because a bastard baby was born in a pile of hay on a clear night 2000 years ago. Let's start with the people you want to cross off your shopping list: people you hate.

LA-based pepper-spray fashion designer Abbie Heppe used felt, puffy paint, and her knowledge of memes to create this topically festive "UC Davis Police Officer John Pike Casually Feeds Baby Jesus" holiday sweater. Now we want one! We love police brutality wear.

Every year around Christmas you get a lot of people trying to make a YouTube clip that everyone is going to post on their Facebook wall. Here are two manic dancers who are trying to "Single Ladies" their way into your heart with a Christmas song. It's going to work.

The feel-good story of the Christmas season: A news anchor in Chicago went on a rant about how Santa isn't real during her 9:00pm broadcast, brutally destroying the innocence of thousands of young Midwesteners.

Tonight, NBC aired its annual Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting special. It was boring! Well, except for the part where Justin Bieber debuted the music video for his duet with Mariah Carey of "All I Want for Christmas Is You (Superfestive!)." Because what the hell?

Well look at that, the stuffy old cranks in our House of Lords are doing "Secret Santa" this year! America really is becoming weak. So far, 58 of 100 senators have signed up for the gift-exchange promoted by Sens. Al Franken and Mike Johann. There's a $10 gift limit, but you just know that Lieberman's going to break the rules and buy someone a Mercedes, like an ass.

We're still pretty early into the holiday season, but lo, enemy forces have already entrenched themselves on a central front in this year's War on Christmas: Rhode Island, state of... whatever. The governor there — like other recent governors! — has decided to call the 17-foot blue spruce in the Statehouse a "holiday tree," rather than a Christmas tree. Oh. Shit.

Max was a little taken aback by the Scottsdale Gun Club's plan to offer posed Christmastime portraits with Santa and machine guns, but now that some have been released I think they're delightful. Locked and loaded for a merry Christmas and a very happy new year!

The conservative Israeli government is pretty convinced at this point that the greatest threat to the Diaspora is not necessarily from Iran so much as it is from lazy American Jews, who have no discipline and are always spreading around liberal nonsense like "maybe we should try to make nice with the Palestinians" and so on. It has now gone so far as to create ads showing what terrors will befall Israelis who raise their children in America: Specifically, that their kids will end up celebrating Christmas!