Macabre Christmas Display Makes Statement

[Thom Little]

It's usually easy to tell where a person stands in the culture wars, but whose side is someone on when his Christmas decor is a blood-spattered Santa Claus holding a severed head?

Joel Krupnik and Mildred Castellanos decked the front of their Manhattan mansion this year with a scene that includes a knife-wielding 5-foot-tall St. Nick and a tree full of decapitated Barbie dolls. Hidden partly behind a tree, the merry old elf grasps a disembodied doll's head with fake blood streaming from its eye sockets.

In a telephone interview Wednesday, Krupnik explained that his family thought it would be a fun way to make a comment about the commercialization and secularization of Christmas.

"It is a religious holiday, but they have turned it into a business. And it shouldn't be," he said. "We didn't put it up to offend anybody. It was just something that came out of our imagination."


http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-slasher-santa,0,1091648.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines

[Dark]

1. The War for Christmas has finally begun!

NO PICTURE! What BS!

[babylonsister]

2. Manhattan mansion? I want to see a picture! nt

[SillyGoose]

3. Ok, I can understand his sentiments but this is over the top.

Little kids no doubt see this and I don't think its right to scare the sh* out of them with this scene of mayhem.

[Warpy]

4. Ahh, it's New York

Trust me, nobody will notice.

[SillyGoose]

6. I'm a native New Yorker transplanted to Florida.

I know that anything goes in the city but I just think its best to leave little kids out of this whole bullshit, fabricated war on Christmas. I get where he's coming from completely, but think his way of expressing it may not be the best possible way of doing it.

[Solomon]

7. Yeah. It's better to scare little kids with a dead man hanging on a

cross with nails in his hands and feet, thorns on his head, and blood streaming down his body.
That'smuch more tasteful.

[SillyGoose]

8. Taking a character beloved by children and depicting it in a state of

bloody mayhem in a public display doesn't strike you as just a bit odd?

[Generic Other]

5. I think I will go put up a bloody cross and crucify Santa on it

Ho Ho Ho.

[lectrobyte]

9. It's a strange world.