Leave Santa ALONE!

One day, political correctness is going to make Christmas disappear. Here’s the latest. A Canadian woman named Pamela McColl is pushing a new version of “The Night Before Christmas” . . . that takes out references to Santa’s PIPE SMOKING.

(–The original poem is actually called “A Visit From St. Nicholas”. But if I called it that, you wouldn’t know what I was talking about. Sort of like how “Baba O’Riley” is now “Teenage Wasteland”.)

Toward the end of the poem, there are two lines about Santa that say, quote, “The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth. And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath.” McColl wiped those two lines out with no replacements.

She says, quote, “Santa has stopped smoking, and 2012 is the year he quit. There’s nothing anyone can do about it.” She’s spent $200,000 of her own money self-publishing 55,500 copies of her new version of the poem.

Obviously, no one’s particularly excited about her messing with a poem that was published 189 years ago, in 1823, by the poet Clement Moore.

The American Library Association said, quote, “It’s denying access to the original voice of the author, and that’s censorship.”

(New York Post)