OMG OTC

Or, in English, Oh. My. God. Oriental. Trading. Company. The stress of selling incredibly cheap bizarre crap in job lots for incredibly low prices has finally gotten to you and you've gone insane. Also, born again. The Oriental Trading Company, for no doubt inscrutable Oriental reasons, has gone Jumpy For Jesus. You see, I got five copies of the OTC catalog in my mailbox this week. That's kind of overkill, but not unheard of - except this is the Vacation Bible School edition and I just made the unholy mistake of thumbing through it. Jesus wept. Yes, yes he did. Profusely. I almost wept too, with laughter.

I was looking for troll dolls. There aren't any. I guess Jesus doesn't love troll dolls - pity, because troll dolls are just so damn lovable: Jesus, what's wrong with you? Hatin' on the troll dolls - jeez. Instead of troll dolls, or other cute things, Jesus is apparently into frogs, because there is a whole page of, and I quote: Faith Filled Frog Gifts! Now we know what to get Jesus for Christmas. Thank god, because it was tough. These gifts include the Cotton "Stick to Your Faith" bucket hats with little pictures of presumably holy frogs saying Stick with Jesus. Why the frogs are sticky, and why, given their stickiness, it's Jesus that they're choosing to stick with, as opposed to, say, Glrmphribbit, Giant God of Frogs, I cannot say. I will, however, note that I have never encountered a sticky frog. They tend to be slippery as, well, hell.

Then there are the Inspirational Plush Puppets which are at least explicable. They're on the same page with the 500 Fabulous Foam Inspirational Beads because tiny green hands apparently carry some sort of sacred Christian message that they didn't tell us Catholics about. They make me think of aliens and those Indian villages where the mud brick houses are decorated with hand prints, but hey, what do I know? I've watched too many bad horror movies and National Geographic specials, clearly, and my mind has been turned away from Jesus.

I kind of like the God Rocks although I'm less enthusiastic about the same slogan applied to "hip" bandannas and, god help us, inflatable electric guitars. But it's the million, million ways to decorate crosses, or vaguely cross shaped things, that worry me the most. I don't like the sequin & cardboard cross box craft kit, which looks like something a young Buffy the Vampire Slayer might have enjoyed and, both as a mother and a neo pagan, I heartily object to the plastic cross sand art frames: "Mooom!!! Jimmy spilled my cross all over the living room rug!" I kind of generally have problems with using instruments of torture as decorative devices, although I guess St. Ignatius Loyola would have been all over it. Definitely a meditation aid, I suppose: gluing plastic jewels on plywood crosses, or using neon string to decorate plastic crosses, or scratching into black paper crosses to reveal the beautiful colors underneath - and, thus, contemplating the agonizing death of our Lord. What are they doing here, raising Jesuits? The Inquisition? I kept on looking, and while I originally thought the creepiest picture in the whole catalog was the multi ethnic family with fixed, forced smiles holding up their magic color scratch art cross ornaments, then, then, Oh Lord, I got to the Race for Faith pages, which combine Nascar and Jesus in one impeccable heap of horrifying tacky goodness. Win With Jesus stick on tattoos. That about says it all, doesn't it? Just says it all.