Tragic holiday horror! Diabolical kids with bad sweaters, scheming with Grinch-like dastardliness to stab at the heart of the season! Openly distributing thinly disguised blades . . .
Openly! Well, the school administrators were on the case in a jiffy.
The ten culpable kids at the Haymarket, Virginia, high school — called, by a cruel joke of destiny, Battlefield High — belonged to the secret commando unit “Christmas Sweater Club,” so-called because they wear “the craziest sweaters they can find.”
Just the kind of loosely-knit cover story you’d expect from such warped-and-woofed yarn spinners.
On the fateful morning, before classes began, club members ruthlessly tossed two-inch candy canes to arriving schoolmates. These student instigators told Channel 9 that school officials charged them with trying to “maliciously maim” their fellow students. “They said the candy canes are weapons because you can sharpen them with your mouth and stab people with them.”
By the time disciplinary notices were issued, however, the complaint had lapsed into something about “creating a disturbance.” Mom Kathleen Flannery related an administrator’s earnest appraisal: “Not everyone wants Christmas cheer.”
Lesson? Obviously, tiny candy canes in the wrong hands are dangerous, especially if converted by frenetic licking into ferocious little shivs that could turn a playground into a killing field!
Also, tiny brains in the wrong school officials’ heads can be dangerous, too . . . especially when they can’t be sharpened at all.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.