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Five hours of Darth Vader's burning corpse will replace your Yule Log

Five hours of Darth Vader's burning corpse will replace your Yule Log

By Chris Plante

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You awake in a room that looks like your room, but it isn't your room. Your automatic daily routine follows its well-trodden path, unobstructed, and yet this day is different. Your baby blue cotton bed sheets have been replaced with a fluffy, retro Jabba the Hutt comforter, and your polka dot shower curtain swapped with a plastic print of Han Solo trapped in carbonite. When you search in the kitchen for the coffee grinder, you accidentally retrieve a pizza cutter that, if you cross your eyes, looks like R2-D2. In the evening, you gaze at your hands in horror to find they have been replaced with giant, Star Wars-licensed credit cards intended for maximum consumption.

But then you hear a soft, crackling sound coming from the living room. The warm glow of Christmas bends around the corner of the hall, and you follow it, believing the holiday and its flickering decorations will provide a reprieve from Star Wars mania. Surely, you think, someone wouldn't pervert Christmas for the sake of crass consumerism.

And there you see it, roaring on the television. Your goofy Five Hours of Yule Log DVD has been swapped with five hours of Darth Vader burning in a funeral pyre. You fall to your knees, raise your credit card hands into the air, and you scream.

Update December 16th, 10:45 PM: I received an email from reader Nate Jones about the veracity of this story's headline. While the headline will remain the same for the sake of clarity and simplicity, I have asked Jones for permission to publish his thoughtful email in full here. He kindly agreed. Thank you, Nate!

Chris,

First let me say this is hilarious, and I will be subtly be playing this at family Christmas parties in the upcoming weeks. However I have to point out that this was not Darth Vader's "corpse". In my understanding, a corpse is a dead body and evident in the mythology of Star Wars, when a Jedi dies, there is miraculously no corpse. The body disappears to become one with the Force and return as a Blue Force Ghost. (ref. Obi-wan Kenobi Ep. IV & Yoda Ep. VI, NOT Quinn-Gon Jinn in Ep. I)

Luke was burning the remains of Darth Vader's suit after the final hour redemption and death of his father Anakin Skywalker. It's a powerful symbol, destroying the iconic suit of the greatest intergalactic villain of their time. The good Anakin has moved on and the old evil remains are destroyed by fire. (Except maybe not completely as we see teased in trailers for the Force Awakens).

So I humbly suggest that you change the title to "Five Hours of Darth Vader's burning suit will replace your Yule Log".

Thank you and may the Force be with you, always.

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