5 moderately disturbing ways to experience the weirdness of the holidays online

We know why you’re here. And it’s okay.

You’re online, maybe hunched over your smartphone, or hidden in a room browsing the Web just to get a little me time.

You need a mental break from weeks of stress shopping. You need to get away from the those long unseen relatives who can’t even be bothered to join Facebook and instead spend all day asking you about all the stuff they missed the last five years. “Why don’t you email us pictures of the kids?” they ask, as you try to explain social networking.

And then there are your kids, who are simultaneously sleep deprived and pumped full of sugar, constantly on the brink of some kind of tantrum supernova.

Time to give yourself a break, and wrap yourself in the warm, loving embrace of cyberspace. There is no judgment here, only acceptance.

Now that you’ve arrived, we present five moderately disturbing holiday items to suit your mood. Why are we doing this? Because all of these people sent us last-minute PR pitches yesterday that warmed our chilly hearts. And because it’s always better to give than to receive, and so we thought we’d share them with you. You’re welcome.

1. Once upon a time, there was a snack company in Japan. And it’s name was “Ezaki Glico.” And the people at this company thought there might be no better way for us experience holiday joy than to watch a video of holiday tunes created from only the sound people make when eating their snack foods. And lo:

http://youtu.be/n7bHwGyE6dg

2. There is nothing quite like advertising to reflect the darkest part of our hearts. Decades of sexism, racism, and criminal use of babies in wildly inappropriate ways can all be found scattered across the Internets. Fortunately, the good folks at Silk.co, a data visualization company, have brought together many of the best of the worst in one, neat, searchable graphic:

3. Like Steve Jobs used to say, sometimes people don’t know what they want until you give it to them. What the good folks at Pixel Bomb Studios thought we wanted for the holidays was a time-lapse video of someone drawing a giant robot wearing a Santa hat while holding up mistletoe and squashing the head of someone and sending their eyeballs flying off the screen. Thus, “See You Under The Mistletoe!”

4. Santa has always scared us a little, frankly. Portrayed the wrong way, he is just a step beyond the spooky clowns that haunted our youth. But in a new game from Bigzur called “Santa Claus Christmas Trip 2015” for Android, the company has created what has to be one of the most terrifying Santas we’ve seen. Look at that poor child shrieking in horror!

5. And finally, what was obviously missing from this list was an animated holiday greeting starring Chuck Norris. Last year, the folks at RareLines, which makes an app called TimeNote Pro, teamed up with the folks at Delov Digital to create a Chuck Norris holiday greeting that went viral on YouTube with 25 million views. So, there was little doubt they would be back with a sequel. And indeed, here it is:

BONUS! And why not? Just a couple more minutes before you return to the holiday fray. This one was not pitched to us, but was spotted by our correspondent in France (me!). It’s a series of ads from Netflix that are posted on YouTube France in which holiday carolers sing tunes from TV shows and movies in, well, holiday-carol style. It’s called: “Un Air De Noël.” Our favorite may be the cheery holiday treatment of this song from the movie “Kill Bill.”

http://youtu.be/5QwIu3rsS8U

Because nothing says the holidays like, “Bang bang, he shot me down.”

Bonne fête, y’all.