The Christmas Experiment

"It was like the climax of Quatermass and the Pit! People were running around attacking anybody who wasn't shopping, whilst a huge image of Santa Claus shimmered over the shopping centre bellowing 'Ho, ho, ho'!" exclaims Ned Hobwalt, who claims to have witnessed what police have described as a 'Christmas shopping fuelled riot', which erupted in Newbury town centre earlier today. During a two hour period, thousands of shoppers, apparently in the grip of seasonal shopping frenzy, started physically assaulting eachother. "I saw one poor bastard surrounded by a mob of them outside Debenhams and beaten with artificial Christmas trees," asserts Hobwalt. "Other people were being pelted with Christmas baubles, whilst one guy was buried under a pile of Tesco's Finest Christmas puddings. It was terrifying! The attackers all had this maniacal gleam in their eyes as they set about their victims!" According to the fifty-two year old plumber, the only thing the victims seemed to have in common was their lack of festive shopping. "They were all just trying to do their regular shopping," he notes. "None of them had mince pies or turkeys in their bags - a fact which seemed to enrage their attackers!" Hobwalt himself nearly succumbed to one of the attackers, an elderly lady, apparently possessed y the evil spirit of Christmas, attempting to strangle him with a string of Christmas lights. "Luckily, I had some Brussels sprouts in the bottom of my shopping bag," he reveals. "As I lost consciousness, I dropped the bag and they came tumbling out - she immediately released her grip and went to find another victim! Those sprouts saved my life!"

Despite the local police's attempts to calm the situation, claiming that the disturbance was sparked by a local Sainsburys branch running out of egg nog, resulting in enraged shoppers turning over vehicles in the car park and setting them ablaze, rumours of a more sinister origin for the riot persist. "A bloke who works for the council told me that when they were excavating a hole to plant the municipal Christmas tree in, they uncovered a mysterious object," confides Hobwalt. "He reckoned it was some kind of ancient casket, possibly containing the remains of some Iron Age chief, or something. He thinks it could have set off some kind of pagan curse against the Christian hijacking of the mid-winter festival!" According to other reports, the object took the form of a giant Christmas present, wrapped in scarlet paper and tied up with gold ribbon. When opened, the Christmas paper-wrapped remains of several alien beings were discovered in the box. "The evolution of Christmas was clearly the result of alien intervention," opines Dan Friddles, a local window cleaner and president of the West Berkshire Flying Saucer Society. "When the box was opened, it triggered some kind of primal instinct in the true descendants of the aliens to purge society of all those not fully committed to the festival!" Others suspect that the riot was the result of an experiment by the retail industries to spark a consumer spending frenzy during the recession. "My mate who works for the water company says they put something in the local reservoir to create a shopping frenzy," says refuse collector John Spreckfold. "But the experimental drug they used was too powerful, and turned half the population into Christmas-obsessed homicidal maniacs!" The police continue to deny all such explanations for the riot, maintaining that it was fuelled by alcohol and seasonal stress, and insisting that the mysterious object discovered during the planting of the tree was merely an old sofa, whilst the giant Santa Hobwalt claimed to have seen was simply an inflatable Christmas decoration which had broken free and had floated over the town centre.