by Andre Radojcich (@portableandre)

It’s hard to imagine that only four days ago Americans were cheerily drinking egg nog and caroling, the Dow Jones was trading at 17,400, and Oku Abrahams, a Jamaican ex-pat that had been homeless in the United States for over a decade, had never put on a Santa hat before.

‘I don’t know how it happened,’ said Cheryl Graves, a Chicago, IL, resident, from the Kenmore Refrigerator box that now serves as her home, ‘I passed by him on the way to work every day for three years and never felt compelled to throw in so much as a quarter. Then last Tuesday, when he put on that fake beard and started belting out ‘We Tree Kings of Da Orient Are’, I immediately cashed in my 401k and handed it over, early withdrawal fees be damned’.

Ms. Graves wasn’t the only one that failed to exercise financial restraint in the face of Mr. Abrahams Jamaican-accented melodies. Within four hours of his setting up at the corner of La Salle and Grand in downtown, Chicago, the entire wealth of the bustling Midwestern city had been handed over, with thousands of residents of nearby Milwaukee lined up to make their contributions also.

‘We put it on the news to warn people of the effect being in Mr. Abrahams’ presence had, but that only made things much, much worse, as he’s just as sentimentally charming on camera’ said Jeff Tanenbaum, former Associate Producer of Local News for NBC Chicago and current Blowjob Artist. ‘By the time we ran the segment nationally, we knew it would hypnotize hundreds of millions of Americans into willful destitution, but after looking at the twinkle in his glaucoma-stricken eyes, it just seemed like the Christmasy thing to do’.

Recognizing the need for rationality in the face of this economic emergency, Dr. Janet L. Yellen, Chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, tried to avoid encountering Mr. Abrahams by confining herself to a sensory deprivation tank in an undisclosed location deep below the Rocky Mountains, but the simple imagining of what his soothing Caribbean baritone sounded like while shouting ‘’o! ‘o! ‘o!’ was too much for her to bear. She then reduced the borrowing rate for banks intending to give all their money to Mr. Abrahams to below zero and delivered the keys to Fort Knox to Mr. Abrahams herself. ‘Tis the season’, Dr. Yellen later remarked.

Recognizing the utter devastation his holiday cheer has wrought on the United States, ‘Santa Oku’ has taken his trillions of dollars and retreated to a fortress of solitude in Antarctica, where he will focus on gaining a greater understanding of his power. At the time of publication, all other homeless people in the United States are still being treated like talking garbage.