This Christmas season, irregardless that since Black Friday sales came and went almost as fast as it took Fox News on election night to call the U.S. Presidential Election for Biden and Harris, in the land of milk and money and malarkey, where more carolers than since General Cornwallis surrendered his last Tyrannosaurus Rex to General Washington are going gated community to gated community and homeless encampment to homeless encampment singing “The Coronavirus Blues” than those singing “Silent Night,” it seemed sanguine that before New Year’s Eve we would toast the signing into law of the second COVID virus relief bill of 2020.

Then came a most unexpected lump of coal in our e pluribus unum Christmas stocking: #45, via a pre-recorded video, made before he left to spend the remainder of the month golfing at his Palm Beach, Florida, Mar-a-Lago Club, announced he would not sign the bill unless it included $2,000 per person ($4,000 per couple) stimulus checks rather than the Congressionally agreed upon $600 per person ($1,200 per couple) checks.

Until the release of that out of left field video, the majority in the Democratically controlled House and the majority in the Republican controlled Senate, along with the approval of the President’s Treasury Secretary, his chief negotiator, had struck a compromise relief bill that the White House had assured all parties involved that the President, in light of America’s dire pandemic and economic straits, supported and would quickly sign into law.

Of course, lawmakers on the Hill and West Wing legislative aides, working overtime updating their resumes, were as gobsmacked as if they had been told, “The Grand Canyon is really just another hole in the ground.”

Short story long, our Lame Duck President had an epiphany: The initially proposed $600 individual stimulus checks, the most the President’s party said it would give us plebs was, as he suddenly saw it, “a ridiculous amount” to give during these Kafkaesque Christmas Holidays.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared, like Donna Reed in 1946’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” when she saw how she could “lasso the moon” and make lemonade from Jimmy Stewart’s lemon like missteps, “Let’s do it!” never guessing that “Mr. Potter” POTUS would at the twelfth hour hold out for $2,000 stimulus checks that would make her previously proposed $1,200 checks look like chump change.

Because we know that when Who is on first base then #45’s “I Don’t Know” crowd playing 3rd base can never resist the urge to steal Shoeless Joe’s shoes, the motion to significantly increase the previously agreed upon stimulus checks amounts was voted down in the House faster than a Happy Holidays angel can say, “Peace on earth and good will toward men.”

Of course, even lowly, Snapchatting shepherds like us know, as we keep watch by night on our 401k’s, like the Three Kings knew millennia before Clarence won his wings, a one-off check for a couple of grand around Christmas time won’t cut it come Epiphany twelve days later.

Ergo, because, as Emperor Narcissus repeatedly remined us the past four years of his “hard rain” reign, there is more room for more God-fearing billionaires in America than there are stars in the heavens, and, oh ye, of little faith, even more cashy, commercial real estate for us to snatch up on terra firma than there are friends of George Bailey.

All we need to do is write handwritten prayers of petition to the MAGA party in D.C. and let it know the only Christmas present worthy of their giving us this “holly jolly” time of year will be one containing a ten-figure U.S. Treasury check. Anything less would be a nut tougher for us or any socially distanced, surgically masked, ballet-scene-stealing nutcracker to crack these days foreshadowing Joe Aragorn’s “The Return of the King” crowning on January 20, 2021.

So, sometime before December 28th we will feign surprise when “Don the Con” caves and signs the original bill he called “a disgrace” just four days before, the Santa Clause Rally will continue on Wall Street, and life in the Shire will shuffle along like it did before Dorothy and Toto arrived with some sort of newfangled Pfizer vaccine.

However, my fellow Americans, let us not forget that after January 20th D.C.’s politicos will consider yet another COVID relief bill to supplement the current low-cal relief legislation, and, as before, they will Zoom with us and ask, “Will $600? Will $2,000? Will $1,000,000 be enough to see you through?” Remember, please, tell them, “No, but $1,000,000,000 will do."