Editing 361: Christmas Back Home

{{comic
| number    = 361
| date      = December 24, 2007
| title     = Christmas Back Home
| image     = christmas back home.png
| titletext = Family going to bed at 10 PM is so much worse than jet lag.
}}

==Explanation==

The script begins similarly to the poem "{{w|A Visit from St. Nicholas}}":

:'''Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro' the house''
:''Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;''

However, there is a change in the text due to the fact that Cueball is on a computer, perhaps coding or on the internet.  Instead, it reads
:"'Twas the night before Christmas at my family's house"
:"There were no sounds of stirring save the click of a mouse."

The idea is that [[Cueball]] has been so used to being on the computer late at night (perhaps coding, or deep into some [[386: Duty Calls|Internet argument]]) and he's forgotten the hours normal people sleep that, when Santa Claus arrives, Cueball is still awake. Note the mouse pun.

Being forced to sleep at normal times is compared with {{w|jet lag}}: sleeplessness due to your body being synchronized to another time zone, named as such because jet aircraft made it possible for people to travel farther and faster, throwing their internal clocks out of sync with the place they're in far more than in the age of necessarily longer travel times in which the full clock-shift is smeared over days, weeks or even months. Here, Cueball needs to turn back his internal clock over five hours to sync with his family.

Naturally, {{w|Santa Claus}} sticks to his strange schedule of being simultaneously at houses with trees and chimneys on Christmas Eve. He is exempt from this lag.

==Transcript==
:[The panel depicts the interior of a house with numerous Christmas decorations. Santa stares at Cueball, who is sitting at his desk with his laptop.]
:'Twas the night before Christmas at my family's house.
:There were no sound of stirring save the click of a mouse.
:For 'twas just like a childhood Christmas except
:I'd forgotten the hours that normal folks slept.
:Santa: What are you doing out of bed so late?
:Cueball: Late? It's barely 3AM!

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Christmas]]