The new tax scheme has rich people enjoying their happiest Christmas since last Christmas, which came shortly after one of their own (or so he claims) won the presidential election, but anyone who isn’t really feeling the holiday spirit may have a new reason to celebrate thanks to a particularly extravagant eBay auction. As reported by WGN, an eBay user named Peter Lutrario is selling two of the actual puppets used for the stop-motion animation in the 1964 Rankin/Bass classic Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, which means some asshole can now literally buy the origin of someone’s fond Christmas memories. Once they have the puppets, they can light them on fire, feed them to sharks, or just grind them up and throw them at poor people—you know, the regular stuff that rich people to do celebrate the holidays.
Of course, these puppets—which happens to be Santa and Rudolph—can’t just go to anybody. Lutrario has set his eBay price at $10 million, an amount that even he recognizes as ridiculous, admitting that he was “just curious to see what the market would bear.” The listing does have an option to make an offer, though, and it says multiple people are either watching the page or have made inquiries to Lutrario, so it could end up going for a lot less than $10 million. That would be a shame, though, since there’s gotta be some wealthy piece of shit out there who just really wants to blow a ton of money on something that had a hand in bringing people joy. Hell, maybe they could use the puppets to film a new Rudolph movie where he learns a valuable lesson about objectivism.
There is some hope that a museum will step up and make an offer on the puppets, but unless museums are a lot more profitable than they seem or Lutrario is weirdly swayed by a free lifetime pass of some sort, that looks unlikely.