The 6 Biggest Christmas F#@%-Ups of 2014

As part of their festive marketing campaign, TGIF planned to fly these drones over couples in the hope of getting them to kiss, because there's nothing more romantic than aerobots usually reserved for brutal warfare. Unfortunately, the anonymous pilot decided to be a massive show-offy dick for the press and ended up crashing into the face of photographer Georgine Benvenuto, who's probably now considering ditching public relations work in exchange for covering civil wars and nuclear accidents.

TGI Friday's
The drone itself went missing, which is terrifying because it now has tasted human blood.

The drone's blades ended up cutting out a bit of her nose, but at least TGIF's drone program has been suspended. On the plus side, customers can now eat their food without risking their lives. On the down side, this means that TGI Friday's is now officially more responsible than the U.S. military.

And then the North threatened to bomb the shit out of it if they didn't take it down.

Lee Jin-man/AP
We had a caption joke ready to go, but Sony deleted it.

The tree is no more than a radio tower annually adorned with lights and a gigantic star. It's about as dangerous as, well, a tree. However, because they outlawed irony in the 1960s, North Korea considers it a "despicable act of psychological warfare" and a "madcap confrontation racket," a quip that probably sounded better in their heads. Eventually, the South was forced to take it down, because getting nuked over a Christmas decoration just isn't worth it. It's not like it was something truly important, like a Rogen/Franco movie.

As for the real reason the North is so pissed, it's either a) the fact that the citizenry can see the tree and the leadership is frightened that the twinkly lights will succeed where mass starvation, concentration camps, and shit haircuts have failed, triggering a country-wide insurrection, or b) because the country hates religion to tragically comical extremes, making them the real-life equivalent of Reddit (sans kooky gaming-related conspiranoia).

And deliver this:

via. mirror.co.uk
"Sorry, Santa did all the coke."

The Magical Journey, located near the town of Sutton Coldfield in England, promised British families a "winter wonderland of magic and drama," and, while we're not sure how much magic there was in the air, visitors definitely experienced a sleigh-load of drama. Among the attractions offered by the park was the chance to ride a "train" (read: "golf buggy pulled by a tractor"), be gifted unwrapped dollar-store rubbish from a grotto apparently staffed by the lead character from Bad Santa, and queue for hours. To be entirely fair, however, that's what passes for a white-knuckle ride over there.

The owners blamed poor weather conditions for preventing them from finishing the installations in time, because "our dog ate the whole park" didn't sound too convincing. As a result, the park received so many complaints that it was forced to shut its doors after a single day. After taking a few days to get their shit together and work off the hangover, the park reopened in glory and majesty ... only to close again a few weeks later, this time for good. Hopefully.

Yes, apparently Christmas has been called off in the U.K. because Scotland Yard finally nabbed that elf-abusing, midnight cookies-stealing bastard. The kids watching this fiasco understandably started freaking out, and many were reduced to tears -- a video recorded during the parade shows adults laughing while their children despair and someone says, "Santa's been arrested!" Worst of all, U.K. banknotes don't even have "In God We Trust" written on them, so there's no chance of any last-minute Miracle on 34th Street-style exonerations.

The tree in question, a magnificent-sounding 45-foot-tall Norway spruce, is so pitiful that there no jokes that could match the awful reality. For a while, its only decoration was a single Peanuts-esque bauble -- because you might as well embrace the nightmare with both arms -- while, according to one resident, local birds refuse to land on it, presumably out of fear that they'll tip it over. Or just fear.

It isn't all bad, though. In a turn of events worthy of an '80s feel-good romp, once the tree got national coverage, the community rallied against plans to remove it ... despite initially gathering money to destroy it. Some even consider it a metaphor for the festive season itself, as opposed to a metaphor for really, really wanting those dumb tourist dollars.