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Have you ever thought to yourself What I’d really like to see is a direct-to-video Strawberry Shortcake Christmas cartoon made almost twenty years after the last time anybody cared about Strawberry Shortcake. Of course you haven’t. You’d be certifiable if you did.

And, yet, Berry, Merry Christmas exists.

I know the depths of depravity to which humanity can sink—mass murders, the Stanford prison experiment, acts of terrorism, Catholicism—but I usually think I have a handle on it, that I understand what evil lurks in the hearts of men and have enough useful perspective on the matter to go about my life. Then I see something like Berry, Merry Christmas and realize that all past evils were mere throat-clearing in preparation for this, the main event. When you watch a Strawberry Shortcake cartoon, prepare to stare into the abyss and see only unending blackness staring back at you, crushing your spirit and leaving your soul as withered as a dead fig tree.

In case you don’t know, Strawberry Shortcake is a little red-headed girl who lives inside a piece of fruit and doesn’t have any parents or guardians. She breaks into shocking non-sequitur songs, related to nothing that comes before or after them. She has some pets, but I suspect that Custard, her cat, is mentally retarded (Strawberry describes her as “a very special cat with a special personality,” and we all know what that means). She has a few friends named after other foodstuffs, and they spend all their time cooking and being sweet.

One of these friends is named Angel Cake. When all these unsupervised children are having one of their many sit-around-and-eat-dessert parties (Are these kids on drugs?  Maybe they should have parents!), Angel Cake brings her favorite treat: angel cake. That’s right, Angel Cake, the little girl, whips out a bakery treat and suggests that all her friends might enjoy eating some angel cake. At which point, the one and only male character sticks his finger into the angel cake and then puts his finger in his mouth.

I’d take a shower, but the filth will never come off.

This particular cartoon is about how Strawberry Shortcake needs to buy Christmas presents for all her creepy, “Miri”-style friends. And then she spends 45 minutes doing just that.

That’s right, this little show is all about watching somebody go the store. It’s every bit as exciting as going with your mom to buy day-old bread. Except with way more disturbing horrors and oblique references to perverse childsex. (I assume; I don’t actually know what your mother does at the day-old bread store.)

Take this as a for-instance. Strawberry Shortcake decides to buy some cookie cutters for Ginger Snap, her cookie obsessed friend. Normally, this would be an uncomplicated transaction, with one party using cash or check or credit card and the other party providing the needed cookie cutters.

But nothing is normal in the nightmare world of Strawberryland. Instead of plunking down a couple of bucks for the cookie cutters, Strawberry Shortcake, who can be no older than eight, says she’d like to pay the man with strawberries. Who wrote this thing and is he still allowed to roam the streets. What kind of person takes a character named Strawberry and has her pay for goods by essentially saying, “Why don’t you take a look at these strawberries, honey!” A terrible kind of person, that’s what kind.

So, yeah: if you want your Christmas to be associated with crippling ennui, followed by skin-crawling revulsion, followed by existential dread, followed by eager thoughts of suicide, go right ahead and watch Berry, Merry Christmas. Otherwise stay very, very far away and throw rocks at anyone who tries to bring a copy of this devil’s movie anywhere near you. And as for buying a copy, it probably puts you on all kinds of state and federal lists of Persons of Interest.

I think it’d be best if we all just pretended this whole unpleasant business never happened.

If You Hated This, You Will Also Totally Hate:

• The Problem with Home Video
• Frosty Returns
• Intensely Retarded Christmas Memories
• The True Nature of a Familiar Song
• It’s a Wonderful Life