#ChristmasFails: psycho Santa, frisky polar bears & premature minions

SANTA GOES PSYCHO

A festive season app that allows your kids to make a call to Santa sounds cute, doesn't it? It is, unless that app is “Santa Call New 2018”.

According to Global News, this app was recently removed from the Amazon Appstore after the mother of a British toddler discovered it was, in fact, a hotline to a rather sinister version of good old Father Christmas.

Upon pressing the call button, the app Santa proceeds to say: “Hello there. Can you hear me? In five nights, if you are free, I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you.”  

Yikes! And we thought the worst thing Father Christmas could ever do was leave a lump of coal in naughty children's stockings.

The Sun reported "Amazon have vowed to contact the app's publisher to demand an explanation".

FRISKY POLAR BEARS

Soon after a new Christmas display was unveiled at the Tynwald Mills mall on the Isle of Man, shoppers noticed two of the polar bears it featured appeared to be “more than just friends” – they’d been positioned to look as if they were mating. Photos of these frisky furballs soon went viral on social media.

The BBC reports the shopping centre management saw the funny side of the situation and, after changing the display and apologising to the public, continued the joke with a social media post of a baby polar bear that was supposedly born as a result of the creatures canoodling.

SANTA GOES OVERBOARD

“Ho, ho, ho” turned into “whooooooa!” when Father Christmas recently hitched a lift with the National Sea Rescue Institute in Cape Town. As the boat pulled up to the shore, St Nick took a tumble on to the beach, much to the amusement of onlookers and the loads of people who shared the chuckle-worthy clip on social media.

PREMATURE MINIONS

Christmas came REALLY early for H&M South Africa this year. A social media user spotted a Despicable Me shirt featuring the movie’s yellow Minions covered in Christmas decorations in one of their stores in April. Oops!

• Additional reporting by staff reporter.