Oh, Santa, just admit it: After centuries of forcing your belly to jiggle and shake while children and grandparents tinkle down your leg, poke candy canes in your beard and yank the pom-pom off your hat, you must be ready to take someone out. Well, I have a proposal. This year, let’s forget about the mink earmuffs and diamond-crusted cutlery and focus on the other half of my list: people who should be shot. Please make it a Merry Christmas and a Happier New Year for us all and assassinate the following human dung heaps:

1) One-night stands who walk around your apartment in a T-shirt and no underwear with their boners bobbing in space like an alien tentacle.

2) Dates who burp up wet slop throughout dinner just like your deaf grandmother. What, they think you can’t hear it? That you don’t mind if they splatter half-digested au jus all over your $200 Chloe T-shirt?

3) Pantywipe “alcoholics” who won’t give up their A.A. jive for one night and at least order a drink so you don’t sit there all pink-nosed and fumbly like Louise Lush. It’s not like it’s wasteful—you’ll drink the damn thing.

4) People who leave stuttering, redundant cell-phone messages and neglect to state their business until around the five-minute mark. Hey, windbag! Are you trying to give me brain cancer? Where’s the fast-forward button on this thing?

5) Cab drivers who needlessly blast their horn when you’ve already reached the curb, just to prove they could’ve mowed you down if they’d wanted. Real Christian of you, asswipe! May an Olympic javelin sail through your windshield and skewer your skull.

6) Waiters—particularly waiters who scowl at you through the restaurant window, the one you’re using to check your teeth for poppy seeds. What the hell? It’s not like you’re in the restaurant; you’re on the street side!

7) Bartenders who skimp on extra ice. Little-known fact: Ice is frozen water. Also worth noting: It tends to melt when dropped in a glass of room-temperature Belvedere.

8) Construction workers on lunch break who think it’s perfectly fine to whoop and throw their pelvises around as you stroll past them. Look, just because you’ve got excellent posture and spend $400 per haircut and slather yourself in sunblock before you’d consider going near a window doesn’t mean you’re willing to sleep with just anyone who notices.

Although it’s sort of nice to know someone does.

9) People who breathe down your neck at candy stores. You’re trying to hurry, but it’s hard to separate the delicious black jellybeans from the rancid stomach-acid flavors using a scooper the size of a shovel.

10) Over-Xanaxed subway passengers who appear unruffled by route-change announcements like: “Although this is a local train, we’ll be skipping the next 15 stops.” What’s with these yawning zombies? Did they not hear the guy? Or was 188th Street everyone’s destinations all along? Why am I the only one to yell “Fuck!” and throw my purse the length of the train?

11) Fire trucks that blast their sirens just as you’re hitting the punch line of a 14-minute blow-by-blow of the night your cell phone automatically dialed your mother in the middle of angry sex with your boss. Someone better be on fucking fire.

12) Butthole dates who call you “pottymouth” to remind you to be ladylike, which proves they don’t want a girlfriend—they want a mother they can screw. Blue bloods are so predictable. So are Catholics, Latinos, Estonians and Jews.

13) Dates who make disparaging remarks about your eating habits, as if it’s so weird to eat the lemon rind out of your Pellegrino, or the shrimp tails off his plate, or the crust off all the rolls in the breadbaskets. I don’t get how that’s rude. The bread’s free, right?

14) Thirtysomething women who still blame their sexual issues on some shit that went down in high school. I mean, please—who wasn’t raped?

15) People you dump because they start acting like lunatics: ringing your apartment 10 times a night, banging on the lobby door and leaving violent, slurring messages that clog up your cell phone and honestly scare the shit out of you. Only for some sick reason, you can’t get this guy out of your mind—so when you spot him outside the Cutting Room a year later looking all dark and brooding, you naturally agree to a drink, which turns into six or seven, and in no time you’re sort of in love all over again. But then he has to start reminiscing and get all revisionist on you, suggesting that he was the one to end things with you, as if you had been the crazy person to stand below your apartment window and shout, “I know you’re fucking someone up there, you philandering cunt!”, as if you had been the one to overturn garbage bins all up and down the sidewalk and blast your neighbors’ buzzers until the slick-haired Italian across the hall threatened to beat you senseless with his belt. Of course not. It’s not like you were the married one.

16) People who sneeze in multiples of three or more.

17) Pregnant woman in Ugg Boots.

18) Babies.

And that’s about it, Santa. Hope I’ve persuaded you to Action Jackson all the renobs and fuckbuckets in the immediate area so the rest of us can sip our ginger-flavored Prosecco in peace.

Kiss, kiss!

Love,

Ramona Rabinowitz

PS: If Blitzer or Nixon get caught in the crossfire, a reindeer pelt would make a fabulous throw for my le Corbusier couch. But don’t go out of your way for my sake. XO.

Oh, Santa, just admit it: After centuries of forcing your belly to jiggle and shake while children and grandparents tinkle down your leg, poke candy canes in your beard and yank the pom-pom off your hat, you must be ready to take someone out. Well, I have a proposal. This year, let’s forget about the mink earmuffs and diamond-crusted cutlery and focus on the other half of my list: people who should be shot. Please make it a Merry Christmas and a Happier New Year for us all and assassinate the following human dung heaps:

1) One-night stands who walk around your apartment in a T-shirt and no underwear with their boners bobbing in space like an alien tentacle.

2) Dates who burp up wet slop throughout dinner just like your deaf grandmother. What, they think you can’t hear it? That you don’t mind if they splatter half-digested au jus all over your $200 Chloe T-shirt?

3) Pantywipe “alcoholics” who won’t give up their A.A. jive for one night and at least order a drink so you don’t sit there all pink-nosed and fumbly like Louise Lush. It’s not like it’s wasteful—you’ll drink the damn thing.

4) People who leave stuttering, redundant cell-phone messages and neglect to state their business until around the five-minute mark. Hey, windbag! Are you trying to give me brain cancer? Where’s the fast-forward button on this thing?

5) Cab drivers who needlessly blast their horn when you’ve already reached the curb, just to prove they could’ve mowed you down if they’d wanted. Real Christian of you, asswipe! May an Olympic javelin sail through your windshield and skewer your skull.

6) Waiters—particularly waiters who scowl at you through the restaurant window, the one you’re using to check your teeth for poppy seeds. What the hell? It’s not like you’re in the restaurant; you’re on the street side!

7) Bartenders who skimp on extra ice. Little-known fact: Ice is frozen water. Also worth noting: It tends to melt when dropped in a glass of room-temperature Belvedere.

8) Construction workers on lunch break who think it’s perfectly fine to whoop and throw their pelvises around as you stroll past them. Look, just because you’ve got excellent posture and spend $400 per haircut and slather yourself in sunblock before you’d consider going near a window doesn’t mean you’re willing to sleep with just anyone who notices.

Although it’s sort of nice to know someone does.

9) People who breathe down your neck at candy stores. You’re trying to hurry, but it’s hard to separate the delicious black jellybeans from the rancid stomach-acid flavors using a scooper the size of a shovel.

10) Over-Xanaxed subway passengers who appear unruffled by route-change announcements like: “Although this is a local train, we’ll be skipping the next 15 stops.” What’s with these yawning zombies? Did they not hear the guy? Or was 188th Street everyone’s destinations all along? Why am I the only one to yell “Fuck!” and throw my purse the length of the train?

11) Fire trucks that blast their sirens just as you’re hitting the punch line of a 14-minute blow-by-blow of the night your cell phone automatically dialed your mother in the middle of angry sex with your boss. Someone better be on fucking fire.

12) Butthole dates who call you “pottymouth” to remind you to be ladylike, which proves they don’t want a girlfriend—they want a mother they can screw. Blue bloods are so predictable. So are Catholics, Latinos, Estonians and Jews.

13) Dates who make disparaging remarks about your eating habits, as if it’s so weird to eat the lemon rind out of your Pellegrino, or the shrimp tails off his plate, or the crust off all the rolls in the breadbaskets. I don’t get how that’s rude. The bread’s free, right?

14) Thirtysomething women who still blame their sexual issues on some shit that went down in high school. I mean, please—who wasn’t raped?

15) People you dump because they start acting like lunatics: ringing your apartment 10 times a night, banging on the lobby door and leaving violent, slurring messages that clog up your cell phone and honestly scare the shit out of you. Only for some sick reason, you can’t get this guy out of your mind—so when you spot him outside the Cutting Room a year later looking all dark and brooding, you naturally agree to a drink, which turns into six or seven, and in no time you’re sort of in love all over again. But then he has to start reminiscing and get all revisionist on you, suggesting that he was the one to end things with you, as if you had been the crazy person to stand below your apartment window and shout, “I know you’re fucking someone up there, you philandering cunt!”, as if you had been the one to overturn garbage bins all up and down the sidewalk and blast your neighbors’ buzzers until the slick-haired Italian across the hall threatened to beat you senseless with his belt. Of course not. It’s not like you were the married one.

16) People who sneeze in multiples of three or more.

17) Pregnant woman in Ugg Boots.

18) Babies.

And that’s about it, Santa. Hope I’ve persuaded you to Action Jackson all the renobs and fuckbuckets in the immediate area so the rest of us can sip our ginger-flavored Prosecco in peace.

Kiss, kiss!

Love,

Ramona Rabinowitz

PS: If Blitzer or Nixon get caught in the crossfire, a reindeer pelt would make a fabulous throw for my le Corbusier couch. But don’t go out of your way for my sake. XO.

How about: Stop wearing them? How about: Be glad that the boots are back-ordered from the manufacturer until the spring; be glad that they're going for three times their $150 price on eBay, impossible to find, etc. That's good . It will give you time to stop and think before you buy, you big ol' fashion sheep.

Ugg boots originate in Australia (where else?), but like many other "but they're sooo comfortable" trends of the past year-velour track suits, etc.-the blame for their popularity may be pinned squarely on Southern California. Embraced 25 years ago by shaggy, tolerant surfers, Uggs caught on more recently with celebrities like Jessica Simpson and Pamela Anderson. Their sleek Barbie beauty is supposedly thrown into stark relief by the dowdy boots-which simply make the rest of us look like militant lesbian activists.

"I despise them," said Matt Heien, a New York publicist who grew up in California, of Uggs. "I am quite bummed out that they are making such a comeback."

Uggs are, in a word, awful. They make thin women look fat, sexy women look frumpy, smart women look dumb. New York ladies have always prided themselves on looking polished, pulled together, "sharp"-armored for anything-and these are just the opposite: dissolute, sloppy, yielding.

More damningly, while they might indeed be " sooo comfortable," as universally acknowledged, they lack one essential quality that ugly boots have always had: practicality. News flash: Uggs are not waterproof! Yes, you can buy an $8 protective spray-but we all know how well those work. One false move in the city slush and you basically have a pair of bacteria-bearing bedroom slippers on your feet. It's just not respectful to your fellow citizens, not to mention yourself.

The city wasn't always so welcoming to Uggs. Once we had backbone. On the company's official Web site, you'll find the story of how the product flopped in Manhattan in the hard-headed disco days of 1978. (The "reception was not a friendly one.") It must feel like karmic payback for the Aussies when their soft, shapeless boot product appeared in a Bill Cunningham photo spread in the New York Times Sunday Styles section on Dec. 7.

Stefani Greenfield, the co-owner of the Scoop boutique chain, was on the forefront of the current wave of Uggs, buying her first pair over two years ago on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica.

"Every one of my Scoop people were like, 'What are those ?'" she said. "Nobody got it. Everyone was like, 'Do you think you're on the ski slopes? Do you think you're at Aspen?' Then, all of a sudden, it became this thing ."

If you think it's bad in New York, come West, where the unpleasant spectacle of women stomping around in fuzzy hausfrau footwear is supplemented by a basic illogic: It's not even cold.

And they're multiplying like Tribbles.

At the Hollywood Wilshire YMCA: 15 pairs of Ugg boots lined up outside a Saturday 10 a.m. yoga class.

Two days after Christmas on the third floor of the Beverly Hills Barneys: European women in Uggs were chattering in foreign languages. Downstairs, the MTV personality Daisy Fuentes was poring over the jewelry counter, wearing a suede jacket, Nordic sweater and faded blue jeans tucked into big, black Uggs.

"I got them a while ago, in Aspen," she said. "I love them. My favorite way is to wear them at home in Malibu, with pajamas. I was hosting an MTV thing in Texas and wearing them, and people were like, 'Are you waiting for a snowstorm?' I was like, 'No, you don't get it-they're cool and warm at the same time!'"

A few miles east, the West Hollywood Nordstrom, the boots' major U.S. distributor, is solidly sold out of Uggs. The store was pushing a look-alike brand called Qwaruba. Women crowded around, fondling them. A male Nordstrom shopper was asked what he thought of the style.

"I think, 'Why aren't you in a ski lodge with your feet up-and maybe one leg broken?'" he said.

Indeed, men's refreshing hatred of Uggs crosses entire time zones and generations. They remind Lance Wills, 30, an artist who lives in Hollywood, of a scene in Dumb and Dumber : "When Jim Carrey gets totally overdone with the Sasquatch boots and the ridiculous, Taos-looking hybrid snowsuit," he said. "People laugh at that on the screen, but then just slip 'em right on and think that they're hot and fashionable!"

"Keep 'em behind locked doors," advised Mr. Wills. "It's kind of like wearing your most comfortable, ugliest pair of slippers that your dog has used as a chew toy for years."

Naomi Glauberman, a fiftysomething writer who lives in Venice, has been coveting Ugg boots for her daily bike ride to yoga, but her 18-year-old son, Sam Jacoby, forbade the purchase.

"Have you seen those little skirts with the boots?" he asked. "Oh God, that just makes me sick."

A 29-year-old entrepreneur who didn't want his name used-let's call him "Horace"-called from New York to weigh in.

He said he first became aware of Uggs about three years ago, in L.A., when his brother's girlfriend, a stylist from Vermont, wore them with a skirt.

"She was of smaller stature, petite, and it was cute," Horace said. "She was always a bit edgy, and somehow made it work. It's like, little Asian women can get away with that stuff, but normal-sized white women can't."

Fast-forward to Hanukkah 2003. Horace's own 5-foot-7, blond, Caucasian, big-footed girlfriend received a package in the mail.

"She's ecstatic," he said. "I was like, 'What could possibly be in that box that makes her so excited?' And she's unwrapping it-and then she holds up what I believe to be one of the ugliest pieces of footwear I had ever seen. Because it was huge . It wasn't little or cute; it was big and furry."

The girlfriend pulled on the boots and began "shuffling along like a Snuffleupagus," as Horace put it, up and down the corridor of her Gramercy Park apartment. "'My God,' I thought," he said. "'Maybe I never noticed it before! Maybe she's not as graceful as I imagined her in normal shoes! Maybe she slouches!'

"She no longer walked in beauty," he concluded sadly.

"My husband calls them the depression boot," said Ms. Greenfield. "He's used to seeing me in strappy Manolos. He goes, 'Usually, when you walk, you're wearing high heels, you're standing proud, tall. You go from strutting … to schlepping along in these boots!' He's like, 'If they make you happy, they make me happy'-but no, he doesn't find them sexy. At all."

There's a word that springs to mind to describe men who tolerate or, God forbid, praise Uggs: whipped .

"I love them," crooned Matt Goss, a balding British pop star who was accompanying Ms. Fuentes at the Barneys jewelry counter. "They're too legit to quit! Nothing's more sexy than a woman who's comfortable."

"I'm thinking of getting him a pair," Ms. Fuentes said, nudging him affectionately.

At a Boxing Day party in Silverlake, Rebecca Coleman, 27, who works in advertising, was rhapsodizing about her Ugg look-alikes, which she learned about from an MTV stylist. She said she wanted to buy her husband Bart a pair of Uggs, but she couldn't find any in his size 14.

"I went to Boston last month, and I have never been so happy in a cold place ever," she said. "And I wasn't even wearing socks with them! It's not just fashion. It's super- comfortable and really warm."

Does her husband like the way she looked in them?

"He doesn't care. He was like, 'Oh, cute whatever.'"

Some might argue that female attachment to Uggs represents a feminist stance against the patriarchal pressure to doll ourselves up.

"But the funny thing is that this feminist stance is-a slouch !" Horace said. "It's not 'Stand tall on your Nikes and Reeboks and propel yourself forth,' like the goddess mentality of 'Go do sports.' It doesn't even support the arch. They're not structurally sound. You know, we've come so far in shoe technology-it can't be good for your feet to walk on plain pieces of rubber. I mean, I'm not asking you to float on seven-inch heels like the models. Who expects that? But there's a compromise. It shouldn't be Ugg boots or bust."

Zach Hafer, 27, a lawyer who lives in Brooklyn Heights, has a girlfriend (also a lawyer) who was craving a pair of Ugg boots something bad after she saw the Sunday Times layout.

"She's always cold," he said. He tracked down a pair of ultra-tall, size-eight sand Uggs on eBay and got them Airborne Expressed to his office from Arizona two days before Christmas.

"I don't want to say for how much, because I might look like an idiot," he said. "But I looked at it like getting tickets: You want to see a playoff basketball game, you gotta pay a premium."

And is he pleased with the way they look on her?

"I kind of like 'em, actually," Mr. Hafer said. "I hate those pointy boots that everybody wears-I mean, I wasn't drooling, but compared to those pointy-toed shoes …. But then again, I went to Dartmouth."