Christmas Eve! Tonight's the night you're supposed to drift peacefully off to sleep while visions of sugar plums dance in your heads so a fat guy with a sack can break into your house, swipe those cookies you were keeping on the mantelpiece, and maybe leave some gifts under your tree as a compulsive act stemming from some sort of deep-seated psychological complex. It really is a magical time of year!

But what if you don't want visions of sugar plums dancing in your head? What if sugar plums kinda make you sick? Or what if, more likely, you have no freakin' idea what sugar plums are in the first place, and therefore you don't want them cluttering up your dreamscape? Well, good news, folks! The playful Grinches at CNN/Money have just the thing for you: a hypothetical business scenario so unspeakably awful that you'll have night terrors for weeks. Take that, sugar plums!

Without further ado, here's the goods: columnist Paul R. La Monica wants to see Motorola buy Apple.

Motorola. Apple, owned by Motorola.

The future of the Mac, determined by-- yes, you heard correctly-- Motorola.

Geesh, forget about nightmares; we may never sleep again.

La Monica's take on it is that Apple would then get a chance to do for mobile phones what the iPod did for the world of digital music. Fair enough. He also notes that Motorola is trying to spin off its chipmaking business, after which it'll be a consumer electronics company churning out phones, flat-screen TVs, DVD players, and cable set-top boxes-- all stuff that could conceivably benefit greatly from Apple's consumeriffic design skills. That all makes perfect sense, we suppose, although most of this sounds like it'd come off better if Apple bought Motorola, instead. (Heck, if Apple waits a few more quarters, maybe it'll even be in a position to do just that.)

Notice that La Monica never once mentions the Mac. Our take on it, of course, is that if Motorola bought Apple, Power Macs would go back to G4s, all Macs would be perennially backordered by six or eight weeks at best, Mac fans could go back to looking forward to 50 MHz performance boosts every eighteen months, and we'd all wind up committing mass suicide-- probably by clubbing ourselves to death with old Motorola StarMaxes.

La Monica, to his credit, isn't proposing that such a buyout is likely, possible, or even desirable ("Apple is NEVER going to sell out... it would be a sin if the company did")-- he's just playing What If. It's just that where he sees golden opportunities for Motorola's consumer goods, we see a fate worse than death for the Mac. And Mac users. But hey, it sure gets rid of those pesky sugar plums, doesn't it?