Because figgy pudding just doesn’t taste the same when you have to eat it out of a can, on a street corner, while huddling around a garbage can full of burning newspapers for warmth, a moratorium on foreclosures has been announced until the end of the holidays:

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will not foreclose on any homeowners between December 19 and January 2, according to statements on their web sites. Private mortgage providers, such as JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America, also said they plan to suspend their evictions during the holidays, according to CNNMoney.

They’re not pausing any of their legal proceedings – just the actual act of booting. Which we suppose will allow for at least a few homeowners to eke out a few additional plasma donations or hock a few additional possessions to keep the wolves at bay, though most are likely so far in arrears that the additional time won’t help very many people. (Currently, a record-high 4.29% of homes are with active mortgages are in foreclosure, or just over 1 in 25.) But, hey, at least when you go to Mom and Dad’s for Christmas you won’t have to show up on their front porch with a U-Haul. You can save that for the week after New Year’s.

If you click through the link, HuffPo has a slideshow of some of the more interesting foreclosure fails of the year, including Bank of America foreclosing on its own branch office, foreclosing on someone who made a payment too early, threatening to foreclose on a man over an unpaid bill for $0, etc. (Interestingly, most of the items in the slideshow are $BAC-related.)

…and while we fear most people are just showing up to Occupy Wall Street protests because of rumors that Radiohead might be there (hint: they won’t be) we couldn’t resist sharing this sign with you as it appears to have been created in true LOLFed spirit.

h/t to Leslie

Whether you’re looking for a belated Festivus gift for Bernie Madoff or a currency alternative to the dollar, here’s a recent report on the trend of brokering deals in honey buns:

They are a lowly, sturdy food designed for desperate cravings and vending machine convenience. They can endure weeks of neglect and even a mild mashing in a coat pocket or backpack. They are, it should come as no surprise, especially beloved by a similarly hardy but disrespected population: Florida’s prison inmates.

Inmates in the Florida prison system buy 270,000 honey buns a month. Across the state, they sell more than tobacco, envelopes and cans of Coke.

Not only that, honey buns have taken on lives of their own among the criminal class: as currency for trades, as bribes for favors, as relievers for stress and substitutes for addiction. They’ve become birthday cakes, hooch wines, last meals even ingredients in a massive tax fraud.

Yep, fermented orange juice plus honey buns equals prison hooch. The more you know! You can even use them to pay your lawyers (take note, anyone who has to represent Tastykake in the near term):

George Alec Robinson, an unemployed sanitation worker and father of three, paid his public defenders in honey buns after they saved him from Virginia’s electric chair.

“He said, ‘This is all in the world I can give you guys,’ ” attorney James C. Clark told the Washington Post. “They were good, too.”

The article also details some interesting honey bun arbitrage, including trading honey buns for bail-bond lead generation and for Social Security numbers, the latter of which were then used to steal a cool million from the IRS. Not a bad rate of return for something that retails for $1.08. And speaking of that $1.08, they’ve appreciated in value from 66 cents in 2008. That’s 63% in the last 3 years. (And given the quantity of preservatives, a stash of them purchased in 2008 would probably still be edible.)

Happy Monday.

In the August edition of the The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report Marc Faber questions whether the Dow could hit 1,000 as predicted by Robert Prechter, based on his interpretation of Elliot Waves, Fibonacci numbers and socioeconomic trends.

In short, Prechter thinks the Dow went up because we were all in a good mood roughly until the dot-com crash, and that everything went to hell in a handbasket after that, and it’s going to stay there and drive the market further down.

Prechter goes onto to suggest the bear market is of super-cycle degree, the biggest since 1720-1784 and will therefore see a decline for equities deeper than the decline during the great depression, which saw the Dow fall 89 percent.

“The trend toward negative social mood that has been in progress since 2000 and which is about to accelerate will continue to curtail lending and lead to a tidal wave of defaults and a terrific deflation,” he said.

1720 was roughly the time of the collapse of the South Sea bubble — where basically the entirety of London lost their shirts via their inflated investments in a company that, among other things, underwrote the British national debt and invested in companies that made square cannon balls. Oh, and stealth startups, back before that kind of thing was cool. The only escape from that debacle was suicide or smallpox.

The best investments if the Dow hits 1K?

One suggestion from Faber is buying a self-sustainable farm in the middle of nowhere surrounded by high voltage fences and barbed wire and equipped with booby traps and an arsenal of machine guns, hand grenades and armed vehicles guarded by vicious Dobermans.

Okay, not as bucolic as my vision of retiring to the Tuscan countryside and going into the cheese and charcuterie business, but I guess I can always do that and booby-trap my prosciutto smoke vault, so no big deal.