Going to Hell in a handbasket...

Language has always held a fascination for me and when someone wrote to me a while back and used the phrase “Going to hell in a handbasket”, it was one of those Ding-Ding moments.  Time to do a bit of research on language.  That should keep me out of trouble for at least a couple of minutes. 

Now the standard explanation is, of course, that “going to hell in a handbasket” means that someone is headed for disaster and it is most likely that there is no turning back.  The expression has been around, actually, for hundreds of years. Some think it refers to the baskets used to catch guillotined heads in the 1700’s in France. Others associate it with the American gold rush of the 1840’s when men were lowered by hand into mine shafts (in baskets) in order to set dynamite. Then there is Meat Loaf who named his 2011 album Hell in a Handbasket. (Did you know, by the way, that his real name was Marvin, then Michael Lee Aday?)  Anyway -- I also located dozens of memes and several cartoons with this “theme” of going to hell in a handbasket.  The Urban Dictionary defines is as a “Comical way of describing a situation where you or somebody is going to end up in deep shit.”  That is my favorite tidbit of all. Sometimes research is fun.

My question --- Is one able to buy tickets for others to take a ride in this basket?  Just asking for a friend. (This last idiomatic expression – asking for a friend -- came into use in the 1990’s. I really like it. It makes me smile from the inside out.)