Bad Santa?
December 26, 2003 | 12:00am
Tis the day after Christmas and all through the house…not a gift wrapper discarded…what a damn freakin’ louse! I was one of those he never visited. Even throughout my childhood, when I willingly suspended disbelief despite all evidence to the contrary, I persisted. Wrote letters, dropped hints to my parents. I tried to channel Virginia’s naïve mysticism. All the while in the unrelenting background, the ominous "he’s gonna find out who’s naughty or nice" kept haunting the airwaves and my conscience. Still, no Santa love.
He’s ethnocentric, I thought. We don’t have chimneys here. Maybe they didn’t produce the kind of goods I wanted in his North Pole sweatshop where he worked those poor elves to death. Again, not very multi-culti savvy – that heinous fur-trimmed outfit is just not up to tropical travelling standards, his reindeer would just rain deer shit on us, and Mrs. Claus probably forbade him to come here in fear he might catch some Southeast Asian venereal disease. Excuses, excuses.
I grew up cold, jaded. Did I do something wrong? Did I not appease him well enough with the triple-choc cookies and low-fat milk left out as an offering/sacrifice? Was our Tree a paltry, insufficient simulation of his sacred altar? I yearned for his coming. I sang songs to invoke his presence (and presents). The malls were filled with his Priests, clothed in his image and ringing bells, asking for our wishes and supplications.
But for all these methods of divination, none of my wishes ever came true. I laid myself down to sleep on Christmas Eve, only to wake up the next morning to a plateful of uneaten pastries and a staircase of unstuffed stockings. It was my parents’ fault that Santa was driven away. They refused to take part in the ritual of assuming his name and performing his role. Those heretics.
This abandonment left a profound impact on my developing psyche. I thought I was bad. This led to a cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies wherein I did become bad–akin to other logical fallacies like connecting my malamorphous physical qualities to the moral of the Pinocchio story, my bad luck to the seven generations before me’s evilness, etc. What’s the point, I thought. I was already blacklisted in Santa’s book.
Because Santa turned a blind eye to my suffering, I turned into a fervent Santatheist.
His capricious, selective nature of giving did not resonate with my personal sense of justice. So many lies about him were perpetuated – that he gives gifts to rich and poor children alike, as long as they’re good, was obviously untrue, a horrible marketing ploy to whip children into submission. I decided to never let my future kids believe in this convoluted myth only to be severely disillusioned or worse, grow up with some serious Father (Christmas) issues. I would also do away with guilt-preying practices of gift-exchanging for good.
Later on, I found out a few things about the supposed "Jolly old St. Nick". Like so many handed-down characters, the original essence and aura of the Dutch Sinter Klaas has been whittled away, subdued and distilled into the corporate red-and-white logo of a Coke bottle. While tenuously based on the historical Saint Nicholas, Santa’s fantastical origins are actually linked to Teutonic and Nordic mythologies – Odin, the god of air, and Thor, the god of thunder. Thor was supposedly elderly and heavy with a long white beard, and he flew in a chariot drawn by two white goats called Cracker and Gnasher. He lived up north, was quite friendly and cheerful, and would shimmy down the chimney to bathe in his element, fire. Though similar, this was nothing like that bearded old bastard whose effigy we’ve come to populate our lawns and living rooms with. The magnificent Thor, I love Thor! (Not only, but some parties claim that in later pre-Christian societies, the Santa figure was a bit of a tribal shaman who consumed a lot of hallucinogenic mushrooms, as did his reindeer, hence the red face and all the flying.)
And so in this bumpy sleigh ride from ardent worshipper to rabid denouncer, I have reached a state of enlightened grace and can never look at a fat man in a red tracksuit the same way again. Santa is not inherently evil as I’ve come to believe, we just made him that way, like how he’s been appropriated to be the Ayn Rand Foundation’s image model. Through misplaced deification, he somehow turned into a gluttonous symbol of unchecked capitalism by being cleverly lumped together with the Christmas celebration. Santa, if you dig deep, really is magical and quite cool. We’ve been singing about the wrong guy all along.
He’s ethnocentric, I thought. We don’t have chimneys here. Maybe they didn’t produce the kind of goods I wanted in his North Pole sweatshop where he worked those poor elves to death. Again, not very multi-culti savvy – that heinous fur-trimmed outfit is just not up to tropical travelling standards, his reindeer would just rain deer shit on us, and Mrs. Claus probably forbade him to come here in fear he might catch some Southeast Asian venereal disease. Excuses, excuses.
I grew up cold, jaded. Did I do something wrong? Did I not appease him well enough with the triple-choc cookies and low-fat milk left out as an offering/sacrifice? Was our Tree a paltry, insufficient simulation of his sacred altar? I yearned for his coming. I sang songs to invoke his presence (and presents). The malls were filled with his Priests, clothed in his image and ringing bells, asking for our wishes and supplications.
But for all these methods of divination, none of my wishes ever came true. I laid myself down to sleep on Christmas Eve, only to wake up the next morning to a plateful of uneaten pastries and a staircase of unstuffed stockings. It was my parents’ fault that Santa was driven away. They refused to take part in the ritual of assuming his name and performing his role. Those heretics.
This abandonment left a profound impact on my developing psyche. I thought I was bad. This led to a cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies wherein I did become bad–akin to other logical fallacies like connecting my malamorphous physical qualities to the moral of the Pinocchio story, my bad luck to the seven generations before me’s evilness, etc. What’s the point, I thought. I was already blacklisted in Santa’s book.
Because Santa turned a blind eye to my suffering, I turned into a fervent Santatheist.
His capricious, selective nature of giving did not resonate with my personal sense of justice. So many lies about him were perpetuated – that he gives gifts to rich and poor children alike, as long as they’re good, was obviously untrue, a horrible marketing ploy to whip children into submission. I decided to never let my future kids believe in this convoluted myth only to be severely disillusioned or worse, grow up with some serious Father (Christmas) issues. I would also do away with guilt-preying practices of gift-exchanging for good.
Later on, I found out a few things about the supposed "Jolly old St. Nick". Like so many handed-down characters, the original essence and aura of the Dutch Sinter Klaas has been whittled away, subdued and distilled into the corporate red-and-white logo of a Coke bottle. While tenuously based on the historical Saint Nicholas, Santa’s fantastical origins are actually linked to Teutonic and Nordic mythologies – Odin, the god of air, and Thor, the god of thunder. Thor was supposedly elderly and heavy with a long white beard, and he flew in a chariot drawn by two white goats called Cracker and Gnasher. He lived up north, was quite friendly and cheerful, and would shimmy down the chimney to bathe in his element, fire. Though similar, this was nothing like that bearded old bastard whose effigy we’ve come to populate our lawns and living rooms with. The magnificent Thor, I love Thor! (Not only, but some parties claim that in later pre-Christian societies, the Santa figure was a bit of a tribal shaman who consumed a lot of hallucinogenic mushrooms, as did his reindeer, hence the red face and all the flying.)
And so in this bumpy sleigh ride from ardent worshipper to rabid denouncer, I have reached a state of enlightened grace and can never look at a fat man in a red tracksuit the same way again. Santa is not inherently evil as I’ve come to believe, we just made him that way, like how he’s been appropriated to be the Ayn Rand Foundation’s image model. Through misplaced deification, he somehow turned into a gluttonous symbol of unchecked capitalism by being cleverly lumped together with the Christmas celebration. Santa, if you dig deep, really is magical and quite cool. We’ve been singing about the wrong guy all along.
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