There is No Sanity-Clause
I apologize to Chico Marx for the title, but other than that I apologize not at all in saying that I was never much into Santa Claus, Kris Kringle, Father Christmas, St. Nick or any of his incarnations. In fact, I don't recall since the Christmas that unfolded when I was five-years-old, believing in either SC or the message he offered.
It was when I was five that I recall lying in my dark room very late at night, and receiving some sort of visitation. The room was at my grandmother's house and, in that big old house, the room was far away from any other activity downstairs. So, I awakened and heard noises. I scrunched my eyes up very tightly because the mythology held (in our household at least), that if you actually gazed upon Santa, he would go 'poof' and the spell would be broken and you would end up in the morning with nothing but coal. Not unlike the Japanese belief that the Emperor could not be looked up, except in the case of Santa, coal would be the end result of the inadvertent gaze, not hara-kiri.
After that, Santa was for me a non-starter. In my early school years, many kids still believed in the guy, but I didn't. I was not cynical about it all, and I wasn't lacking in imagination, I just thought Santa, along with other fairy tales, was crap piled very deep, and designed as a means of getting kids to behave nicely in the weeks before Christmas. I believed then that I saw through the ruse, and I believe to this day that I was right.
Santa is indeed a mythological entity of two purposes: to keep kids in check; to keep kids in a state of near orgasms of greed. It is in the latter manifestation I find Santa to be the more hideous. That is, he is purely a product of commercialism designed to feed the god of Mammon. In our contemporary version, Santa was the invention of a soft-drink company, and he has been doing legendary work for them and everybody else for a century-and-a-half. Christmas has long been a time of giving and getting, and raising business profits. Indeed, as a former business writer, I know how much businesses rely on Christmas sales. Nothing wrong with that, but maybe Santa could be taken off the payroll and maybe be given a mystical place of prominence in the imaginations of the very young. At least those younger than five.
In case this foregoing screed made me appear like an utter cynic, let me say that if I ever come close to believing in Santa it is when I watch the original 'Miracle on 34th Street', when Edmund Gwenn played St. Nick so believably that one almost had to be taken in. That is because he, as Kris Kringle, still believed in and professed the saintly nature of the guy who had been turned into a soda pop salesman by those of tainted souls.
It was when I was five that I recall lying in my dark room very late at night, and receiving some sort of visitation. The room was at my grandmother's house and, in that big old house, the room was far away from any other activity downstairs. So, I awakened and heard noises. I scrunched my eyes up very tightly because the mythology held (in our household at least), that if you actually gazed upon Santa, he would go 'poof' and the spell would be broken and you would end up in the morning with nothing but coal. Not unlike the Japanese belief that the Emperor could not be looked up, except in the case of Santa, coal would be the end result of the inadvertent gaze, not hara-kiri.
After that, Santa was for me a non-starter. In my early school years, many kids still believed in the guy, but I didn't. I was not cynical about it all, and I wasn't lacking in imagination, I just thought Santa, along with other fairy tales, was crap piled very deep, and designed as a means of getting kids to behave nicely in the weeks before Christmas. I believed then that I saw through the ruse, and I believe to this day that I was right.
Santa is indeed a mythological entity of two purposes: to keep kids in check; to keep kids in a state of near orgasms of greed. It is in the latter manifestation I find Santa to be the more hideous. That is, he is purely a product of commercialism designed to feed the god of Mammon. In our contemporary version, Santa was the invention of a soft-drink company, and he has been doing legendary work for them and everybody else for a century-and-a-half. Christmas has long been a time of giving and getting, and raising business profits. Indeed, as a former business writer, I know how much businesses rely on Christmas sales. Nothing wrong with that, but maybe Santa could be taken off the payroll and maybe be given a mystical place of prominence in the imaginations of the very young. At least those younger than five.
In case this foregoing screed made me appear like an utter cynic, let me say that if I ever come close to believing in Santa it is when I watch the original 'Miracle on 34th Street', when Edmund Gwenn played St. Nick so believably that one almost had to be taken in. That is because he, as Kris Kringle, still believed in and professed the saintly nature of the guy who had been turned into a soda pop salesman by those of tainted souls.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home