It’s customarily said that Christmas is done “for the kids.” Considering how awful Christmas is and how little our society likes children, this must be true.
– P.J. O’Rourke
Attacking Christmas is dangerous. For some people it’s the sacrosanct third rail of the American religion. So don’t misunderstand: I’m not attacking Christmas, just Santa Claus.
Honestly, the Santa smear has nothing to do with hating Christmas. Like the song says, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year.” I love Christmas. I love the family get-togethers, the gift exchanging and, foremost, the celebration of Christ’s birth. I love it all. It’s the fat guy that puts a fly in my yuletide beer.
Santa Claus is the product of Northern Europe. The Scandinavians – from whom I received many of my hand-me-down genes – can squabble amongst themselves about from which corner (Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark) he truly hails. And they occasionally do bicker about such things – usually after nine or 10 cold shots of caraway-seasoned aquavit. But the commercial version of the jolly fat man is positively American – embarrassingly so.
First clue: Santa really lives at JC Penney’s. At least that’s where he’s most often spied, letting little kids clamber all over him. Santa is the product of the dual desires of shopping malls to turn a buck and parents to feel good. The result is that this one guy, Santa, is somehow in every stupid shopping mall in America wearing out his lap and eardrums with the endless requests of snot-nosed kids.
This is cruel. Not to Santa – the AARP mailing list recipient is getting decently paid to sit there in that dumb costume. It’s the kids at which the cruelty is aimed.
Consider: Santa doesn’t exist, anymore than the Boogie Man, yet year after year, parents reinforce this farce in an effort to please their children – and feel good themselves in turn. In other words, parents lie to their kids so everyone can have a happy ol’ time.
Of course it’s a white lie – but an unnecessary deception nonetheless. Kids could be just as happy with Christmas without some obese senior citizen with a fake beard telling them that their Jesus action figure is as good as wrapped and waiting under the tree. What kind of scam do we think we’re running here?
It gets worse. Somehow, every kid in America is sitting on this one guy’s lap; this is made possible by the fact that there are about a 27,000 Santas with reindeer parked outside the malls of America. And any kid should be able to figure out that they can’t all be the Santa, not one omnipresent St. Nick. Maybe there’s a Santa guild that sensibly divvies up the gift load among Santa surrogates. Maybe, but kids don’t understand union politics.
And still the myth continues to yet another absurdity: Somehow this Santa is supposed to – in one evening no less – deliver these gifts to 100 million American kids and another few billion around the globe. Even if the 27,000 helped out, it’d take more than a month to take care of the deliveries.
And lest we forget, should the extras help out, that’d be 216,000 reindeer flying overhead – and that’s leaving Rudolph out of the equation. Make that 243,000 reindeer overhead if you feel the need to add the beast with the Tip O’Neill nose to the lineup. Furthermore, knowing a bit about livestock, I can assure the reader such a bevy of airborne herbivores would mean more deer doo-doo falling out of the sky than presents.
Better hope you get a sturdy umbrella in your stocking.
According to at least one former grade-school teacher, I’m being overly cynical. That’s common. In reviewing the argument thus far, she says that I don’t understand the physics of Santa Claus very well. Santa can do the whole delivery process by himself because time is not a constraint for St. Nick. As she explained it, “Minutes become hours; hours become days; days become weeks.”
It’s simple. Santa can do it all himself because Santa has essentially infinite time to do it all – like income-tax extensions for presents. Nonetheless, if someone a little more advanced in the study of theoretical physics than a grade-school teacher could send me a paper explaining this, I’d appreciate it.
The most horrific element of the Santa cult is the vindictive nature of this so-called saint. Everyone remembers the stern warning – almost like the prophets to the Israelites about the wrath of Jehovah – that if we were naughty boys and girls, we’d get coal in our stockings instead of hula hoops and toy trains and G.I. Joes and whatever other cheap plastic piece of junk kids happen to think the world revolves around.
Ignore the fact that coal is a far more useful product than a Barbie doll (kids don’t understand the economics of fuel and energy too well), this pap about Santa’s list is really horrible.
First, imagine that there is some guy in the North Pole keeping score of every time kids talk bad about each other, disobey their parents, say “s—,” play pranks, don’t clean their rooms, bugger their homework, pull ponytails, ditch school, blow up frogs with firecrackers, kick siblings and steal penny candy. And then imagine that this Sin Accountant adds up the balance and either rewards or damns based on the total.
Some people erroneously conclude that this behavior is no different than what God does. But entertaining that line of thinking is the real naughty deed. God is no Scrooge. Remember for a second what Christmas celebrates: God sending Christ to save the world from its sins, not merely to point the finger at the naughty kids. Christ forgives and saves the naughty kids (and their parents) from their sins. That’s what Christmas is about, not an old fart in a red suit.
Christmas is about the gift of salvation by Christ, and Santa couldn’t stuff that under a tree if he had all eternity.
Every good and perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of Lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.
James 1:17
WATCH: Mark Levin: Kamala Harris is not someone who can be commander in chief
WND Staff