Growing up in a big family on a tiny farm in the early nineteen fifties, I was aware at a very early age that we were poor; more aware after starting school at the age of six and mingling with children of the not-so-poor. My parents struggled to manage the bare necessities of life. My mother could seemingly extract from thin air the ingredients for meals that kept us from starvation. Because of her hard work, minding the huge garden we had each summer and then putting up hundreds of jars of produce in the fall, our table was never quite bare. But it was never abundantly filled either. This amazing woman also made clothes for her many children by cutting up flour sacks and creating garments, by hand-stitching as well as using a finicky treadle-type sewing machine. Extremely few items ever came into our house through monetary purchases. Money was almost non-existent.
My reason for believing in Santa Claus until I was almost eight years old probably was a direct result of my acute awareness of our poverty. Anything Santa brought was free! No scarce dollars had to be pulled from the meager family budget to spend for these yearly gifts. When an older brother picked on me for still believing in Santa upon the delivery of a beautiful new sled for my seventh Christmas, I fought with him and cried angrily and pitifully. In truth, I wanted to fight the world that had deceived me, and my own parents who aided and abetted the cruel world, promoting the fat man in the red suit who did not exist. I recall with absolute clarity the feeling of utter disbelief in the new truth, followed by utter despair. The unfairness of life became a sudden crushing weight on my developing psyche as my family sacrificed to buy gifts for me.
That unfairness and my deeply ingrained hatred of deception have contributed to every step in the formation of who I am. To this day, no single experience surpasses “The Santa Lie” for its impact on my view of the world.
Today, my adult(!) psyche is developed (or at least aged) to the point that I can see the many fat men in red suits at this season and not fly into a rage. A few times, back around 1990, I even donned the prescribed attire and became the jolly fat man myself. Why not? It was just another acting gig. I had pimped myself out to corporate America for hundreds of spokesman jobs; how could Christmas and its idiocy be any worse? It really wasn't a hard job and the smiles brought to most faces when the red suit and fluffy white beard entered the room, well, in some ways it made everything okay. But I still hate the bastard called Santa!
Nowadays, being an actual senior (jolly old elf) citizen, currently with a scruffy white beard which will probably never be fluffy, I can be more myself without catering to so many others and their craziness. Oh sure, I have to endure some fools who might become real estate clients, but I can draw some limits around the amount I am willing to prostitute myself for their business. I am also a little more adept now at deflecting rank prejudice and nasty comments without having to completely offend the offenders. Strange how society requires us to be magicians and dancers (or prancers and vixens) in order to survive.
But being able to keep some personal perspective on the Santa BS doesn't mean it is easy to overcome the hateful image. What it may be doing to others, especially young, impressionable minds, bothers me a great deal. I have to keep reminding myself that I have known many well-balanced, well-adjusted folks who simply blew off the whole big lie with aplomb, and apparently did so at a very early age. Their psyches were obviously not as whacked out as was mine. So probably not everyone gets the brunt of the bad joke as a huge slap in the face as it was for me. Good! But I still can't see why humans continue to force total foolishness onto their beautiful children who are sponges for learning and deserve actual information to be available instead of the BS.
Would it not be truly magnificent for all parents to drop the whole sham and readily explain to their small children that "Here is a special gift from Mommy and Daddy?" Why would anyone choose to take no credit for giving a child something of value or something that is known to be what the child wants? In my estimation, the concept is a sinister head-start program to prepare a fresh new mind for the bigger lie ahead: that a loving holy father, a god, a supreme being is surely there also to give abundantly throughout life.
In a world that is heavily besieged by corruption, deception, stealing, hating, abusing and generally destroying much of the good that life has to offer, why start our own beautiful children on their road with a giant (but pretty and insidious) lie? Maybe I am wrong on this whole thing. Perhaps it has always been used as a vaccination against all the crap life can throw at us. We find out our own parents lied to us for as long as we were gullible enough to believe them, so it would be smart to distrust the world and prepare to protect ourselves from it. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger? Is that the mentality we are seeing in play here with Santa?
DEC. 31 HAPPY NEW YEAR! New post coming tomorrow.
"This amazing woman also made clothes for her many children by cutting up flour sacks and creating garments, by hand-stitching as well as using a finicky treadle-type sewing machine."
ReplyDeleteMy times have changed! So few of us know what hard times are like. What you wrote is what I heard from my parents in the decades before the fifties.
One thing old Herbie had right (and I might add, only a few) was if someone lied to there kid about Santa, how could he trust there was a Jesus?
Well you can't. The stories of a Santa are ones that are designed for the up and coming Jesus story. You are correct 100% Mark!
Call the event by another name or call it by its current name, the whole course of events should be a time where families get together and celebrate life and the common bond they share.