Christmas Icons: Part One

Christmas Icons      Part One:  "Santa Claus Never Came"

(Warning:  Spoiler Alert!)

There is no Santa Claus.  There is a North Pole, but it's just a barren icy landscape that in a few years will be the location of the most militarily strategic body of water on Earth.  There are Reindeer, but the people who keep them must slaughter them for meat and fur in order to survive.  (They also drink their blood.)  The Mongolian and Siberian herders are gradually losing their way of life, and soon there will no more reindeer than there are elves.  There is no magical toy factory; toys are made at Mattel.  It's the world's largest manufacturer, with sales over six billion dollars and 32,000 employees.  Mattel's website indicates where the "magic" happens:  "Mattel's manufacturing operations are located in China, India, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, and Thailand."  Ho.  Ho.  Ho.

Let me explain; I am not sitting up late with any strong holiday libations, nor am I depressed.  I have simply rejected the cult based on the cheerful little home invader.  Modern belief does not do legends justice.  Not that there is actually a very long legendary tradition of Santa Claus; in most world locations, the legend quickly becomes religious as one traces the history, and the current American model is, as almost everyone knows, a creation of 1920's Coca-Cola marketing.  Snopes disagrees, but only in the details; my point is that Santa emerged very recently.  (http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/santa/cocacola.asp)  For old tales, you can't beat Charles Perrault, author of Le Petit Chaperon rouge (Little Red Riding Hood), Cendrillon (Cinderella), Le Chat Botté (Puss in Boots) and La Barbe bleue (Bluebeard).  Even he wrote as recently as the late seventeenth century.  To find seriously old tales, one must search the more nationalistic or religious themes, but that's another story and I digress.

In my own mental version, the fur clad, diminutive king of the elves is supposed to make his visits by getting around tyrants installed in local governments, to deliver toys and other necessary items of encouragement, such as cured meats, coats, boots, and maybe a short barrel of beer (considered to be food by most of the world through most of history).  He is someone who comes in when circumstances look bleak and delivers hope in the form of hard goods to the lowly and downtrodden.  We are not short of the downtrodden in these tough times.  When is he going to show?  And when he does, what will he bring?  Toys?  What do we need with more toys?  (The short barrel of beer is just plain, wishful thinking)  

Well, and maybe sometimes some of us could use a choo-choo, or a scale model of the starship Enterprise that comes with a light that installs inside so it can light up at night when you go to bed.  Yeah.  But where was he when I needed him, huh?  Don't lecture me on why I got into trouble; I know why I got into trouble.  (Remember, I was up to $160 per hour before I descended to 0$ per hour in the Dot-Com-Y2K-911 crash in 2000-2003)  But, as I said, Santa Claus never came to town.  I struggled, Dorothy and the kids supported me completely, and just about a full year after we should have understood the writing on the wall, we bailed out, needing help even to return from Europe with nothing but ten boxes of possessions.  I remember one doleful evening near Christmas, when a kindly man came to "mark" our possessions.  In Germany, when you don’t pay your bills, ("can't" = "won't" = "don't"  in Deutschland) an official comes to your home and tags valuable items with a prominent red sticker, which is illegal to remove.  After a month or so, if you don't pay, they send someone else to collect your stuff.  The idea is that the almighty German peer pressure will get your ass moving.  When your friend in Germany sees that you are either clumsy, stupid, or lazy, he will invariably offer either a helping hand, a kick in the pants, or a lengthy lecture on standard behavior.  The red sticker is the government's way of encouraging your best friends to encourage good behavior in you.  Well, this guy came with a tag gun, but he couldn't find a single valuable item in the apartment!  He was a little perturbed, but when we told him our story of how we came to Europe in order to witness to the Gospel, (albeit with a naïve attitude), his face sank.  The more we were cheerful, in spite of everything, the sadder he looked.

(I'm coming to the point now):  Under my leadership, and Dorothy's indefatigable buoyancy, we celebrated the Christmas season each year for the entire wonderful four weeks of Bavarian Advent.  Personally, I think it was easy in such a place that seriously knows how to put on a festive occasion.  Now that's another story that I promise to tell another time.  Every tiny thing we did, from putting candy and nuts in the shoes for St. Nicholaus Day, to the many visits to the Christkindlmarkt, (Christ Child Market) also called Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas Market), stuffing down currywurst (simple sausage and curry sauce) while shivering in the cold, or standing in the crowd in front of the Karstadt store window display, was a celebration of its own.  We celebrated the coming of Christ, we celebrated our family, and we even celebrated our pirate style of life in Germany.  The most important part was, that when I became depressed over what I could not buy for those I loved the most, my family reacted as one:  They got pissed.  (That's "extreme anger" in American Colloquial; "pissed" means "drunk" in most of Great Britain)  We all believed in what we were doing, and we all believed that our togetherness, that the miza za pet ("table for five") we talked so much about was of supreme importance.  If I was going to be depressed in the face of our vast wealth, lacking only money, it would ruin everything.  Dorothy and I had been married for sixteen years, and Amanda was fifteen, Candace fourteen, and Ted thirteen years old.  They all looked to me to continue sending the message:  Our decisions had been good ones for us as a family, and if anything negative happened, it was either a challenge to be overcome or a message from God.  We were pirates.  Not the toothless, immoral barbarian kind; we were adventurers who lived by our own compass, and as often as not, saw the unknown as opportunity for adventure.  We accepted difficulties as the occasional natural outcome of our life on the high seas.  What was not accepted was a wishy-washy captain who had no stomach for extremity.  They would follow me and do their part only so long as I stood up on the poop deck with a set jaw and determined glare.  We would sail on, and weather the storm; it was the only way to go forward! 
 

To this very day, my kids who are now all past twenty-one talk about our adventures as a vital part of who we are.  That is not to say they liked everything about our journeys, quite to the contrary.  But they all retain a solid sense of strength in adversity, and can each raise any of life's simplest joys to festive status at any time.  While listening to my kids talking this week about getting some sort of "real" Christmas tree, because they know I love it, I realized with sudden clarity that they were visited by Santa Claus when they were kids.  They did have someone to encourage them, regardless of difficulties.  They did have special occasions and festive celebrations.  I was in the bathroom, shaving the next day.  I looked at the face in the mirror, covered with a white shaving cream beard, and in a voice worthy of Darth Vader, I said out loud, "I am Santa Claus."