For all my 21 years, the esteemed St. Nicholas has managed to find the time, energy, and gymnastic prowess to fit his portly stature through my chimney every Christmas Eve. Or has he? I swallowed the establishment’s lies about this illogical fantasy for years, but now that I’ve reached 21, I’m calling their bluff: there is no way for this person to exist in our society. There is no Santa Claus.
The mere notion of an apparently ageless man from the wilds of the Arctic Ocean flying through the sky in an airborne rickshaw is already insulting to the intelligence of the critical thinkers among us. Couple this with the fact he is led by unusually compliant animals – some wielding ostentatiously provocative facial decorations – and we have before our eyes a damaging, perverse, distortion of reality.
No matter how much joy or Christmas spirit he has in his heart, there’s absolutely almost no way his life is financially tenable in our neo-liberal, pluralist world. Check the maths. He works for a mere three weeks a year, busking outside department stores, but he has to buy presents for every person who writes to him? I’m no mathematician, but those numbers probably don’t match up.
Thanks to my parents’ disingenuous motives, I still don’t know who’s eating my cookies, drinking my milk, and replacing my broken Scalextric on a yearly basis – but I can tell you for a fact that it probably isn’t Santa Claus.
R. Dolf.
This article appeared in CG Issue 55