Why do people still insist on telling their kids that Santa is real? Why don’t people think it’s creepy to tell their kids that Santa watches them while they sleep?
—North-Pole Truther
Happy Festivus, NPT:
Oh don’t get me fucking started on Santa Claus. I don’t know what I hate more about the Santa myth. Is it how inextricably bound Santa is with forcing behavioral normativity onto children? (Here’s a mind-blow for you: being “good” is actually just “acting in a way that is convenient to adults,” and adults, for the most part, are assholes.) Is it how cruelly capitalistic and class-unaware Santa is? (Oh, sorry, poor kid in class, I guess you were “bad” while Chet the rich little shit who gives you a swirlie every morning just scored an entire Best Buy! Welcome to fucking capitalism!) Is it the blatant disregard for the space-time continnum? Is it that Mrs. Claus is forced into a life of domestic servitude?
Last year we did Christmas in Arizona with my in-laws and another family they’re tight with, and that family didn’t schlep 9 Toys R Usses to Arizona so the presents that “Santa” brought were modest, whereas my daughter’s grandmother had so many gifts for her that it required four ancillary Christmases to dispatch with them all, and this poor little 7-year-old girl was reduced to tears, like, Wait, was I not good? Does Santa not love me? and I was like We are really fucking doing this right now? I was prevented from dropping the truth onto that sweet, wise little child by relatives more concerned with “preserving the [classist, heteropatriarchal] magic of Christmas,” and I regret it.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the family, a few years ago my niece and nephew’s cousin (so, like, my second cousin-in-law or some such?), who was five at the time, somehow deduced that his presents didn’t come “from Santa,” they came “from Amazon,” and on the night before Christmas he requested (AND WAS GRANTED) the obliteration of a Santa-shaped piñata, after which he hoisted Santa’s disembodied head atop a stick and paraded around with it, a la Lord of the Flies. The irony of this, of course, is that Amazon really does see us when we’re asleep and awake and everything in between, and doesn’t give a fuck if we’re good or bad as long as we keep renewing Prime — and by and large, we’re cool with it.
ask a gen-xer 
Why blame (a heteropatriarchal, pre-Friedanian incarnation of) Santa when we should probably blame Johnny’s parents for failing to love him enough to get real and negotiate the meritocracy—read: how to stop being hosers and figure out a way to buy the kid enough presents to prevent a wig-out? Santa suckage is infinitely better than parental suckage, which is worse than crony-capitalist suckage, but who’s going to pull out a whiteboard to explain to a crying eight-year-old that the decline in real wages over the last 45 years is the reason mommy and daddy have to shop at the Dollar Store?
Your “woke” perspective on Santa notwithstanding, I think your posts are rad. Like, the-sound-effects-in-BMX-Bandits rad.
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Lol meritocracy
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Reblogged this on Purposeful Parenting Journey and commented:
While walking (holding hands so as they say, HHWW) at the mall with my husband to do our Christmas shopping:
Husband (H): What will we buy for Yenyen (our daughter)
Wife (W): I’m thinking doll house but let’s look…
H: What about Santa?
W: What? (Not sure what I heard…)
H: Santa, what’s Santa’s gift for her?
W: Oh, she knows there’s no Santa. (Out daughter is 3 years old by the way)
H: (unclased his hand) What?! What did you tell her? Why did you do that? KJ! (KJ for kill joy)
W: (shocked and lost, I grew up aware and ok with the fact that Santa
isn’t real)
The following is a fun read and amost captures exactly what I have in mind (except maybe relpace Amazon with Lazada or SM… and ToysRUs as is). Enjoy!
PS: I’m an Xennial – that generation that’s smack in between gen X and the millennials. Yes, please remember that we exist! 🙂
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I couldn’t have expressed that so well. Damn. But that’s exactly how I feel about GD Santa.
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