Modern Myths: No.5: Santa Claus

This concludes my Modern Myths series for now, although I will probably add to it more in the future. I've left the most important one this week until last, of course :-)

Myth 5: Santa Claus does not really exist and anyway, he's nothing but trouble. He makes us spend vast amounts of cash we don't have, fills our shops with garish, useless, child-tempting clutter and our children's eyes full of greedy promise. He's an invention of the modern church, at best a bloated, drunken old man who sits children on his knee and interrogates them and at worst he deliberately, maliciously causes nervous breakdowns in their parents. Without Santa Claus, the world would be a much better place. Santa should be banished to the North Pole, where he belongs. Bah, humbug.

The Truth: Haven't you seen the film? Santa is on our side! He works tirelessly all year round to make healthy wooden toys for our children, just one each, specially chosen, to brighten their long, dark, snowy winters.

Patch the elf is the bad guy! He leaves the North Pole and goes to work for the evil business mogul and nasty plastic/electronic-toy empire owner, B.Z. But BZ's toys don't work and are dangerous, which luckily Patch and therefore the rest of the world realises in the end.

The real Santa Claus actually wants to remind us of a world gone by, when we had proper fires and chimneys, when winter was hard because it's COLD! And there's not much food, except what people have carefully saved up for the one, big, midwinter blow-out when we banish the darkness with candles, the cold with fires, the misery with friendliness, the grey chill with an amazingly green tree and the deprivation with gifts.

We absolutely needed that feast to see us through the dark months until Spring when the first green shoots surfaced and we could go out and plant seeds again so that we'd have food for the following year.

But the world has gone mad now. Our winters are full of lights, central heating, money and freezer food. Our children have bright shiny toys all year round. What we're short of now is TIME, because sustaining all this artificiality is very time consuming and the continuing, seemingly unnecessary existence of Christmas only exacerbates this fact.

This is not Santa's fault and it isn't his preference.

The real Santa Claus wants to cherish each child and give just one or two small, unextravagant gifts, carefully crafted or chosen with love. The real Santa wants to ask us: "Where are your chimneys? How am I supposed to climb inside this central heating flue? You call that a fireplace?? What do you mean, your child doesn't know what a carrot is?" He intends for us to pull up a chair by the fireside at bedtime, at least one night a year, with our child on our knee and tell the magical story about flying reindeer and a night that lasts forever, until all the toys are delivered.

He exists to remind us that anything is possible. Time can be elastic, if you have something vitally important and right to do in an impossibly small section of it. You can fly around the world on a sleigh pulled by magical reindeer if you have to. Why not? Who says you can't?

If our houses are full of unwanted, unplayed with toys and our towns are filled with expensive garish merchandise and our real lives are empty - even childless, in many cases and we have nobody with whom we really want to feast, that's not Santa's fault. He only keeps doggedly trying to remind us of the alternative. Perhaps that's why we resent him so much and try to pretend that he doesn't exist ;-)