The following is absolutely brilliant.
To my knowledge, it’s written by Dennis Presiloski, who published it at substack and on Facebook.
They told me Santa Claus would bring me presents if I were a good little boy. They told me he would come down the chimney, after landing on the roof. In a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer. I looked at them. I looked at the heater vent in our basement apartment and thought of the three floors between us and the roof, and I thought, “Bullshit.”
I may have been four-years old but I wasn’t stupid. I mean flying reindeer maybe, but there was no way a fat man in a red suit was going to squeeze down a four-inch pipe with or without presents.
No way.
And then there was the whole story about leaving cookies out for Santa Claus, but my dad was eating them as fast as my mom could put them out, and I figured I’d already seen who the real Santa Claus was. Yep. I had it all figured out. That was the beginning of my “conspiracy theory” career.
I didn’t believe their story. They couldn’t make me believe it. The whole thing was stupid and ridiculous, but there was just one problem…
I wanted those presents.
So I kept my mouth shut. I went along with the lie. And sure enough the next morning, there was a brand new train set under the tree. Not so coincidentally wrapped in the same kind of paper as the non-Santa presents. Just then my mom “noticed” that Santa had eaten the cookies we left out (as if that were conclusive evidence) and my dad made a joke how much Santa enjoyed them.
They must think I’m really dumb, I thought. But the jokes on them because I got the train set anyways and didn’t believe their nonsense. I hadn’t invented this game, I didn’t approve of the game, but I was playing the game.
A year went by and it was time for another round of pretending that Santa was at both Kingsway Mall, Londonderry Mall, and at the North Pole managing the elves, all at the same time. Whatever. Sit me on the fake beard fat guy’s lap and take a photo. It was all so very stupid, but if that was what I had to do to get extra presents, then here come’s Santa Claus.
The thing I couldn’t figure out was what was in this whole charade for my parents. Surely they couldn’t believe that the guy at the mall who smelled like alcohol with a pillow in his shirt was actually Santa Claus. On the drive home they asked what I had asked Santa to get me.
I said, “It’s a secret.”
Oh how they cajoled me to tell them, and oh how I enjoyed watching them squirm knowing that they needed this information to maintain the fraud they mistakenly thought I believed in.
But it wasn’t just my parents. This was a massive conspiracy, involving 1000s of pretend Santa Clauses, cartoon artists, school teachers, movies, even the news was in on it. Walter Freaking Cronkite reporting the location of a fictional sleigh!
But the emperor had no clothes, and Santa had no sleigh. I resented it all, but I liked getting extra presents, so continued to keep my mouth shut.
A few years later, my little brother was old enough to be spoon fed this lie. When my parents asked him if he wanted to see Santa Claus, He didn’t know what Santa Claus was. So they explained the whole thing to him: flying reindeer, coming down the chimney, cookies on the table, and of course presents.
He was getting very excited about it, but something in me snapped. I just couldn’t stand them lying to my little brother, so I blurted out, “Don’t believe that, it’s all phony, there is no Santa Claus.”
My parents were shocked. To this day I don’t know if they were shocked that I didn’t believe in Santa Claus or shocked that I was ruining their game. They cajoled me to join in on the prank, but I wanted no part of it. It disgusted me. So I resigned myself back to silence. Secretly hoping that I would still get the extra ‘Santa’ presents.
I did.
Many years later I asked my parents what all that Santa business was about. Why do it? Their response was that it was just a fun game to play with the kids. And for millions of parents around the Christian world that is all that there is to it. A bit of fun. A bit of make-believe. But I can’t help but wonder what the bigger effect of such ‘make-believe’ is. What function does it play in wider society?
Is it not something like: “If you go along with the bullshit handed down by authority you will be rewarded.”
As cynical as that might sound, its actually a useful lesson. Many a successful career has been built on not much more. It’s a lesson I could have benefited from much more than endlessly truth-seeking.
In the modern world, truth is not nearly as useful (or profitable) as it ought to be. Perhaps that is the true function of the Santa story, to educate children that the world runs on bullshit, and there is little to be gained in calling it out.
At least that’s the lesson I should have learned.
But what about the many more numerous kids who bought into it right from the start? What happened to them? I really don’t know. I suppose most figure it out eventually, and eventually will play the same gag on their kids. No harm, no foul.
But then again, some probably never figure it out. They go through their entire lives believing in prosperity from magic, from reward for simple obedience, of gifts falling from the sky like magic based on nothing more than wishing it so.
In other words, they become Democrats.