One nation under Santa: just 342 days left ’til X-mas!
I know it’s second week, but I still have Christmas on the
brain.
Maybe it’s the weather, or maybe it’s just the first slot my
editor could give me, but my frontal lobe, amid the dread of class
schedules, book lines and the "F" word (financial aid), is still
filled with Christmas.
Especially that night on the freeway. It was almost a sacred
moment. The rain came down persistently, as if to say "See, the
weather does change here in California." My windshield wipers did
their best to keep the reminder out of my way. The clip-squeak of
their mechanized labors marked evenly the seconds until we would
celebrate Christ’s one thousand nine hundred and ninety-fourth
birthday.
I was driving home. Let me rephrase that. I was parked on the
405 freeway, waiting, praying to move. We were stopped, as if in
attendance of some supernatural mass, with the preacher as the sky
and the rain as a baptism. I stuck my arm outside. Maybe I was
being cleansed. I had my Neil Diamond Christmas tape in. So this is
Christmas.
I might have had an epiphany that night, but I doubt my thoughts
were shared in the collective freeway consciousness. Shopping,
wrapping, cooking and reminding oneself about the cranberry sauce
all came before the secondary, the birth of Christ. Maybe Christmas
is just a massive Pavlovian response, a cultural salivation of good
cheer. Or maybe it’s a physical reaction to gravitational shifts of
the moon.
For whatever reason, Christmas is a very different thing than
what it used to be. Part secular, part Christian, part capitalist,
part pagan ritual, what is this mix-and-match cultural
Frankenstein-and-myrrh we’ve created in America?
We have become one nation under Santa, the modern symbol of
Yuletide materialism. Christmas has gone shopping in the latter
half of the 20th century. This Christmas, my roommate disposed of
his disposable income to the tune of $400. Let me just put that in
terms that starving students can understand  he spent $400 on
his girlfriend! That’s 1,200 bags of Top Ramen!
Can we buy love, can we buy piety, can our credit cards max out
somewhere in the heavenly firmament and touch the hand of God? Is
this purchasing frenzy a cry for love in our postmodern anonymity?
All we really want is validation, right? Apparently, there’s more
than one way to celebrate Christmas.
I went to my friend Paul’s house, and there in his living room
was a huge Christmas tree with presents all around, a crackling
fire and I think I smelled egg nog. Everything smacked of Christmas
except that Paul and his family are Jewish. Paul said that they
don’t really think of it as Christmas, but rather, as a family
gathering. The excuse was about as flimsy as a Victoria’s Secret
catalog.
The Christmas confusion doesn’t end there. I know Christians who
don’t celebrate Christmas because it is historically inaccurate as
a birthdate for Christ. And let’s not forget those people who only
go to church at Christmas. Aren’t they just punching the clock on
St. Peter’s payroll? What does it mean when Neil Diamond, a Jew,
has a Christmas album? I think it means we want more than the
limitations of Christianity can give us.
We want to be more than Christian, Jewish or Muslim, more than
Hindu, Buddhist or B’Hai. More than these, we want to be together.
For a brief moment, our culture commits to a willful suspension of
disbelief, to a shared experience that reminds us we are not alone.
That’s Christmas.
Yet one mystery remains. Santa Claus. It seems odd that we
celebrate the birth of the baby Jesus by the propagation of exotic
tales about an old guy in a red suit (thank you, Coca-Cola
company), with tiny factory worker elves and glow-in-the-dark
reindeer. Who is Santa anyway? An American. But like most of us, he
immigrated. Let’s go back in time …
A bunch of Dutchmen arrived in the New World. On their big
wooden ships they imported all things Dutch. Though they had
traveled to America fleeing tyranny, they rather liked the way
tyranny looked, smelled and felt. Among these things Dutch was a
regular birthday celebration on Dec. 6 of a myth named Sinterklaas.
Like most immigrants of the time, he changed his name.
But maybe this wasn’t just a simple bow to fashion. Was there a
clandestine purpose in his flight from the Netherlands, a past, a
crime perhaps? Where’s Joseph Campbell when you need him?
In all his guises, it seems there is a modus operandi. Where
there is Santa, there is celebration. Not just celebration, but
serious getting down. Fertility rites! Through the ages, covertly
or in open invocation, Saint Nick has always stood for getting
nookie.
Look at the big picture. In the desperate conditions of winter,
these Nordic cultures needed hope. They needed someone to remind
them that life will go on.
Who better than St. Nicholas, who legendarily brought people
back to life? Who better than Santa, who enters through the
chimney, bringing sugarplums, spice and everything nice? These are
the things to live for! These are the crimes that have kept Kris
Kringle on the run for more than 2,000 years.
So sometime after the reformation, counter-reformation and about
halfway through the enlightenment, Sinterklaas jumped a ship headed
for the New World. Then the British (read, the Puritans) conquered
New Amsterdam, renamed it New York, and suppressed all
Sinterklaas-related partying.
So the myth laid low until the early 19th century. Santa Claus,
as desperate for work as anyone in a Steinbeck novel, took the job
of Father Christmas. Of course, Nick didn’t have his own day
anymore. He had a timeshare with Christ on the 25th. The rest is
history.
But whether he originates from our pagan past, or is actually
the very real fourth century monk from Asia Minor named Nikolaos,
Santa’s longevity suggests that there is a need for us to affirm
life, to ensure progeny and prosperity, to transcend the darkest
winter and to get some.
That’s how we ended up with Christmas, American style. Traffic
jams, shopping mall mania, the Jingle Cats and Santa. We’ve all had
to deal with relatives, bad gifts, questionable food, not to
mention just plain decompressing from school. It’s enough to drive
someone to drink egg nog.
Even though Christmas only takes place once a year, it pervades
our culture year-round. So my advice for a better Christmas: change
the name of the holiday to X-mas. X is a variable. Let X equal
anything worth celebrating!
Christians, of course can still celebrate the birth of Christ.
Pagans can celebrate the rebirth of the sun (the winter solstice).
And the rest of us can have another day off! For perspective, read
"Journey of the Magii" by Tennyson. Most important of all, make
sure you still secretly get all mushy and dumb watching the
politically incorrect It’s a Wonderful Life.
Kaizen is a senior ethnomusicology student.