Santa dishes about Christmas woes

Being Frank, by Frank Ameduri

Dear Santa:

Well, big guy, Thanksgiving's behind us, and we're officially in Christmas mode. I know I haven't written in a while -- 34 years if you want to be picky about it -- but I have been thinking about you.

The thing is, I've got some questions, and I think maybe you're the guy with the answers. First off, what happened to Christmas, anyway? Didn't it used to be filled with enchantment and surprises and a general sense of goodwill and all that? Wasn't there some kind of religious connection at some point? Didn't stores wait until after Thanksgiving before they started yanking Christmas dollars out of our pockets?

Now there's Christmas stuff on the shelves at the same time as Halloween stuff -- and if that doesn't seem more than a little ironic, you're not paying attention. I'd also like to know what happened to your elves. I know they're not really making all the things under the tree anymore, because most of the labels say "Made in China" or some Pacific Rim country, and I know your digs are at the North Pole. Please tell me what's gone wrong.

Regards, Frank

Dear Frank:

Thanks for the letter. I was wondering what happened to you. Have you stopped sneaking cookies into bed at night? I hope so. I guess I should start by saying that I'm flattered you sent your questions to me, but I'm really not the guy with the answers you seek. Of course, since the zip code for Heaven is not listed, I can see why you chose me. I'll do my best.

You are correct in guessing that Christmas was once a religious holiday. If you break the word up you get Christ Mass, and that pretty much tells you what you need to know. It's a celebration of the birth of Christ, although I understand he may have been born in August or September.

It's possible early Christians moved the celebration to December to coincide with the pagan celebration of Winter Solstice. The pagans were having a generally good time, so they were hard to convert. Blending holidays was a way to kind of absorb them. Anyway, that's neither here nor there, the spirit of the holiday is what counts.

Earlier holiday traditions were more centered on alternating fasting and feasting, church services and small-scale exchanges of gifts (merely symbolic of the gifts given to the Christ child by the Magi). In some places the gifts would take the form of fruit and candy placed inside shoes or socks, or something along those lines. Smelly and perhaps a bit unsanitary, but it's the thought that counts.

Back then the holiday belonged to God, and to the people who believed in Him. Most of the people who were celebrating the holiday back then didn't have a lot of expendable income, and none of them had credit cards. Nobody had any notion of what consumerism might be, and if they had, they'd have been sick to their stomachs over it.

My job was really easy back then. Only Christians were celebrating Christmas -- go figure -- and gifts were simple and few. It was a good life for a jolly fat guy and a bunch of shivering elves.

It all started coming apart when New York department stores got the idea that people weren't exchanging nearly enough gifts, and that the gifts they were exchanging were either free, elf-made items or very cheap. The retailers, realizing that Christians were in the habit of giving money to churches for no reason at all, saw a huge revenue-making opportunity in linking God to buying. God has been misused to separate people from their money for centuries, and there was no point in reinventing the wheel.

Christians weren't going to be enough, though. Retailers needed a universal gift-giving holiday, and they needed a gimmick -- a marketing symbol to knock the Christ out of Christmas. That's where I came in.

Nobody talked to me about it, mind you. It was a complete shock to me. Especially because they got the clothes all wrong. I mean, who wears a getup like that, especially in an arctic climate? Can you imagine?

Anyway, that's how the ball got rolling. Pagans had left their mark on the holiday with the tree, and now retailers had hijacked the whole bloody mess. Of course, most people still didn't have a lot of cash on hand, but the banks eventually took care of that. Don't even get me started on credit cards. "Buying things you don't need with money you don't have, foolish. Paying 200 times what it cost over the next 35 years, priceless." The guy who invented minimum payments at 2 percent of the balance will be getting coal from me for a very long time.

What really burns me up is that these greedy people not only stole Christmas from the Christians, but then they turned it into a headache for everyone else. I knew a Jewish lady whose kids were driving her crazy. As you know, Chanukah happens around the same time as Christmas. It's actually one of the lesser Jewish holidays, but Christmas has inflated it.

Anyway, Jewish kids usually get a dreidel for Chanukah. No great shakes. Meanwhile, their gentile friends are cleaning up on Christmas booty. This drives Jewish kids crazy, and makes some of them think about converting, at least during the month of December.

Finally, to save her own sanity, this Jewish woman invented the Chanukah Chicken to bring a gob of gifts to her kids and stop them clucking at her. It's funny until you start crying.

You're not going to want to hear this, but the new Christmas is a celebration of America's most universal religion -- consumerism. Goodwill has been replaced with the guilt and stress of power shopping. The concept of Christ child as savior has been replaced by images of me flying around like a loon in bad clothes, distributing nauseating amounts of material goods to wealthy and middle-class kids.

Instead of worshipping at church, consumers worship at their personal plasma-screen television shrines, drooling over beer commercials and lusting after the newest gadgets and goodies that can all be purchased right now with a new credit card that offers zero-percent interest for the first six months, Happy Christmas! But I'm not bitter.

As for the elves, their jobs have all been outsourced to China and South America. Some of them got jobs in the entertainment industry, but many of the poor little buggers are really down on their luck. A few of them stayed here, but they stay drunk most of the time. I haven't the heart to throw them out. The rest are mostly living on the street and in various shelters. A few of them tried to start their own toy-making business, but they were crushed with an anti-trust suit and now they scrape by making balloon animals on Venice Beach. It's a tragedy, really.

My Christmas advice to you is simple, Frank. Turn off your TV. Cut up your credit cards. Bake some of your favorite goodies for family and neighbors as Christmas gifts. Tell your kids about the birth of Christ. Go to church. Have a nice meal with friends and family. Go sledding. Play games. Then, if you remember, put a cookie and some milk on the coffee table before you go to bed. Maybe I'll leave a little something for you if I can get the sled going. It starts with little steps, right?

With the usual jollinesss,

Santa

Frank Ameduri is keeping it simple this Christmas.