Look away now if you’re under nine, because by the time you read this Santa Claus will be dead. I have arranged for him to be beaten senseless with a sizeable block of frozen tofu turkey then drowned in a vat of tepid Advocaat. Don’t feel bad for him: it’s how he would have wanted to go.
I would have let him live if he could have answered the following questions:
• Why do we encourage our kids to worship this entity who exists solely to fill our homes (and landfill eventually) with more and more emission-releasing plastic crap from sweat shops?
• Do we really want our children to believe that good behaviour is rewarded by emission-releasing plastic crap from sweat shops? It seems to me that we are embedding in them a belief that we in the consumerist nations are somehow more deserving and morally superior to the inhabitants of LEDCs.
• Can it be right to encourage a child to be ‘good’ for a stranger in exchange for consumer goods? In any other context this would be called grooming.
These questions are both pertinent and pressing and yet when I turn up at his grotto in Stretford Mall he refuses to enter into any sort of dialogue unless I pay £3 and sit on his lap. Even then his conversation is limited to ‘Have you been a good girl this year?’ which I find highly inappropriate.
So I have held my own kangaroo court in his absence, arguing the case that Santa is a capitalist construct designed solely to train our children for a lifetime of consumerist obedience.
It’s his fault we speak of ‘retail therapy’ making all our problems go away when for 1 billion of the world’s population clean water would be the dream ticket to a life free of disease. Santa is responsible for a huge amount of stress in skint parents who can’t afford to match the kid next door’s presents and can’t explain why Santa has been less generous to their kid. He is the reason why we’ll fill up another 40,000 double decker buses with unecessary waste this year and drive them to hell in a handcart made of whatever’s left of the rainforest.
Like fossil fuels and factory farming, Father Christmas has had his day, so it’s time to say Hyvää Joulua* but Hyvästi** and good riddance***!
*Merry Christmas (in Finnish)
** Goodbye (in Finnish)
*** I don't know how to say good riddance in Finnish.
I couldn't agree more . I'm going to spread the word that its all a con and become a very unpopular person. Truth hurts!
ReplyDeleteplease get your facts straight. santa was not originally a capitalist construct; i suppose you also perpetuate the myth that he was created by coca cola. you have some valid points, but don't put the blame on santa.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't commenting on Santa's origins, of which I am fully aware; my point is that Santa has become a capitalist construct and is now representative of our obsessive consumerism.
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