THE BEST THING ABOUT SANTA CLAUS
by Jon Rappoport
January 10, 2012
I didn’t do a Christmas post this year, so it’s really too late now, because everybody is glad the holiday is over. Too much dessert, weird presents, time to get back to work.
But what the hell. I like Santa Claus. Always have, always will. Mainly because, when you turn 10 or 11, you stop believing in him. This is a great thing. Think about it.
As a kid, you invest a tremendous amount of energy in the man, you wait for him to deliver the gifts, you love him…and then, one day, while you’re throwing snowballs at older kids, one of them comes up to you and says, “By the way, Santa isn’t real.”
And you get over it.
It’s a rite of passage.
“Honey, our son just figured out Santa doesn’t exist. Talk to him.”
“And say what? That we’ve been lying to him?”
But ultimately everybody’s cool. It was a good joke. A lovely joke. A nice thing.
And there were clues. Ten department stores, each with its own Santa. People shopping at Xmas. That’s a hard one to ignore, right? Why are they buying presents when Santa delivers them?
In December, every year, folks more or less all conspire to create Santa. Then they stop.
Religion should take a chapter out of that book.
“Let’s do Krishna. This week is Oobladee Krishna. We’ll make up tunes and go on hayrides. Next week, how about Buddha? The fat man with the enigmatic smile. Then maybe The Holy Ghost. Organ music, guilt, fear. Always dug the scary stuff.
But no. Pick a religion and you’re stuck with it. Or you rebel.
“Mom, I’m going to live in Oregon with the Church of the Cranberry Cult. I have to buy hip boots and a rake. You’ll probably never see me again.”
When I first heard about Buddha, I immediately thought of Santa. Both guys had girth. They obviously enjoyed a good meal. They weren’t trying to press their case too hard. It was a riff. You could pick it up and then lay it down. Nobody with a thumbscrew would knock on your door.
Not many people realize this, but Thomas Jefferson wanted each generation to write its own Constitution. Every 20 years or so, they’d sit down and dream up a new one. He was never trying to legislate a Forever.
“You don’t like a Republic? Try your own monarchy. Or something no one’s ever heard of. The point is, you decide. Otherwise, you’ll freeze yourself in marble. Get it? One of the primary freedoms is inventing new government.”
That never panned out.
Do I have explain why? Didn’t think so.
When we talk about Santa at Christmas, we smile and laugh. We all know it’s a joke. We’re making him up. It doesn’t seem to be a problem. No one turns angry. It’s the one imaginary celebration, and it works.
“This isn’t really happening…and yet it is.”
And underneath it all, that’s why we buy presents. Because we’re inventing the whole shooting match, and it feels good.
This is why I favor a state religion. If it’s the religion of Santa. The guy who doesn’t exist.
“And so my friends, as I stand here in this church, talking to you about our fundamental holiday, I must remind you we’re all writing script. Never forget that. We’re cranking it out by the ton. And next week, we’ll stop. These are the two pillars. It’s on and then it’s off.”
Amen. Oobladee. Dancer, Prancer. E=mc2. Except on Thursdays.
Happy New Year.
Another nice artifact.
Speaking of which, the next Magic Theater workshop is scheduled for Mar. 3 and 4 here in San Diego. If you’re interested, email me. Judging by the last workshop, this one is going to be a beauty.
Once you unlock “the secret of Santa,”and now we’re talking about the whole history of art, because artists freed us to see imagination in its fullest aspect, the field is wide open. Why take religion literally? Why take it as final, any more than you would take one symphony as final background music for the universe? Why take the universe as final?
Even if you wanted to pinpoint an author of the book called This Universe, should you worship him/her/it any more than you would worship the author of Moby Dick?
The whole point of Hesse’s novel, Steppenwolf, from which comes the idea of the Magic Theater, is that the magician, Pablo, sees the universe as a joke, while the main character, Harry, can’t. He finds it so serious and oppressive that he walls himself off from other people.
Well, the universe, no matter how it presents itself, is nothing more than another Santa Claus.
And if we had any sense, we would institute holidays in which other universes are celebrated. If you think you can’t find any, walk into a museum.
As we see how central unlimited imagination is to the present and future, other people behind us are retrenching their own fundamentalist traditions, trying like crazy to reinvent the past. Their greatest fear is realizing that those traditions were imagined.
So what should we do? Argue over and over that the past, in some crucial way, is gone? Will that carry the day? No, we need to imagine and create and keep on doing it until it reaches flood proportions.
In doing so, appeals to authority won’t work, because there aren’t any. I don’t care where you want to locate them, how you want to dress them up, what wisdom you want to put in their mouths. Those authorities are, at best, characters in plays of invention. And guess who writes the plays.
When I was a kid, I found out we had a chimney that was blocked up with concrete. No one knew how it had happened. My father hired two guys to drop iron balls down it, and after several tries they gave up. That’s when I figured out Santa probably wasn’t real. The chimney was blocked! I mentioned this, and my parents looked at each other and shrugged. And that was that. Life moved on.
But I still dug the fat man in the red coat. He was magic, and magic never dies. Because we invent it. We find it. We’re a species of artists, whether we want to admit it or not.
In my role as prosecutor, I keep making that case, to squeeze out a confession. If you’ve been reading my pieces for any length of time, you know I’m pretty relentless.
Jon Rappoport