Back Off, Fat Man!

So, I’m back.  When last I left you I was discussing such things as Pillow Fights, the recipe for Ice Cubes, and the predictive power of cockroaches.  While I have a lot of fun writing this blog, I admit that the derisiveness of the election season even gets to be too much for me at times.  So I needed to take a little time off to clear my head and detox.  It’s time to get back to the task at hand though – namely, making fun of idiots my fellow citizens’ commentary on internet message boards.  But, I have also decided to intersperse the posts by making shit up as I go waxing philosophic about ideas rolling around in my head.  I begin with a topic relevant to the season: Santa Claus.

I was listening to my favorite morning radio personality discuss a news story about a small “dust-up” at a local mall over the mall Santa Claus.  Apparently this particular Santa, in a showing of ultimate goodwill toward men, was refusing to allow children to sit on his lap if the parents didn’t first purchase the holiday photo package.  Now, my crack research department had no time to determine whether this news item is real or not, but it brought up this point:  Do kids want to sit on Santa’s lap?

I maintain that they do not.  Or at least, a majority of them do not.  If you are a parent you probably have a photo in your archive similar to the one above.  I know I do.  My oldest son didn’t care one way or the other about sitting on Santa’s lap, but the younger one was dead set against it.  My local radio host hit upon what I think is closest to the truth when he said, “The magic of Santa for kids is that he leaves the presents while they’re asleep and they never have to SEE him.”

I think this is 100 percent accurate.  What do we parents tell kids?  What did our parents tell us?  1. Santa knows who has been naughty and who has been nice, and 2. Santa won’t come if you’re awake.

I remember two vivid things from my own childhood about Santa:  Lying in bed trying desperately to get to sleep so Santa would come, and driving myself nuts trying to determine which “list” Santa had me on.  I mean, there aren’t any published standards for “naughty” and “nice.”  What if you’re nice 364 days, but that one day…say way the hell back in March…you were mean to your little sister?  Does that one screw-up put you on the “naughty” list for the rest of the year?  Or is it more relative than that?  Can you be “naughty” all you want, as long as you make up for it by being more “nice”?  Is there a spreadsheet of points for different “naughty” categories?  How is a kid to know on Christmas Eve whether to expect a lump of coal or not?  And how the heck do you expect them to get to sleep if they’re thinking about all of this other stuff?

That’s a LOT of pressure to put on kids.  So, is it any wonder that when we parents traipse our kids to the mall to sit on Santa’s lap, that at least half of those kids are scared shitless?!?  I know I would be thinking, “This dude flies all over the world in one night, slides down AND UP chimneys, knows who has been naughty and nice, and now you want me to SIT ON HIS EFFIN’ LAP!?  That sounds like a potential lie-detector machine to me…NO WAY!  WAAAAAAAAHHHHH!”

So maybe…just maybe…we ought to dial back on the whole “big, fat man has magical powers and can see into your soul thing” if we expect our kids to also sit on his lap for a nice photo to send to all of our friends and family?  Just a thought.

Be Reasonable.