The Cheese Grater Winter 2016 7
SAVAGE interviews Christmas’ most controversial figurehead, Santa Claus. William Reporter for Savage I stand outside the Lapland Embassy on Belgravia’s Chesham Place, shivering culturally in my D&G brogues. A homeless man approaches me for some change. I kneel, and pass him a copy of the latest SAVAGE. “Here,” I gently fold his hands over the glossy cover. “Turn to page 24 for a biting review of Ken Loach’s latest pessimistic northern discharge. The man just doesn’t understand aesthetics, does he?” The vagrant shuffles off, clutching his new bible. “So like us,” I whisper to myself, “so like us.” I disinfect my hands and lips with the same bleach SAVAGE uses on the editorial team and ring the embassy’s doorbell. I’m shown inside with such brusqueness that I barely have time to summarise Brave New World for the doorperson,
and before I know it I’m in front of the man himself – Santa Claus. He sips delicately from a bottle of Coca-Cola. I begin by moistening my finger with my vial of Hemingway’s saliva and turning the page of my Moleskine notebook, “I realise you’re a busy man so we won’t mince words-“ “-but we might mince pie!” Claus roars with festive laughter, interrupting my carefully phrased opening salvo. I cough once, dismissively. My parents didn’t pay for seven years of private schooling for me to be interrupted by a man who wasn’t even born in this country. I move on and begin to quiz Claus on whether he believes, as I do, that the commercialisation of Christmas is more of a symptom than a cause of suburban disenfranchisement. “Oh, let’s not bother with such trivial things. Come, my boy, tell me this: what
do you want for Christmas?” Claus’s booming baritone once again barrels over me. It’s almost as if the man has never been interviewed by an Arts and Culture Journal, let alone a Premier Arts and Culture Journal. I roll my pen between my fingers, wondering whether, if I throw it very hard, it might pierce the old man between the eyes. “Mr. Claus, I would appreciate it if you focused on the task at hand. I’m a busy man, and I have three hundred thousand posters in my bag that I need to put up over other people’s posters before nightfall, or no-one will know about our Celebration of Free Speech event.” “Come, come, young man. There are more important things in life than your magazine, surely.” Claus chuckles merrily to himself. It will be his last chuckle. My fist tightens around my pen.
Pi Comment: Why, at 21, I’m rejecting the damaging Santa Claus myth R. Dolph For all my 21 years, the esteemed St. Nicholas has managed to find the time, energy, and gymnastic prowess to fit his portly stature through my chimney every Christmas Eve. Or has he? I swallowed the establishment’s lies about this illogical fantasy for years, but now that I’ve reached 21, I’m calling their bluff: there is no way for this person to exist in our society. There is no Santa Claus. The mere notion of an apparently ageless man from the wilds of the Arctic Ocean flying through the sky in an airborne rickshaw is already insulting to the intelligence of the critical thinkers among us. Couple this with the fact he is led by unusually compliant animals – some wielding ostentatiously provocative facial decorations
– and we have before our trembling eyes a damaging, perverse distortion of reality. No matter how much joy or Christmas spirit he has in his heart, there’s absolutely almost no way his life is financially tenable in our neo-liberal, pluralist world. Check the maths. He works for a mere three weeks a year, busking outside department stores, but he has to buy presents for every person who writes to him? I’m no mathematician, but those numbers probably don’t match up. Thanks to my parents’ disingenuous motives, I still don’t know who’s eating my cookies, drinking my milk, and replacing my broken Scalextric on a yearly basis – but I can tell you for a fact that it probably isn’t Santa Claus.
Santa with another gullible child
