Santa, My Brain, and Me

Those of you who’ve sampled even a small serving of my annual yuletide rantings about the rituals of Christmas will know that I’m as anti-Santa as most of you are anti-sprout. But I’m not nearly as militant as my barbed words would suggest. Whenever people broach the subject with me, they tend to regard me less as some sort of formidable intellectual opponent, and more like I’m Uncle Albert banging on about the war again.

I’m a mild Scrooge case. I’m not out there on roller-skates shouting through a megaphone into the bewildered faces of passing children that Santa’s a big fat phoney and their parents are dirty great liars – as much as I confess that the thought carries a certain appeal. I’m not trying to get mall Santas forcibly repatriated to the North Pole by phoning in bomb threats to every shopping centre blasphemous enough to employ them. I’ve got a dream, that’s all. A dream that one day we’ll be able to live in a world where parents aren’t paying five-quid a ticket so their kid can cry on the lap of some diabetic tramp for thirty seconds, before being quickly ushered out with a 15-pence jigsaw from Temu under their arm.

Santa’s nothing short of a conspiracy, a capitalist hijacking of the Christian season of worship – a festival that was itself hijacked from Pagans. And it’s a conspiracy every one of us is in on. I don’t mean a conspiracy as in the bonkers kind, the kind you’re about to experience in the following paragraph, where a noticeably wired dad I’ve just invented is having an intense heart-to-heart with his son at the breakfast table:

“Santa and the Easter Bunny bring the chocolate, son, so all of the kids’ teeth will fall out in their millions, and the tooth fairy can make a fucking killing [slams a line of ching from the table]. The tooth fairy’s Jewish, see, and she owns all of the… chocolate…. factories… [is reminded of Charlie, so slams another line]… so she’s in it to the fucking hilt. The hilt! And you’d better believe that it was Jesus who invented Halloween. He did it to kill off thousands of sweet old ladies every year just before the end of heaven’s financial year. It’s so he can get his soul quota numbers up so he gets a bigger chunk of the next budget, see? [rubs finger and thumb together] See what happens is the old ladies all keel over from heart attacks on October the 31st because every time they answer their door there’s 6-year-old kids dressed like porn stars and Jeffrey Dahmer. Quite cunning, eh? Anyway, I think Jesus is a Jew, too. Would explain a lot. [stares at son] [wipes nose] Have you heard from your mother since the court case?”

It’s a conspiracy in the respect that we’ve used Santa to give our kids starring roles in a yuletide version of The Truman Show. We perpetuate Santa Claus knowing it’s a lie, but because we think of it as a white lie, a good lie, one that brings joy to children, we let ourselves off the hook. And we never fret about our children’s inevitable dawning realisation that the first ten years of their lives have been predicated on a massive reality-warping lie perpetuated by the very people they trusted most in the world, because there’s nothing nightmarishly dystopian about that scenario at all, nothing that could possibly leave them with lingering psychological and trust issues… No. Nope. No siree. Don’t be silly billies!

Hmmm. OK, I see it, I see it. With that little dose of passive aggressive sneering it’s all starting to sound a wee bit militant after all, isn’t it? This is starting to come off like a manifesto. Can I let you in on a secret, though? One that may surprise you to hear [as you read it in your own head]? I do sometimes move back and forth on the issue. I do. I’m not immune to my humanity. I do actually enjoy seeing children being happy, you know, despite the misanthropy that runs through my writing like a fault-line. I’m not the sort of guy who sees a smile spreading across a kid’s face and thinks to himself: ‘You’ll pay for that benign innocence, child. Just you wait and see how fast I bat that ice cream cone you’re about to buy out of your stubby little hands.’

So, when I found myself at a family Christmas party at the community centre recently with my two young sons, and I saw a little girl bursting out of the main hall, quaking with excitement, shouting: ‘Santa’s on his way?’ – half in proclamation, half in excited disbelief – dear reader, I smiled. It was cute. Joyful, even. And I thought to myself: the whole Santa thing really does bring them happiness, doesn’t it? Maybe I don’t have a principled moral stance on this issue, after all. Maybe I’m just a miserable, joyless c***.’

I didn’t think that for very long, however, because, well, how could I? Jesus, I’m fucking awesome. My very next thought was: that little girl could’ve just as easily burst out of that hall and shouted, ‘Peppa Pig is on her way?’, and there would have been just as much joy on her face, and I would’ve smiled just as broadly in recognition of that joy. On one level, there’s no difference between the two scenarios here. Kid is introduced to fictional character. Kid thinks it’s real. Kid gets to exist in a larger-than-life, make-believe world of wonder and magic. So far, so standard. On another level, though, my version of the wee girl isn’t being gaslighted into believing that giant talking pigs literally exist in the real world, in defiance of all known laws governing the natural world and reality itself.

“Mummy, is Peppa Pig really eight-feet tall and real, like, real as in, like, real life? Is she actually real and not just a cartoon?”

“Of course she is! Why else would we celebrate Pigmas every year?”

“But where do they all live?”

“In the South Pole. Duh!”

“Is Daddy Pig there?”

“It’s a whole advanced pig civilisation. There’s fucking millions of them.”

“Don’t they get too cold?”

“A wee bit, but bacon lasts longer in the freezer, doesn’t it, so I expect they’ll all live for ages. And be delicious.”

“And do the pigs really bring us our presents every year?”

“You’re saying that like you think it’s ridiculous! Of course they do! I’ve told you; it’s all perfectly sensible.”

“In a big sleigh made of beef, pulled by naked humans?”

“Exactly!”

Sometimes it’s just my brain. I want to be happy, really I do, but it seems to me that so much of happiness is predicated on illusion, self-deception, and mis-direction. If I was having a feast with friends in the apocalypse, after a few months of almost starving to death, I’d be the one saying, ‘It’s human meat, isn’t it? How else would we have suddenly got so much food when there’s literally nothing out there? It’s people, isn’t it? We’re eating people!’, and they’d be angrily retorting, through globs of long-pig, ‘Yes of course it is, but shut the fuck up so we can all pretend it’s chicken and enjoy it!’

I can be smiling or lost in blissful reverie, and then my brain will saunter up to me and say: ‘Me and the boys have connected a few things up back there, and we’ve got to say, that nice thing you thought you found? It’s not looking too pretty once we shut off the reality and ignorance filters, mate. And if you connect this bit to that bit, then this bit to that bit over here, turns out your life is actually fucked, mate. Anyway, that’s tea break.’

Oh, but for a single slice of simple, sustainable, deluded joy; a suspension of reality for the sake of a smile. Just sometimes. But, no. Alas, in life, as in Santa, my brain never closes its investigations, never ceases exploring and asking, and the questions accelerate into infinity.

What does Santa do if he turns up at a house and there’s a crime in progress? Statistically, it must happen to him all of the time, if only in Glasgow alone. The dude’s got magical powers, for Christ’s sake, you’re not telling me he’s going to tip-toe into a house and say, ‘Sorry for disturbing your raping, pretend I’m not here, I’m just going to pop this Monopoly under the tree.’ Or if he climbs in as a kid is being beaten? ‘Ah, when that wee laddie regains consciousness under the Christmas tree following the vicious beating I’ve just witnessed him taking from his father, he’s going to lose his fucking mind over that Slalectrix set!’

Questions! What did Santa do during the Rwandan genocide? Just not bother his fat arse? Thanks for giving us a taste of the North Pole’s isolationist foreign policy, you fascist! Why has he never helped NASA? We could’ve been to Alpha Centauri by now, and on reindeer back. Why has no-one pulled him up for the clearly racist move of not delivering any presents to majority Muslim countries? And, most pressing of all, what did he do during the Third Reich? Especially pertinent question given that our modern aesthetic conception of Santa is at least partly based on a kindly, bearded German man who gave lots of gifts to poor children. So if Santa is German… then he would probably have been a Nazi throughout most of the 30s and 40s. He’s already snubbing brown kids the world over, small step from there to dinner with the Goebels. If he did operate as some sort of seasonal sky Nazi, then I’ve got to say kudos to him. Imagine how brave you’d have to be to emerge from the sooty fireplaces of some of the most murderously racist people in history wearing a big black face and shouting about Hos. Guy’s got balls of steel. And, to my mind, it was him who rumbled Anne Frank.

“Ho ho ho! Where do you want me to leave this gift-wrapped 1945 diary?”

“Fuck sake, Santa!”

I’m off to lie down in a darkened room, then book a brain-ectomy for the New Year.

Jamie’s Special Festive Message…Em, About Haircuts?

I always like to mark Christmas on this site with a nice festive message. Except instead of ‘nice’, ‘festive’ and ‘message’ imagine I said ‘hearty’, ‘fuck’ and ‘you’. Come on, you surely aren’t coming to me expecting a merry glug from the milk of human kindness, and if you are then – if I may inexplicably lapse into southern US patois for a moment – there’s masochism in them thar bones o’ yours, boy.

I’ve thought about what festive topics I could cover. I usually give Jesus a swift kick in the ghoulies this time of year, but where’s the fun in that when he’s only going to turn the other testicle? Shame, really, because I had the germs of a few good ideas (probably the wrong choice of cliché given the year we’ve just had). For instance, I was thinking about how religious scholars and priests of all stripes are like literary critics who keep reviewing the same book again and again and again. Imagine if you tried that if you were on a newspaper.

“Nice column in last week’s edition reviewing ‘The Biography of Rod Hull’. What have you got for us this week?”

“Well, I liked it so much I’ve reviewed ‘The Biography of Rod Hull’ again, to be honest.”

“But… there are hundreds of thousands of books out there. You can’t just… you can’t just review the same one again.”

“It’s just so good though. I’ll be honest, I’m just not interested in any other book, not when ‘The Biography of Rod Hull’ is so fucking good.”

That person would be sacked, wouldn’t they? On the spot. Unless their father happened to own the newspaper, in which case the editor would be forced to publish a review of ‘The Biography of Rod Hull’ every single bloody week. A few years of that and the editor would be ready to garrotte himself with a garland of tinsel.

“I think you’re going to be pleasantly surprised by the 2,647th book review I’ll be turning in today.”

“Is it ‘The Biography of Rod Hull’?”

“Yeah. Yeah it is….”

“So where’s the fucking surprise?”

“Well, I tie it in with the coronavirus, and I finish with this absolutely killer line, you’ll love it, it goes like this: ‘And, in a way… isn’t the coronavirus a little bit like Emu?’”

But I’m not going to do that one, or any of the other ideas that were swirling around inside my head. Instead, I’m going to tell you about my haircut today. And what could be more festive than that?

I always seem to go for a haircut at the same time as approximately 98 per cent of the rest of the male population. Each time that door chimes to announce my arrival into the barbers’ I utter a silent ‘fuck’ under my breath as I process the sight of twenty other guys crammed along the wall-length couch. They always look up at me, half-apologetically, half-indifferently, and then we all sit there together in uncomfortable silence, like inmates waiting to be processed.

It won’t surprise you to learn that Christmas Eve’s Eve, just prior to a recently announced national coronavirus lockdown, isn’t a great time to mosey in hoping for a quick hair-cut. I would’ve been quicker putting myself on a waiting list for a new kidney.

I see haircuts as an evil necessity. I only tend to go for one once I start looking like a hobo that’s just crawled out of a bin, and admittedly it’s hard to decide when to draw that line, given that this is arguably my base-line. I’m always amazed by the multitude of men who turn up at the barbers with only a mere dusting of hair on their bonces. Why are they bothering?

Sometimes they’re old men. In their defence, they probably don’t have all that much to occupy them from now until they cark it, so being able to knock ‘HAVE THREE HAIRS SNIPPED FROM HEAD’ off their daily to-do list must give them an enormous sense of achievement and self-worth. Most of the time, though, the culprits are young men: guys who look like they’ve only just had their hair cut yesterday. What the hell has happened to men? It used to be you’d go to the barbers, an old guy in a white coat would run an electric razor over your head exactly twice like you were a fucking sheep, and then chuck you out the door with a lollypop or a slap of aftershave. Bish bash bosh. In and out.

A single men’s haircut doesn’t cost all that much per unit, much cheaper than a woman’s haircut, but women only go to the hairdressers about four times a year; some of these fuckers must be going to get their precious, metro-sexual crowns re-styled four times a month. How can they afford it? Is there a special ‘men’s hair-cut grant’ no one has told me about that I can apply for through the Scottish government?

Guys under thirty these days all want to look like the cast of Peaky Blinders or the Only Way is Essex, or whichever coke-addled, madam-manhandling footballer happens to be the tabloid press’s pick of the month. And what’s more amazing than the fact that these quasi-bald men actually go to the barbers in the first place, is how long the barber spends on them once they’re in there. They seem to agonise over every bit of stubble, like they’re sculpting a privet hedge into the shape of a boat, or shaving Michaelangelo’s David into the back of Big Tam from the Scheme’s heid. Jesus Christ, there aren’t any scouts for Vidal Sassoon in here: just get the fuck on with it!

That’s not to denigrate the work. Hairdressing is one of those things that looks and seems simple, but really isn’t, as any unskilled parent who’s ever picked up a pair of scissors can attest. My youngest boy, Chris, needed a haircut earlier this year. His fringe was so long it was dive-bombing his eyes. OK, I thought, no need to rush for an appointment, I can buy some extra time with a few precision snips. Dear reader, I left that poor little boy looking like a Franciscan monk who’d just auditioned for a 60s boy band. He was more cartoon character than boy. It gave me a new-found respect for that brother-and-sister-hood of the blade. From now on, I’ll leave it to the professionals.

Back to the shop. Waiting in that couch-based queue always necessitates a lot of mental arithmetic and weighing up the odds. You sit there trying to put together the Da Vinci Code in your mind: “Right, three seats, ten guys, one of the hairdressers is probably going to have to go for a break half-way through, so if that next guy takes twenty minutes – actually he looks like he’ll take about forty minutes cause he’s hardly got any hair which doesn’t make any sense but there it is – and then the next guy, well, he’ll be quick, he’ll go on that seat, they’ll be finished first, which means he’ll get that hairdresser, the next guy will get that hairdresser, which means that I… right, all I really want to know is, am I going to get my hair cut by the really attractive woman, or the troll? Or the guy who’s literally got a tattoo of a pair of scissors on his face?” (Last year I really did have my haircut by a man with a tattoo of a pair of scissors on his face. He must really love his job. Lucky he never trained to be a gynaecologist) “Please, please let it be the attractive woman…”

Yes, I know I’m shallow, as are most of my fellow willy-wearers, but what can you do? There’s no sexual component to it, of course. Nobody goes to the hairdressers for kicks (unless they’re a massive pervert); it’s too weird and anti-septic an environment for that – like getting a lap-dance in a disused hospital while you’re off your tits on heroin. Truth be told, I usually end up falling asleep, or almost falling asleep. It’s relaxing to the point of being soporific. Same with a visit to the optician. My optician usually has to X-Ray me through my eyelids, and then wake me up by bashing me across the skull with a pair of heavy NHS specs. But, anyway, shallowness dictates that you would always prefer an attractive person to be cutting your hair, even if the task at hand is disconnected from any predatory or sexual impulse. It’s aesthetics, pure and simple.

The odds are usually against me on that one, though.

It’s the same on the bus. Long time since I’ve been on one, mind you, but I’m sure the dynamics remain the same. When you’ve got an empty seat next to you, you always imagine that some gorgeous starlet will sashay up the aisle, flicking her hair back and forth like something out of a Timotei advert, before sliding in next to you with a purring ‘hiiii’. But they never do. It’s always an enormous man who smells of shit and fish. Every. Single. Time.

It got to the point where I considered just surrendering to fate, putting down a piece of cardboard on any empty patch of seat next to me that said: ‘RESERVED FOR THE MAN WITH HALF HIS DINNER DOWN HIS FACE AND THE MUSTY AROMA OF A BLACK PUDDING SUPPER THAT’S BEEN SHAT OUT BY A RHINO.’

Anyway, it barely matters who I get to cut my hair, because I’m a little hard of hearing, so I can’t normally engage with them all that well. I usually find myself nodding like an imbecile, not hearing or understanding anything all that well, and hoping that I haven’t just given my seal of approval to something truly awful. Or that I haven’t accidentally just missed the hairdresser saying: “So you want me to make you look like a Peaky Blinder, huh?”

Merry Christmas everyone.

Father Christmas’s Covid Countdown

Santa lumbered towards the gantry. The platform jolted and quivered as his fat frame thumped down onto it, one tree-trunk-like leg at a time. His head elf, Grogu, jumped. Not because he was scared, which he certainly was, but because of physics. The jump was entirely involuntarily. Each one of Santa’s crashing steps sent him flying into the air and back down again, the world’s most reluctant astronaut. Santa suddenly stopped. Once the aftershocks had settled Grogu bowed his tiny head, scrunched up his face, and braced himself for impact. Santa usually liked to announce his arrival with a swift, open-handed slap. This time he didn’t. He simply ignored Grogu. Either that or he’d decided to leave the violence until the end of their exchange for once. After all, versatility is the key to good management.

Santa looked down over the half-empty factory floor below, a wave of steadily mounting disgust ruffling the corners of his nicotine-tinged moustache. He gripped the railings as if they were elf necks.

“What in the name of sixteen sodomised snowmen is going on down there, Grogu?” he boomed. “There’s next to fuck-all elves on that shop floor! What am I paying them for?”

Grogu shuffled uncomfortably. “You, eh…” he mumbled, “You aren’t paying them, Mr Claus.”

“And they still get too much!”

Santa looked down at Grogu. Well, there wasn’t really any other way for Santa to look at him. A thoroughly contemptuous sneer fanned its way through Santa’s moustache. “What sort of a f***ing name is Grogu anyway?”

Grogu kept still and quiet, like you would if there was a T Rex in the vicinity.

“Well?” asked Santa. “Where are they all?”

“I think Covid is to blame, sir.”

“Covid? Is he the little one with the warty face and the funny eye? I’ll f***ing swing him by the ears into a polar bear’s arsehole, by Christ. Called a strike has he?”

“Covid is a disease, sir.”

“You’re f***ing right he is, Grogu, and my boot’s the cure.”

“No, no, no. Covid isn’t an elf. It’s an infectious virus. We’ve been issued with directives insisting that we socially distance while on the shop floor.”

Santa’s face twisted into the furious sort of shape you’d normally associate with people who’d just had an arse fart directly into their face. “WHO ISSUED THESE DIRECTIVES?” he roared.

“Em… Elf and Safety.”

Santa thumped the railing with a giant pink fist, the clang reverberating across the entire factory. It sounded like the tolling of a bell calling the elves to execution, which perhaps it was. Grogu’s heart started hammering so quickly that if you’d seen his bare chest you’d have sworn there was a woodpecker trapped inside it. The elves below all looked up in unison, the collective cricking-snap of their up-thrust necks plainly audible. Santa went a deep sheen of ruddy pink as he noticed the coverings over the elves mouths.

“IF THAT’S MRS CLAUS’S KNICKERS YOU’VE GOT STRAPPED TO YOUR F***ING FACES I’LL THUMP EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU INTO THE SNOW WITH A FROZEN DEAD WALRUS! DON’T THINK I DON’T KNOW THEY’VE BEEN GOING MISSING FROM HER DRAWER!”

“Sir, they’re masks,” said Grogu, half-apologetically, half-terrified. “To… to make it less likely the infection will spread if one of the elves contracts it.’ Grogu squinted down into the sparsely dotted collection of his fellow elves. ‘Em, except for Yulper and Chimrick in the far corner there, they actually do seem to have pairs of your wife’s skiffs stretched over their lips.’”

Santa’s face turned as red as his suit. He reached deep into a pocket of his coat, and in a finger-click of a second pulled out and threw a hard, green Christmas bauble. It zapped across the room like a comet, making an ominous thunk-clunk noise at it struck first Yulper’s skull and then Chimrick’s, ping-ponging between them and knocking them both to the floor, where they sprawled like chalk outlines.

“I WANT THEM BURNED IMMEDIATELY!”

Grogu nodded and leaned over the railing. He shouted down in his loudest voice, which admittedly wasn’t all that loud. ‘BURN THE PANTS!’

“NOT THE F***ING PANTS!’ corrected Santa. ‘THOSE TWO FILTHY, CROTCH-SNIFFING, TRIANGLE-EARED C***S WHO SWIPED MY WIFE’S LIP-LOADERS!”

A couple of burly gnomes in leather jackets jogged onto the factory floor , grabbed Yulper’s and Chimrick’s legs and dragged their unconscious bodies out of sight. The elves continued to stand there, gazing up at Santa with bulging, unblinking eyes.

“How did this happen, Grogu?”

“Well, best guess, she left some of her sexier undies drying on the radiator by an unlocked window and the temptation was just too…”

Grogu raised his head from the cold steel that was pressing against his cheek. It took him a few seconds to realise he’d just been punched half-way across the gantry.

“I MEAN THE VIRUS, YOU UNSHAKEABLE DANGLEBERRY!”

Grogu staggered to his feet like a reanimated corpse and shambled up the gantry to Santa. “Well, the scientists, em, aren’t sure, sir, but there’s a popular theory that all this started when a gnome in the South Pole ate a penguin. Or fucked it. No-one’s quite sure.”

Santa stamped a foot and sent Grogu flipping over onto his bum. “OF COURSE THEY FUCKED IT, THOSE FILTHY, FISHING-POLE MOTHER-F***ERS! THEY’D ROUST A MALE WHALE’S BLOW-HOLE IF THEY THOUGHT NO-ONE WAS LOOKING! AND I’VE GOT ABOUT FIFTY OF THE VIRUS-RIDDLED BASTARDS RIGHT HERE IN THE NORTH POLE!”

Santa again grasped the railing. He leaned over the top of it like he was going to be sick, but only angry words vomited out onto the elves below, who were all still staring up at him.

“WHAT ARE YOU ALL STILL GAWPING AT, YOU DIMINUTIVE DICKBAGS? GET SOME BLOODY WORK DONE!”

There was a momentary silence during which the elves were either too brave or too stupid to move. Santa’s eyes bored into them all with the strength of a superhero’s laser-beam. One of the elves coughed, and then one of them said:

“Fat c**t.”

You could have heard a pin drop. Santa was far too furious to react. His system was overloaded with rage to the point of impotence. His head twitched from mask to mask, mask to mask, in the vain hope of detecting some minute disturbance in the fabric suggestive of recent speech. Those jaggy-eared rats! He turned to Grogu, who’d just managed to get back on his feet, ordering him calmly:

“Grogu, I want standard issue masks issued to each of the elves on duty, with North Pole branding. Every elf must wear one, supplied by me, no exceptions, from now on, a fresh one each day. Bring a box of them to my office first though, just before my 12 o’clock shit. I’ll teach those mouthy little f***ers to gob off.”

***

Santa thundered to his office and called an urgent Zoom meeting with corporate. He sat at his desk, feet up, eating tubes of Pringles like they were Smarties, and intermittently scratching his balls. The oily, smarmy, eminently punchable head of the Head of North Pole Corporate Strategy flashed onto the large screen mounted on the office wall in-front of him. Santa reached into one of the desk drawers and fished out a bottle of whiskey; started glugging it straight.

“Claus, you old son of a gun, you!” schmoozed the Head, an obscene grin bisecting his face.

“Graham, you fucking c***!” Santa growled back, with no trace of a smile at all. “Question: I’ve only got about a third of the workforce on the shop floor because of this stupid virus thing, productivity is down 300 per cent and I’m way behind on quota. What am I supposed to do? Move Christmas to f***ing April? Cause that’s the only way I’ll be able to pull this shit off.”

“I know it’s a challenging time for you,” said Graham, and then nothing further. He just stood smiling. Santa thought for a second that the connection had frozen.

“Anything else?”

“We’re behind you one hundred per cent.”

“No help though? No ideas, no suggestions?”

The waxy-skinned corporate statue grinned at him for another few seconds more. “We’ve got one hundred per cent faith in you.”

“Graham, I’ve got to make toys for every little c*** in the world and then deliver them to every little c*** in the world. These are impossible circumstances.”

“Not the Muslim world.”

“What?”

“Well, you said the whole world. It’s not the whole world, though, is it? Barely one per cent of China, almost none of Africa. The majority of your work goes to the English-speaking ‘A’s: Australia, America and the Arseholes Who Still Think They Rule the World. Tell you what, if you think it’ll help, you can cut out Switzerland. No one really likes Switzerland anyway.”

“Oh great, so I can knock some chocolate and cuckoo clocks off the f***ing list. That still leaves countless hundreds of millions of houses!”

Graham’s smile cracked, quivered, went flat, then returned to normal. “You’re being outperformed by Amazon, do you know that? They’re making your operation look like the amateur cluster-copulation that it is. They’re doing what you do once a year, once a day, and they’re doing it perfectly. And let’s put something in perspective here. You’re living in a shack in a snowy wilderness surrounded by your wife’s underwear and dying polar bears, while Jeff Bezos is living in a billion dollar fortress on the moon. The moon! All your sponsors, Coca Cola, Mattell, every single one of them would pull out today if not for the high Santa brand recognition and the advertising revenue that comes from it, and the fact that you maximise their profits by using slave labour. Sorry… zero pay contracts.”

Santa slammed his whiskey bottle down on the desk. Not to make any dramatic point. Just because it was finished. “Exactly: we use slave labour. So we bring back those lazy ass elves from furlough and we make them all work together, harder than ever, round the clock, and who gives a f*** if they get sick. I’ll put the gnomes on a plane to the South Pole and they can bring in the New Year gang-banging penguins. Problem solved.”

Graham winced. “Ooooh, bad PR, Mr Claus, bad PR.”

Santa leaned back in his chair. “So people don’t care if the little f***ers are being worked to death, just so long as they don’t get sick from a virus while they’re doing it?”

“Absolutely,” smiled Graham. “The market research confirms it.”

Santa leaned back in his seat and smiled thinly. “Jesus Christ, and I thought I was the evil bastard. So, in summary, Graham, you’ve been absolutely and completely f*** all help.”

“Always here for you, Mr Claus.”

“Always here to do f*** all, you mean.”

“I feel this has been a most productive meeting. Oh, before I go, just one more thing: you can’t go into any houses this year.”

Santa shot upright. “Come again?”

“Covid restrictions. We can’t risk the spread of infection, especially since you’ll be flitting between hundreds of millions of homes.”

Santa laughed. “So what the f*** am I supposed to do? Drop a payload of presents from the sky like I’m a drone above Fallujah? Shout ‘HEIDS’ as I rain down animatronic puppies over Paisley?”

Graham smiled his widest smile. This was the smile finale. The big one he’d been working up to. “I trust your judgement, Mr Claus.”

And with that, he was gone, smile and all.

“We’ll see about that, you grinning plastic prick,” growled Santa mischievously.

***

Grogu was a little surprised to find himself standing in-front of a mounted camera dressed as a slutty nun, complete with crotchless panties and blood-red lipstick.

“Em, remind me how this is going to help save Christmas again, Mr Claus?”

Santa stood tweaking the camera and laughing. “Well, now that all of you workshy little twerps have got OnlyFans accounts set up, you’re going to be raking in money from all the world’s perverts, money that I’m going to use to order all the world’s presents through f***ing Amazon. Let Jeff Bezos take the strain, the swotting, bald, Bond-villain c***.”

What a fantastic idea of Santa’s. Even better that he’d stopped the gnomes from burning Yulper and Chimrick. Their OnlyFans account featured them parading around in his wife’s pants while wearing shit-covered face masks, intermittently kissing each other, and it was his biggest earner. There really was a frightful amount of perverts out there, and between them and their deep pockets they were saving Christmas for a generation of hopeful, cherubic children.

“And, em, what’s this?” asked Grogu, holding up a bendy latex implement that possessed the dimensions of a large poloni sausage.

“That’s a double-ended dildo, son.”

“And…em… what am I supposed to do with it?”

“I trust your judgement, Grogu,” said Santa, as he lumbered from the room.

“SANTA?” wailed Grogu, “WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH IT?”

“Go f*** yourself, Grogu!” he called back.

It was the best Xmas Eve ever. Santa didn’t have any presents to deliver, so he spent the evening flying through the skies, from Coatbridge to Copenhagen, Berlin to Brisbane, halting the reindeer every now and then to hover over a FedEx or DPD van and take a great big curly shit on it from the air.

At precisely 5am on Christmas morning, Santa snapped the reins and called to Rudolph: “Make haste for the moon, you red-nosed nobber. I’ve saved a bit of supper for that shiny-headed son of a bitch, Bezos, and it’ll soon be time for my six o’clock shit.”

Merry Christmas everyone!

 

Horror at the Edinburgh Christmas Market

In the dead-zone between Christmas and New Year I took a trip to Edinburgh’s Christmas Market, which proved to be both absolutely great and utterly terrible at the same time. I went with my two kids, 5 and 3, and my friend and his two kids, 6 and 4. We’ll call my friend ‘Iain’, mainly because that’s his name. Our kids have names, too. I promise we haven’t just assigned them numbers.

Regular readers will know that my two are called Jack and Christopher. Iain’s kids are called Girl Child and Boy Child.

The train ride into the city was surprisingly stress-free considering that we were two hapless fathers herding four excitable, potentially unruly children into a claustrophobic environment crammed with disapproving strangers for thirty long minutes. For some reason that bit was fine. It was the arriving that reeked of failure, and that was entirely down to the tardiness of our initial departure.

We’d arrived at our home station with mere seconds to spare, so weren’t able to buy tickets prior to boarding. The six of us had had to sprint towards the train like something out of Home Alone, and then dash through the rapidly closing doors like something out of Indiana Jones. There were no ticket collectors/dispensers on-board the train, so we had to queue to buy them at Edinburgh before we could pass through the barriers.

We were slow to realise why everyone else disembarking the train was moving so quickly up the platform – the queue-savvy sons-of-bitches – and so found ourselves at the very back of the ticket-line.

Iain detests the traditional ticketing system. He prefers to deal with automata, which is why he spent the whole duration of our time in the queue frantically trying to buy digital tickets through an app on his phone. He failed. We reached the front before he mastered it. If it had been the Crystal Maze, he would’ve been left behind in the Train Zone as we went on to collect bits of shiny paper in the Crystal Dome.

I don’t know exactly why Iain hates tickets so much. It’s something to do with feeling beholden; of having to bow down for inspection to a haughty stranger. I think he just doesn’t like talking to people, something to which I can definitely relate.

We ascended into Edinburgh proper, fighting our way through a teeming crowd of thousands.

Edinburgh’s Christmas market stretches across two levels of Princess Street Gardens, with a giant, blindingly-bright Big Wheel dominating the event and the city skyline. This year it was crushingly busy and bustling, a clog of people being pushed up, down and along thin arteries flanked by coffee houses, portable pubs and assorted trinket-hawkers. The air – cold and sharp – smelled of irritation and fried onions; alive to boot with the sounds of a thousand ‘excuse me’s’ intermingling with the same six or seven Christmas songs everyone had been listening to on a loop for a solid month already. I haven’t visited the Xmas market since I was about 23, but I don’t ever remember it being this hectic, this brazenly commercialised, this soulless. The kids didn’t give a shit, though. The city was loud and colourful, there were chocolate-covered churros, and there was a mini-rollercoaster. What more could they want?

Iain was overjoyed to learn that we had to pre-purchase a big wad of tickets before the kids could go on any of the fairground rides. He again tried to enlist me in his one-man war against ticket inspections, but I just couldn’t share his anger. Normally I’m something of an anger connoisseur. I get angry over a great many inconsequential and pointless things, and I felt sad that I couldn’t add this one to the collection.

The big, bespectacled lady at the ticket desk asked Iain if he lived in an EH postcode area (i.e. within Edinburgh or its immediate environs). He said no. Because he doesn’t.

‘That’s a shame,’ she said, ‘You would’ve got a 10 per cent discount if you did.’

Iain didn’t miss a beat. ‘I don’t, but he does,’ he said, pointing a thumb back at me.

This was Iain’s chance to stick it to the man, and he was enlisting my help. His old friend wouldn’t let him down. Whom else could he count on in his hour of need?

‘No I don’t,’ I said.

Iain looked at me with disappoint in his eyes, while the ticket lady, in turn, looked at Iain with disappointment in hers. She looked visibly wounded, like her tenuous grip on hope had been wrested from her hands and cast to the gutter by Iain’s treachery. I just sort of laughed, and unashamedly bought my full-price tickets.

‘What did you do that for?’ asked Iain, unable to conceal how miffed he was. I explained that I had a vision of the future, the immediate future, and it was one in which I looked like a complete twat

The woman’s next question, I explained, undoubtedly would’ve been: ‘Oh, so what’s your post code?’ and I would’ve been forced to stutter out something like, ‘ah, E…H… 1… em, 1… 1…. em, 1?’

And she would’ve said: ‘And what street is that?’

And I would’ve said: ‘Em, I think it’s Street… Avenue?…’

‘Are you sure that’s a real street, sir?’ she would’ve asked.

And I would’ve said: ‘Em…could be Crescent… Place?’

‘Crescent Place? Sounds fake to me, sir.’

‘I LIVE IN A FUCKING BIN, OKAY? BEHIND A TOILET.’

So it’s lucky I avoided that, really.

The kids first went on the mini roller-coaster. I think it always helps when you’re trying to promote an atmosphere of happiness and magic for wide-eyed, excited children to have your fairground rides staffed by dead-eyed teenagers who look like they wouldn’t even blink if the ride suddenly derailed, sending your children catapulting into the night sky at 180mph.

We spent an hour or so at the market, going on some more rides with the kids; treating them to the rickety, rocket-shaped death-trap that was the Helter Skelter; feeding them chocolate; trying to get them to stop running in circles like dogs on a beach. Eventually, time took its toll on their manic dispositions and we realised it was time to head home, via McDonalds, naturally, because we’re bad parents.

We thought about going on the big wheel, but thought better of it when we realised it would cost us about £25 each. That’s a lot of money for the kids to decide they were bored after half a revolution, or for the younger kids to violently shit themselves at 100ft.

We made our way to the McDonalds inside the food court in the busy shopping mall that borders Waverley train station for the last – and the worst – leg of our journey. Horror awaited us. Great streams and chunks of it.

I scouted for a table and chairs in the busy food-court with my two boys and Iain’s Girl Child while he went into McDonalds with his little Boy Child to order the food. We hadn’t been sitting for thirty seconds when little Christopher announced that he needed a pee, elongating the vowels so the word lasted almost as long as an actual peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

What the hell was I going to do? Iain was lost in a crowd of people inside McDonalds. I had a unisex group of kids in my care, only two of them mine, so it wasn’t practical to take all of them to the male toilet with me at once. The clock was ticking: Christopher wasn’t renowned for his ball-control. The wife from a couple sitting at the table next to us with their two kids overheard my dilemma and offered to keep an eye on two of the kids so I could whisk Chrissy off for a pissy. I thanked her, but politely declined. Tick tock. I had to make a snap decision. Off we went. All of us. Not ideal, but necessary.

I led the kids around the lower level of the mall as we hunted for the toilets, keeping them close to me and tight together like a comet’s tail lest they get swallowed up by the throng of people. We eventually found the toilets, but the queue leading up to the turnstiles that you had to pass through before you even got a shot at relieving yourself was about 18 people strong, and I didn’t have that kind of time.

I hurried and herded the kids back to the table, hoping Iain’s journey into the dark heart of McDonalds would be completed. It wasn’t. What was I going to do now? Chris kept shuffling, jiggling and loudly complaining. I spied the main doors that led out of the mall and joined with the stone steps outside. Ah-HA! All being well – if I could find a place out there for a surreptitious piss – I’d be back at the table in less than a minute.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to the couple from earlier. ‘Would you be kind enough to watch these two after all?’

‘Stay still, don’t talk, don’t move,’ I said to Jack and Girl Child.

I lifted Christopher up under his arms and rushed him towards the sliding doors like a bomb. Once outside we dashed dead ahead into an alcove where Chris unleashed a long, flowing piss you wouldn’t have credited to a creature of his size; back we dashed and waddled, just in time for a young goth at the table behind us – who’d been sitting with her head on a table receiving worried back rubs from her friends for the past ten minutes – to projectile vomit everywhere. I saw it cascading from her mouth and through her hands like potatoey Vimto, an image that stayed with me for the rest of the day (and haunts me even now). Iain arrived seconds later with our food, and we had to wolf it down with the sharp tang of vomit still lingering in the air.

As we began to eat, Iain’s Girl Child loudly announced that she needed the toilet. Off Iain went, back he came and then, yep, this time Jack needed a poo. Off I went, back I came, and then Iain’s Boy Child had to go. No sooner had they left than Chris announced that he was desperate for yet another peeeeeeeeeee. Why was this happening to me?

Here I had the same dilemma again, and the same split of kids. Emboldened by my earlier success, I bomb-waddled Chris out of the mall’s sliding doors (‘Stay there, kids, and don’t move, okay?’) and back to the same reservoir of piss from before, still wet and plentiful, so he could add more to it. I rushed back, Iain returned and then, guess what?

‘Daddy, I need a pooooooo!’

‘Fuck sake!’ I barked, unable to stop the swear word from leaping out my throat.

Iain grinned. ‘I’ll be honest, the only thing that’s making this more bearable for me is seeing how awful it is for you.’

I laughed. ‘I’m glad to be of service.’

We finally got out of there and boarded our return train, where yet another round of pee-pees sent me up and down the carriage like an angry kangaroo. Iain found this, and my exasperated reactions, a continuing source of amusement. I silently wished for a ticket collector to come along the carriage and re-kindle his rage.

It had been a good day.

…most of it anyway.

But we both agreed that for now, and possibly forever, Christmas could definitely, absolutely, incontrovertibly…

…piss off.

Christmas: A One-Star Review

If the Christmas season was an Amazon product I’d give it four stars. Not because it’s all that good, but because I’m nice, you see. I wouldn’t want to hurt Christmas’s feelings.

If the Christmas season was a place of interest, or a restaurant or something, I’d give it four stars on Trip Advisor, and I’d probably write something like, ‘Loved the bit where the little people opened the presents and smiled, and couldn’t fault the bit where everybody ate the bitter-tasting green Maltesers and the dead bird with Bovril poured all over it, but if I’ve any mild criticism to offer – and it seems churlish even to mention it – and, really, it’s very, very mild criticism indeed – mild as an Amish curry – it’s that for well over ninety per cent of that small handful of festive weeks I felt like I wanted to raid a private scorpion breeder’s aquarium and stab myself to death with their collection, and then run over a cliff onto a field of landmines screaming, ‘Why? WHY won’t you JUST let me DIE, God?’

‘Apart from that though… excellent.’

The kids were fuelled by a cocktail of excitement and chocolate, making them psychotic whirling scarecrows of tears, screams and laughter, their behaviour made all the worse by them being unbound from routine and purpose. We tried to take them out and about, and occupy their time as much as possible, but bad weather, worse finances and a dearth of places to go in the middle of a winter holiday didn’t make that easy. If they weren’t fighting over each other’s new toys, they were fighting over each other’s old toys; sometimes they just fought because of muscle memory. Separately they were fine, angelic even, and together they could be wurlitzers of warmth and unity, but most of the time they squabbled like pigeons on meth, pecking at each other over the smallest of injustices and infractions. ‘I WANTED THE BLUE SPOON!’ ‘THAT’S MY ONE!’ ‘BUT I ALWAYS HAVE THE BLUE ONE!’ ‘IT’S MINE!’ ‘YOU’RE NAUGHTY!’ ‘I’M NOT NAUGHTY, YOU’RE NAUGHTY!’

Standing there amid the screams and recriminations, I could feel my blood pressure rising like a thermometer inside the sun’s arse. Even on otherwise tranquil trips away, the ghost of Stressmas was never too far from my heart. I took our eldest, 5, to the local country park so we could don our wellies on, trudge through the mud and shout borderline abuse at farm animals, but on the road there some geriatric jerk-off in a gleaming BMW decided to dangerously tailgate me in the rain and wet on a dangerous stretch of road, with my little boy buckled helplessly into the site of impact like a tiny Crash Test Dummy.

In my usual calm manner, I gesticulated wildly and hammered the horn, calling him a murderer and a few other choice names besides, before totally losing it and punching the rear-view mirror off its perch and down onto the floor. The old man gunned his engine and revved past me at high speed, staring straight ahead to avoid my furious glare, which begs the question: why was he tailgating me in the first place? Anyway, I wasn’t proud of my little outburst, and I apologised to the boy for losing my temper, telling him that big people made mistakes sometimes, too. I asked if we could keep this little outburst between the two of us so I’d have time to replace the cracked glass in the mirror, so naturally he grassed me up to his mum the next time he had a chance. I guess I’m proud. I’ve taught him well by instruction, if not always by example.

The festive season had genuine highlights, of course, with Christmas Day being the obvious top dog. What’s not to love? Looks of surprise, delight and gratitude on our children’s faces; getting to spend the day with close family; eating well,  laughing, being merry and beating those sons of bitches at every parlour game, board game and quiz game brought to the table. Budge over, Jesus. There’s a new God in town.

So there’s no point writing about how lovely the loveliest bits were, because I want to make you laugh and/or nod in shamed recognition, not start cooing and ooing and aahing.

My second favourite part of the season was our eldest kid’s nativity play, which I enjoyed enormously, mostly because our lad was the star of the segment. He played the grumpy, boom-voiced inn keeper around whom the well-worn story of baby Jesus revolved. Although he was natural and confident in his poise and delivery, I can’t deny it hurt my feelings a little that he disobeyed my instruction to holler out ‘ALL HAIL LORD SATAN’ at the end of the big musical number. I’ll remember that, you little (Peter O’) tool!

The nativity was merely the opening act of a two-hour long extravaganza. We watched each of the remaining six classes perform their medleys of music and madness. I took particular delight in spotting those kids who were hating every agonising second of the experience; the ones who’d rather be out in the playground being smashed in the face with a lead pipe than standing on stage in full view of their community wearing a silly hat and dancing awkwardly to an old Boyzone song from 1992. Around 95 per cent of these squirming, dead-eyed children were boys. It may surprise you, but the overwhelmingly hyper-masculine, working class culture of this part of Central Scotland doesn’t always lend itself well to theatrical exuberance.

My kid’s performance aside, the best –the absolute best – bit of the show was definitely when they brought out the cardboard Twin Towers. OH NO THEY DIDN’T! Oh YES they did. Each class’s segment was built around the theme of a particular decade in the school’s history. Primary 2 had the 2000s, which covered 9/11, an atrocity that not for one second I thought they’d cover. When the curtains opened, I even whispered jokingly in my wife’s ear, ‘2000s? What are they going to do here: recreate 9/11?’ Then out came those two big pieces of cardboard with lots of little windows drawn on them in black marker, and down fell my jaw. What the hell was coming next?: two six-year-olds running out from the wings of the stage wearing pantomime airplanes and screaming ALLAHU AKHBAR?

Mercifully, the action segued from mention of the deadliest terrorist attack on US soil, to the many sporting successes of 2002. Tonally, it was like flicking through a classic women’s magazine. (’10 SECRETS TO A MORE LOVING YOU’ ‘KIDS SAY THE FUNNIEST THINGS’ ‘MY UNCLE CHOPPED OFF MY MUM’S HEAD AND USED IT AS A COCK WARMER’) There was no mention of the second Iraq War, but I figured the teacher’s main goal probably wasn’t to stage a live, theatrical documentary worthy of John Pilger.

Before the morning’s entertainment was over we’d had the wedding of Princess Di and Prince Charles (thankfully they omitted the Paris-based sequel: Di Hard); a nine-year-old girl stomping out on stage in character as Margaret Thatcher, and a ten-year-old Joey from Friends repeatedly shouting out ‘How YOU doin’?’. It was surreal as merry shit, and of course, for that reason, I loved every ridiculous second. I prayed that the finale would be JR Ewing and Jimmy Savile conveying the Iran Contra affair through the medium of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, but, alas, they just sang a Christmas song. I hereby offer my writing services for next year’s Chrimbo concert. I’m thinking ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ meets ‘The Hills Have Eyes’. Get your people to call my people. I think we might have a hit on our hands…

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JOIN ME LATER IN THE WEEK FOR A TALE OF TICKETS, TERROR, PISS AND VOMIT AT THE EDINBURGH CHRISTMAS MARKET

Lying to Your Kids: Your Questions About Santa (Parts 5&6 of 6)

I wrote a mostly serious think-piece called ‘Why the Santa Myth is Bad for Your Children’s Elf’, which you can read by clicking on the highlighted link. The article inspired a set of questions, challenges and accusations, which I’ve been addressing in bite-sized pieces, day-by-day (well, every other day), in the run-up to Christmas. I hope this final section makes you laugh if we’re sympatico on the subject, and still makes you laugh even if you think I’m a monster (even though it’s clearly you who are the monster). If it makes you think, it’s a mere side-effect, I assure you.

What’s wrong with the whole Santa thing? Why can’t you let kids have their innocence a little longer, when this world is such a terrible, horrible, disgusting, nightmarish place?

The sort of people who trot this one out are usually the sort of people who spend more on their Christmas decorations than the GDPs of most small countries. While the poor line up on Christmas Eve to get tinned turkey from their local food banks, the ‘oh-it’s-nice’ brigade is busy spunking out £50-a-pop on individual strings of ethically-sourced tinsel from John Lewis and £600-a-go on tree baubles designed by John Paul Gaultier that have been pain-stakingly moulded from impressions taken of Paul Hollywood’s balls, all in the name of erecting a festive art installation in their homes that’s as close to the anti-septic perfection of a picture in an upmarket catalogue that a person can get their house to look and feel before it tips over into becoming a modern-day emperor’s mausoleum.

“We need Santa as a bulwark against this horrible world,” they say, as their kids open up a parcel containing a functioning, sentient robot and a wrist-watch that can tell the time in other galaxies. “They need to keep their innocence,” they say, as they drive their kids to Jenners’ Boxing Day sale, passing housing schemes along the way where the kids had out-of-date toothpaste for breakfast and dog-food for dinner, and had to take their siblings on in hand-to-hand combat for the privilege.

“Why is this world such a big, cruel, savage toilet?” they ask, as they fill out forms to send their kids to schools with wrought-iron gates and ivy creeping up the balustrades.

Santa doesn’t visit the schemes and estates where the red on the Aquafresh is actually blood. He just flies over them, as high above the ground as possible, tutting and shaking his head. Maybe he ejects the odd teddy bear with an eye missing, or a spoon without a handle, just to feel festive, but he daren’t land. “They’d have the fucking runners off my sleigh in a heartbeat,” he says, with a nervous laugh. “And they’d have the reindeer fighting to the death in an underground betting shop.”

Believing in Santa never did YOU any harm though, did it?

First of all, how do you know? How do any of us know? Millions upon millions of Americans think it’s normal to want school teachers to carry guns, or for poor people to die in agony because they can’t afford hospital treatment. That’s only crazy from the outside looking in.

Anyway, I’m not sure that exposure to organised religion at a young age did me any lasting harm (I’m an ardent atheist these days), but that doesn’t mean that I consider organised religion to be harmless. It’s incredibly dangerous, and in the wrong hands and heads incalculably so.

My gran smoked for about nine decades and didn’t die directly from smoking-related illnesses, but that doesn’t mean that smoking is safe.

I once lathered my naked body in liquid LSD and then tried to recreate the classic arcade game ‘Frogger’ by repeatedly running backwards and forwards across the motorway, but I was killed by a truck and came back as a High Priest of the Gnome people, so maybe that’s not such a great example.

In any case, whatever supernatural stories you need to tell yourself to make you feel better about your own actions, or less afraid of your own inevitable death, and whatever all-powerful entities you need to create in order to give those stories life, are all absolutely fine. They are. Really. They’re great. More power to you. Just so long as they don’t bring harm to any other living being – yourself included.

But the second you start seeking out other like-minded ‘souls’ with similar beliefs and supernatural figureheads to yours, with a view to forming a club, one which quickly moves to multiply and immortalise its rules and beliefs in the form of some irrevocable holy manifesto, the contents of which are destined to be poured down the throats of ‘heathens’ and children everywhere for time immemorial, then that’s not so fine. Then it becomes political. But worse…

Because while political leaders and political ideas can change and evolve with time (in theory, at least), religious leaders and ideas – in the main – do not. Otherwise, what’s the point? Either your God has all the power and all the answers, or he’s a pretty shit God, right? Religion is nothing more than politics preached from the cloud and the pulpit, as opposed to the podium and the press conference.

The big difference is, though – again in theory, and specific to this place and time – I’ve got at least some say over whether or not my kids are proselytised into a religion, or indeed a political party. I don’t seem to have any power over whether or not my kids should have a belief in Santa foisted upon them.

Even if the Santa myth had no ill effects, and didn’t constitute a massive breach of trust between child and parent/guardian, even then… why are people who don’t want their kids to believe in Santa forced to go along with it? What makes this relatively new and dangerously commercialised myth more important and sacred than a person’s right to raise their children the way they want to?

I’ve tried various things to gently shake my eldest son from his belief (I’m part of a team, remember, so I can’t just scream ‘SANTA IS A HOAX’ in his face fifty times a day, as much as I may want to). When my eldest kid was four I asked him: “How do you know it’s Santa and not just me and your mum going downstairs and putting presents out?”

He thought for a moment.

“Because he comes at night. And YOU’LL be asleep too. So it can’t be you.”

Such quick-thinking, such mental gymnastics, but all employed in the service of doing somersaults over ghosts. What damage are these falsehoods doing to his brain? Imagination is fine. Lies are not.

I stroked his hair and looked him dead in the eyes. “I just want you to remember, when you’re older, that there was one man in this world who didn’t lie to you.” And I pointed to myself.

That’ll come in handy if I need him to avenge me in the future…

Merry Christmas/Sharkmas one and all.

Lying to Your Kids: Your Questions About Santa (Part 3 of 6)

I wrote a mostly serious think-piece called ‘Why the Santa Myth is Bad for Your Children’s Elf’, which you can read by clicking on the highlighted link. The article inspired a set of questions, challenges and accusations, which I’m going to address in bite-sized pieces, day-by-day (well, every other day), in the run-up to Christmas. I hope it makes you laugh if we’re sympatico on the subject, and still makes you laugh even if you think I’m a monster (even though it’s clearly you who are the monster).

Oh, come on, you believed in Santa as a child, and I’ll bet YOU liked it, you big spoil-sport

I’ve got quite a simple response to that question, really.

Nothing should be done to inhibit a child’s burgeoning critical faculties, or to corrupt their very sense of the world as an observable, rational and comprehensible place. You can pretend, play-act, stretch the limits of their imaginations, sure, but don’t for Christ’s sake have them believing a lie for seven fucking years!

Don’t get me wrong. You’re right. I myself used to believe wholeheartedly in Santa Claus. I used to get letters from him, in very ornate handwriting. And I thought: this could only be the work of a magical being; he writes like a bloody pro. This guy’s the real deal. I also used to get plenty of Valentine’s cards. I don’t think I can properly express the horror I felt on the day I was old enough to realise that the letters from Santa and the Valentine’s cards were all in the same handwriting. That was a shock to me. “Well, Santa. I see last year’s presents have come with a few strings attached. I’m not that sort of boy. But maybe throw in a few Easter eggs and we’ll talk.”

The truth was even more horrible. I cross-referenced the Santa letters and the valentine’s cards with the handwriting on my birthday cards. Turns out the Santa letters and the Valentine’s Day cards were from my gran.

“Roses are red, and I’m your mum’s mummy, just wait till I stuff you, back up in my tummy.”

I know she was just trying to boost my fragile little-boy ego, but I really bought in to the whole romantic fantasy.

And all that time the unrequited love of my young life was a bloated septuagenarian Glasweigen lady who smelled of cabbage. I was cat-fished by own gran before it was even a thing.

So, no, Christmas was quite traumatic, actually.

Lying to Your Kids: Your Questions About Santa (Part 2 of 6)

I wrote a mostly serious think-piece called ‘Why the Santa Myth is Bad for Your Children’s Elf’, which you can read by clicking on the highlighted link. The article inspired a set of questions, challenges and accusations, which I’m going to address in bite-sized pieces, day-by-day (well, every other day), in the run-up to Christmas. I hope it makes you laugh if we’re sympatico on the subject, and still makes you laugh even if you think I’m a monster (even though it’s clearly you who are the monster).

What have you got against kids using their imaginations and believing in magic, Jamie? Don’t you realise that without Santa the world would be a grey, dull and empty place?

Of course, you’re right.

It’s only at Christmas-time that we permit our kids to exercise their imaginations in glorious, ambulatory 4D instead of just forcing them to mainline TV through their eyes, absorbing hour after hour of YouTube videos of kids opening plastic egg-cases (for some inexplicable reason, this is considered entertainment).

Our kids spend eleven months of every year shuffling around the house like robot butlers haunted by the souls of civil service middle-managers, daring only to imagine that the next day and the next day and the day after that will be exactly the same as it was today.

Until, that is, the igniting spark of Christmas arrives! Huzzah! ‘Tis yuletime, so come to life, my children. Come to life! It’s time to play, to dare, to dream. Let your thoughts have substance, for ’tis the season of magic (‘Tis also the season that teaches kids that it’s okay for fat old men to break into houses in the dead of night as children sleep).

It’s the time of year where parents everywhere say to their spawn: “Come on, kids, let’s begin your officially-mandated month of very strictly regulated imaginative role-play. I’m going to channel all of my dead-eyed vapidity into regurgitating the same old stock-phrases about Santa that I trot out every year, and pretend that I’m taking you on some unforgettable, mind-bending journey to the very periphery of the knowable universe, when in reality I’m just lazy and deeply unimaginative, and SANTA’S NICE, AND I LIKE NICE THINGS, THINGS THAT MAKE PEOPLE GO AWWWWWW, AND YOU WILL NOT TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME, YOU LITTLE FUCK-STAIN! Plus, I really like accessorising trees, and making my house look like a John Lewis catalogue, so when I take pictures of my decorations and put them on-line it makes everyone question their sad little lives, and how they’ll never match up to me so they might as well convert to Islam next year.”

Magic is for life, not just for Christmas. Santa is nothing more than a template, a suggestion, a Shutter-stock photo. Kids should be creating their own mental mischief all the time, every day. And you, as a parent or a big person in their lives, should be running around the house with them pretending to be fifty-foot-high hedgehogs on the run from the Intergalactic Council of Sentient Jelly Cakes, or bears with the heads of dolphins, or screaming at each other in made-up languages. Kids need magic. It sustains them. They just don’t need their magic accompanied by a side-order of lies.

Why is it so important to deceive them as we enchant them? Wouldn’t Santa still be a lark if the kids knew he wasn’t really ‘real’? Of course he would. Harry Potter isn’t real, Star Wars isn’t real, and people have become multi-millionaires a million times over on the back of that shit.

Do you want to go ‘all in’? Is that what you want? You want to go all in? Let’s do it then! Let’s tell our kids that EVERY fictional character is real: Ronald McDonald, the Honey Monster, the Gruffalo, Mr Hankey, Death, dragons, Scooby Doo, Muttley, Garfield, Jesus, Danny Dyer. ALL of them. You want magic? HERE’S your fucking magic!! Check out this world: kids who can’t eat their Rice Krispies because they’re frightened that Snap and Crackle are going to burst out of the packet and kick the fuck out of them; kids who think Voldermort is going to pick them up from school and then turn into a giant spider and eat them. Let your mentally-exhausted children live in that world. Let them run THAT gauntlet, you sickos.

A quick thank you and a Merry Christmas to my weirdo readers…

In creative and artistic terms, it’s best and healthiest to create for creation’s sake. To paint, to sculpt, to write, to rhyme, to sing, to act, because you have to, because you need to, because something inescapable and unquenchable in your very being won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Not because you expect to make money out of it. Not simply to sell yourself. Your very soul. Otherwise there’s no truth or purity at the core of your work. You’re corrupted. You’re click-bait. You’re art for the Amazon warehouse generation.

As someone who makes next to no money from his writing, the previous paragraph is what I keep telling myself so I don’t start carving tattoos of Jeffrey Archer’s face into my chest with a Stanley knife, while shouting out the window: ‘LET ME BE YOUR SEXY WORD WHORE, YOU FRIGID BASTARDS! LET ME FUCK YOU RIGHT IN THE MIND FOR CASH! COLD HARD CASH! WANT MY FUCKING KIDS TO STARVE, DO YOU? OH COLD HEART! OH, CRUEL, CRUEL WORLD!’

Of course the next best thing to money is recognition. I’m not talking fame, or anything gaudy like that, although I don’t see why my big whiskery face doesn’t deserve to be beaming out from even just ONE lousy billboard. I just like the thought that someone, somewhere out there, is hanging on my words; that someone might be looking forward to the next thing I write. That’s the important thing: to know that I’ve made someone smile, or laugh, or cry, or think. Or even just really, really, really pissed them off.

You, you lovely sons of guns, have made me feel all that and more. Well, most of you. Definitely a lot of you. You know… some of you. OK, GREIG. OKAY? GREIG. GREIG’S MY ONLY FUCKING FAN, OKAY??? ARE YOU ALL HAPPY NOW??

But seriously. All of you – especially Greig – have made me feel like I’m doing something worthy. That I’m not just hollering into the void, or ejaculating thesauruses into the wind – or is it thesaurii? No. No, it’s not. The wavy red line knows all. All hail the wavy red line!

You’re a great bunch of…. I hesitate to say fans… you’re a great bunch of… em, disparate group of people, many of whom… have… liked or read, like, one thing I’ve written, and just… haven’t got round to ‘unliking’ the page yet… em… and lonely people? Lots of really sad, lonely people. Thank you. Thank you so much. You’ve made this hellish, insecure, border-line narcissistic wreck of a man weep a little less in his bed at night.

The site – and its Facebook page – is taking a break for Christmas and New Year. I’ll be back at some point in early January, so until then you’ll have to find somewhere else to get your fix of horrifying stories about my sex-life, passive aggressive rants about my children, sociopathic outbursts of hatred towards the world, and reviews of TV shows you don’t watch.

Thank you again for your support – for being here, for noticing, for getting involved. I hope you have a marginally tolerable festive season, and find some way to self-medicate yourself through the season. And resist the urge to kill your gran. I know she gets smashed on sherry and goes on and on about brown people, and how much she really likes that lovely Piers Morgan, but don’t do hard time on her account. She’ll be dead before you know it.

Merry Christmas everyone! See you next year!

Giving Santa the Sack: Your Questions Answered

I’ve already written a mostly serious think-piece about ‘Why the Santa Myth is Bad for Your Children’s Elf’, which you can read by clicking on the highlighted link. I found that the article inspired the same sets of questions, challenges and accusations, which I’ve tried to address here, but this time with a little less of a serious head on. In fact, I’ve gone full-on bonkers in some places. Hope it makes you laugh if we’re sympatico on the subject, and still makes you laugh even if you think I’m the monster (even though it’s clearly you, you monster).

Why are you trying to rubbish Santa? It’s tradition. We’ve always had Santa, elves and reindeer at Christmas time. ALWAYS.

Yes, you’re right, indeed we have. Who can forget the famous cave paintings depicting early man clubbing a bear to death as Donner and Blitzen whizz above his head on a coke-fuelled adventure, pooping down gift-wrapped bones and Christmas cards made from human skin? Or Jesus sitting on Santa’s lap asking for a camel that can go through the eye of a needle, and Santa shaking his head and asking, “Is that on the Pray-station 4?”

The Santa we know today – big red coat, bushy white beard, jelly belly and jolly disposition – has had more origin stories than all of the heroes and villains at Marvel and DC combined. He’s an ever-shifting mish-mash of Christian saints, pagan history and alpine folklore who’s been constantly co-opted and re-packaged by ad-men, marketers and movie moguls the world over, to the point where he’d be almost unrecognisable to those long-ago mountain children who grew up hearing tales of the petty, vengeful old bastard who partnered up with a half-goat, half-demon called Krampus to go around the countryside stuffing kids into a sack. Ho-Ho-Hosef Fritzl.

Shall we bring Krampus back? Shall we? After all, horny old Krampus is far more traditional than the Coca-Cola-coated old coot who shimmies down our chimneys at present. I’m all for it, incidentally. I think Christmas would be improved immeasurably by the introduction of blood-curdling terror (which would also be a perfect complement to Brussels Sprouts).

On second thoughts, let’s not get too hung up on tradition. We used to do a lot of things back in the day: burn witches; stone adulterers; smoke on aeroplanes; vote Liberal Democrat. There’s always room for change. We don’t need to preserve the status quo (and by ‘status quo’ I mean ‘any established or prevailing world-order’ just as much as I do the 1970s rock band, who were fucking terrible).

We already took Jesus out of Christmas.

What’s one more fictional bearded character?

Why can’t you let your kids use their imaginations and believe in magic? Without Santa the world would be a greyer, duller place for kids.

Of course, you’re right. It’s only at Christmas-time that we permit our kids to exercise their imaginations in glorious, ambulatory 4D instead of just making them ingest imaginative content through the TV; making them sit there like old ladies attached to morphine drips, with nary a blink shared between them, as they impassively absorb hour after hour of cartoon dogs or videos of kids on YouTube opening plastic egg-cases (for some inexplicable reason, this is considered entertainment), while we sit there by their sides, occasionally force-feeding them lumps of sugar and chunks of fried pig.

Our kids spend eleven months of every year shuffling around the house like robot-butlers haunted by the souls of civil service middle-managers, daring to imagine only that the next day and the next day and the day after that will be exactly the same as it was today.

Until, that is, the igniting spark of Christmas arrives! Huzzah! ‘Tis yuletime, so come to life, my children. Come to life! It’s time to play, to dare, to dream. Let your thoughts have substance, for ’tis the season of magic. ‘Tis also the season that teaches kids that it’s okay for fat old men to break into houses in the dead of night that have children sleeping in them.

It’s the time of year where parents everywhere will say to their spawn: “Come on, kids, it’s time for your annual, officially-mandated month of very strictly regulated within firmly set parameters imaginative role-play! I know I’ve spent the past year shouting things at you like, ‘Why don’t you live in the real world and stop being silly?’ and ‘No, Kevin, you’re not a magical koala bear on a spaceship with a guitar made of stars, and if you say that one more time I’m going to smash your X-Box into little pieces and feed it to grandma in a sandwich’, and ‘I wish I’d had time to pretend I was a flying postman called Kite Pete AS MY MUM WAS PUNCHING ME IN THE FACE AND TELLING ME SHE WISHED I’D BEEN ABORTED‘, but now – I promise – I’m going to channel all of my dead-eyed vapidity into regurgitating the same old stock-phrases about Santa that I trot out every year, and pretend that I’m taking you on some unforgettable, mind-bending journey to the very periphery of the knowable universe, when in reality I’m just lazy and deeply unimaginative, and SANTA’S NICE, AND I LIKE NICE THINGS, THINGS THAT MAKE PEOPLE GO AWWWWWW, AND YOU WILL NOT TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME, plus I really like accessorising trees, and making my house look like a John Lewis catalogue.’

Magic is for life, not just for Christmas. Santa is nothing more than a template, a suggestion, a Shutter-stock photo. Kids should be creating their own mental mischief all the time, every day. And you, as a parent or a big person in their lives, should be running around the house with them pretending to be fifty-foot-high hedgehogs on the run from the Intergalactic Council of Sentient Jelly Cakes, or bears with the heads of dolphins, or screaming at each other in made-up languages. Kids need magic. It sustains them. They just don’t need their magic accompanied by a side-order of lies.

Why is it so important to deceive them as we enchant them? Wouldn’t Santa still be a lark if the kids knew he wasn’t really ‘real’? Of course he would. Harry Potter isn’t real, Star Wars isn’t real, and people have become multi-millionaires a million times over on the back of that shit.

Do you want to go ‘all in’? Is that what you want? You want to go all in? Let’s do it then! Let’s tell our kids that EVERY fictional character is real: Ronald McDonald, the Honey Monster, the Gruffalo, Mr Hankey, Death, dragons, Scooby Doo, Muttley, Garfield, Jesus, Danny Dyer. ALL of them. You want magic? HERE’S your fucking magic!! Check out this world: kids who can’t eat their Rice Krispies because they’re frightened that Snap and Crackle are going to burst out of the packet and kick the fuck out of them; kids who think Ned Flanders is their real next door neighbour; kids who think Voldermort is coming to pick them up from school and then turn into a giant spider and eat them. Let your mentally-exhausted children live in that world. Let them run THAT gauntlet, you sickos.

Or… we could just declassify Santa.

Oh, come on, you believed in Santa as a child, and I’ll bet YOU liked it, you big spoil-sport

It’s simple, really. Nothing should be done to inhibit a child’s burgeoning critical faculties, or to corrupt their very sense of the world as an observable, rational and comprehensible place. But don’t get me wrong. You’re right. I myself used to believe wholeheartedly in Santa Claus. I used to get letters from him, in very ornate handwriting. And I thought, this could only be the work of a magical being, he writes like a bloody pro. This guy’s the real deal. I also used to get plenty of Valentine’s cards. I don’t think I can properly express the horror I felt on the day I was old enough to realise that the letters from Santa and the Valentine’s cards were all in the same handwriting. That was a shock to me. “Well, Santa. I see last year’s presents have come with a few strings attached. I’m not that sort of boy. But maybe throw in a few Easter eggs and we’ll talk.”

The truth was even more horrible. I cross-referenced the Santa letters and the valentine’s cards with the handwriting on my birthday cards. Turns out the Santa letters and the VD cards were from my gran.

“Roses are red, I’m your mum’s mummy, and I’m going to stuff you, back up in my tummy.”

I know she was just trying to boost my fragile little-boy ego around Valentine’s Day, but I really bought in to the whole romantic fantasy. And all that time the unrequited love of my young life was a bloated septuagenarian who smelled of cabbage. I was cat-fished by own gran before it was even a thing.

Yee-Haw! It’s Sharkmas!

Imagine if you heard about a culture where the kids were told that every June the 15th a cowboy called Finn Clintson hurtled around the world on a great white flying shark, stopping off to eat air fresheners out of people’s cars, and delivering boxes of rice only to those houses where the kids were managing to play darts at a professional standard.

Families start putting neon sharks in their windows at the end of May. They take their kids to aquariums where they sit on Finn Clintson’s great white shark (a stuffed one, of course) and tell Finn what kind of rice they’d like for Sharkmas. On Sharkmas Eve, all the dads put fresh stacks of air fresheners in their cars, and leave the doors unlocked so Finn Clintson doesn’t have to break through a window. The cries of ONE HUNDRED AND EIIIIIIIGGGHTTTYY can be heard bellowing from every window, down every street, between May and June, as kids everywhere almost break themselves trying to emulate their Sharkmas hero, Les ‘Danger’ Wallace. Listen carefully and you’ll hear: “DO YOU EVEN WANT TEMPURA RICE THIS YEAR, ABIGAIL?” and “YOU MISSED DOUBLE-TOP? IT’S LIKE YOU WANT TO MAKE FINN CLINTSON’S SHARK DIE OF SADNESS!!”

And no-one’s allowed to tell their kids that Finn Clintson isn’t real, or where the rice really comes from, or that sharks can’t fly. Even the schools keep up the charade, bringing Finn Clintsons into the school and having the kids make little wooden great white shark decorations to dangle from their Sharkmas Hat Rack. Ten year old kids are walking around literally believing in flying sharks and cowboys dropping rice-boxes in people’s houses at night.

What would you think of that culture?

You’d think they were all cruel and mental, right?

Happy Sharkmas, you cunts.

What’s wrong with the whole Santa thing? Why can’t you let kids have their innocence a little longer, when this world is such a terrible, horrible, disgusting, nightmarish place?

The sort of people who trot this one out are usually the sort of people who spend more on their Christmas decorations than the GDPs of most small countries. While the poor line up on Christmas Eve to get tinned turkey from their local food banks, they’re busy spunking out £50-a-pop on individual strings of ethically-sourced tinsel from John Lewis and £600-a-go on tree baubles designed by John Paul Gaultier that have been pain-stakingly moulded from impressions taken of Paul Hollywood’s balls, all in the name of erecting a festive art installation in their homes that’s as close to the anti-septic perfection of a snap in an upmarket catalogue that a person can get their house to look and feel before it tips over into becoming a modern-day emperor’s mausoleum.

“We need Santa as a bulwark against this horrible world,” they say, as their kids open up a parcel containing a functioning, sentient robot and a watch that can tell the time in other galaxies. “They need to keep their innocence,” they say, as they drive their kids to Jenners’ Boxing Day sale, passing housing schemes along the way where the kids had out-of-date toothpaste for breakfast and dog-food for dinner, and had to take their siblings on in hand-to-hand combat for the privilege.

“Why is this world such a big, cruel, savage toilet?” they ask, as they fill out forms to send their kids to schools with wrought-iron gates and ivy creeping up the balustrades.

Santa doesn’t visit the schemes and estates where the red on the Aquafresh is actually blood. He just flies over them, as high above the ground as possible, tutting and shaking his head. Maybe he ejects the odd teddy bear with an eye missing, or a spoon without a handle, just to feel festive, but he daren’t land. “They’d have the fucking runners off my sleigh in a heartbeat,” he says, with a nervous laugh. “And they’d have the reindeer fighting to the death in an underground betting shop.”

Believing in Santa never did YOU any harm though, did it?

First of all, how do you know? How do any of us know? Millions upon millions of Americans think it’s normal to want school teachers to carry guns, or for poor people to die in agony because they can’t afford hospital treatment. That’s only crazy from the outside looking in.

Am I right, Finn Clintson?

Anyway, I’m not sure that exposure to organised religion at a young age did me any lasting harm (I’m an ardent atheist these days), but that doesn’t mean that I consider organised religion to be harmless. It’s incredibly dangerous, but in the wrong hands, and heads, it’s incalculably so.

My gran smoked for about nine decades and didn’t die directly from smoking-related illnesses, but that doesn’t mean that smoking is safe.

I once lathered my naked body in liquid LSD and then tried to recreate the classic arcade game Frogger by repeatedly running backwards and forwards across the motorway, but I was killed by a truck and came back as a High Priest of the Gnome people, so maybe that’s not such a great example.

In any case, whatever supernatural stories you need to tell yourself to make you feel better about your own actions, or less afraid of your own inevitable death, and whatever all-powerful entities you need to create in order to give those stories life, are all absolutely fine. They are. Really. They’re great. More power to you. Just so long as they don’t bring harm to any other living being – yourself included.

But the second you start seeking out other like-minded ‘souls’ with similar beliefs and supernatural figureheads to yours, with a view to forming a club, one which quickly moves to multiply, standardise, immortalise and spread its rules and beliefs in the form of some irrevocable holy manifesto, the contents of which are destined to be poured down the throats of ‘heathens’ and children everywhere, then that’s not so fine. Then it becomes political. But worse. Because while political leaders and political ideas can change and evolve with time (in theory, at least), religious leaders and ideas – in the main – do not. Otherwise, what’s the point? Either your God has all the power and all the answers, or he’s a pretty shit God, right? Religion is nothing more than politics preached from the cloud and the pulpit, as opposed to the podium and the press conference.

The big difference is, though – again in theory, and specific to this place and time – I’ve got at least some say over whether or not my kids are proselytised into a religion, or indeed a political party. I don’t seem to have any power over whether or not my kids have a belief in Santa inculcated in them.

Even if the Santa myth had no ill effects, and didn’t constitute a massive breach of trust between child and parent/guardian, even then… why are people who don’t want their kids to believe in Santa forced to go along with it? What makes this relatively new and dangerously commercialised myth more important and sacred than a person’s right to raise their children the way they want to?

I’ve tried various things to gently shake my eldest son from his belief (I’m part of a team, remember, so I can’t just scream ‘SANTA IS A HOAX’ in his face fifty times a day, as much as I may want to). Just a few weeks ago I interrogated his belief in Santa. He’s 4. “How do you know it’s Santa and not just me and your mum going downstairs and putting presents out?”

He thought for a moment.

“Because he comes at night. And YOU’LL be asleep too. So it can’t be you.”

Such quick-thinking, such mental gymnastics, but all employed in the service of doing somersaults over ghosts. What damage are these falsehoods doing to his brain? Imagination is fine. Lies are not.

I stroked his hair and looked him dead in the eyes. “I just want you to remember, when you’re older, that there was one man in this world who didn’t lie to you.” And I pointed to myself.

That’ll come in handy if I need him to avenge me in the future…

Can you believe it’ll be Sharkmas again in just six months? Where has this year gone.

Why the Santa myth is bad for your children’s elf

We live in a time of great freedom, however illusory or temporary that freedom might yet prove.

For instance, I could sit in a circle of peers and announce that I don’t believe in Yahweh, God, Vishnu, Allah, or a giant turtle that holds the known world atop its back as it crawls through the cosmos, and most of the people in that circle would probably accept this declaration with a silent nod or a shrug of the shoulders. Never mind that in certain countries, among certain people and cultures, such a vow would earn me a spell in prison, a steak knife to the stomach or death. Here in the modern, secular west, I can profess belief or its lack in whatsoever I choose and be almost certain of a tolerant reception.

But try to tell people that I don’t want to play along with the Santa myth? Well, let’s just say that most culturally dominant orthodoxies seem benign until you try to opt out of them. I think a steak-knife to the stomach would be easier to take. Take it from me: being a Santa-truther gets you treated like a scar-faced leper with a vest of grenades and a public masturbation problem.

The sprawling Santa conspiracy, global in its reach, in which we entangle our children raises a multitude of uncomfortable questions, and comes at a terrible price: not least of which is the spirit of shattered trust in which it’s perpetuated.

It seems that all other western cultural norms are fluid, except for this one. Never this one. The only things powerful enough to grant you a Santa exemption are deeply-held fundamentalist Christian beliefs or adherence to a non-Christian faith, and even then there’s a chance you’ll still be regarded as a destroyer of children’s dreams.

I baulk at the presumptuousness, the unthinkingness of it all. Really, would a Christian parent ever in a month of Sundays approach a Muslim family and knowingly ask them if they’re looking forward to the birthday of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ? A religious person might very well try to preach to or proselytise my children, but I’d be well within my rights to do everything possible to counter their supernaturally-motivated manoeuvrings, from taking expert advice to punching them in the teeth, and I’d enjoy broad moral – if not exactly legal – support. Santa’s cult of commercialism, however, has carte blanche, and few would ever support me in a bid to tear it down.

It’s clear that there’s something about this little red-and-white lie that’s seen as integral to and inextricable from a hearty and wholesome childhood. There’s a concomitant notion that somehow the act of debunking Santa holds the potential to obliterate a child’s capacity for innocence and imagination, and quite possibly leave them with the dull, jaded outlook of a middle-aged chartered accountant on the eve of his second divorce. Or else turn them into a fleet of joyless androids each wearing the scowling face of Richard Dawkins.

This pre-supposes that in the pre-Santa days of Shakespeare and Dumas the kids of the world were witless dullards, and every visionary, artist and poet worth their salt only emerged post-Pole.

Santa began as a folk-tale that many believe morphed out of the legends of a Saint. He was a rather different, certainly less sanguine, figure in his early days, one that children were more inclined to fear than keenly anticipate. The Santa we know and love today – the darling of TV adverts, movies and billboards – has only existed in his current form – big-bearded, red-jacketed and jolly – for a comparatively short time (the same is true for his retinue: Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer only arrived in 1939); but yet we are encouraged to believe that something as malleable and arbitrary as the historical idea of Santa should be considered unchallengeable, unchangeable and eternal.

Santa is but one fictional character in a cast of thousands. Why does he get special dispensation when it comes to the laws of reality? I regularly read my sons stories about alien encounters, magical beanstalks, sentient robots and talking horses, without ever feeling the need to hoodwink them into accepting that all of these things can be found in reality. No-one would consider it heresy for me to explain to my son that horses can’t really talk; knowing this fact doesn’t in any way limit his imagination or detract from his very real enjoyment of the story. Penguins don’t have jobs, dogs can’t moonlight as policemen, aliens can’t travel through time in a physics-defying police box, there’s no such thing as ghosts, and people can’t turn green and smash buildings when they’re angry. My eldest certainly knows that, or at least these things have been explained to him. He doesn’t care. He still mimics these characters and scenarios, and riffs on them in his own unique, imaginative way when he’s running about the house lost in make-believe or play-acting with his toys.

Strange old ladies don’t stop him in the street to ask if he’s excited about a visit from the talking horse. He doesn’t see a million adverts on TV featuring a talking horse trying to convince him to buy things. He isn’t taken to The Talking Horse’s Grotto every year. In no other sphere of life is there such a zealous attempt to systematically cement children’s fantastical notions into fact.

Perhaps in the past the Santa fantasy was more innocent and fleeting in nature: a little tale or poem wheeled out every Christmas Eve; a single evening of merry make-believe. These days Santa is everywhere. Literally everywhere: he’s like a God who’s tired of subtlety and enigma. You can write to him, email him, watch him, read him, visit him, Skype him, tag him in your friends’ Facebook posts. He appears every year at the stroke of November, and doesn’t stop assailing kids with his maniacal mirth-making until the very last slice of turkey’s been fed to the dog.

Your motivations may be pure. You may only wish to indulge in a little heart-warming festive fantasy. But you don’t have the luxury of raising your children unplugged from the Matrix. Santa is perpetuated by businesses, not by you.

Money. It’s all about money.

Just like everything else in life, I suppose.

The power of Santa compels him… to do very little

Here’s a question for you: why does Santa deliver unequal amounts of toys to the children of the world? Why does he deliver more toys to affluent families than he does to poor families? Because he does. SO clearly, then, on the great sliding scale of political ideology, the red-jacketed sleigh-racer is more tightly aligned to conservative notions of capitalism than he is to communism, or socialism. If your kid goes back to school after the winter break with a new pair of cheap shoes and a toy laser gun, and has to listen to another kid bragging about his £1000 home entertainment system and surprise trip to Disneyland, what is he to infer about his worth in Santa’s eyes? Should he castigate himself for being too naughty, placing the blame for his poor festive haul upon his own tiny shoulders? Or should he just conclude that Santa doesn’t really like him all that much?

Remove Santa from this equation, and you’ve still got a problem with unequal distribution of wealth and resources in society, married to an unslakable thirst for goods and gadgets that’s only heightened and reinforced by our media, but that’s an argument for another time (besides, there are more learned, original and eloquent thinkers out there with better and more important things to say on the topic than little old me).

Consider also this point: Santa is an omniscient being who has mastered time itself, can travel around the globe and back in one evening, and can apparently conjure an endless supply of toys from thin air. Santa uses these powers not to alleviate suffering, lift people out of hunger and poverty, cure the sick and the lame or to usher in a new era of world peace, but to drop toy robots down chimneys. What a role model. He’s no better than Sooty. Or Jesus.

You can emphasise the magical, imagination-stretching benefits of a child’s belief in Santa as a rationale for deceiving your children, but when I hear Santa’s name mentioned by parents, more often than not his name is employed as a correctional tool rather than as an instrument of wonder. Be nice, behave, go to bed, tidy your room, eat your dinner or Santa will cross you off his list, and you won’t get any toys. By weaponising Santa in this way, parents have created a bearded boogeyman to scare or bribe their children into behaving the way they want them to. This may be an instantly effective, no-nonsense behavioural control technique, but then so is smashing them in the face with a cricket bat.

The sad truth is that parents are conditioning their children to be good not for goodness’ sake – as the old snowman song goes – but to be good so they can get a new TV or pony. They’re being encouraged to equate virtue with financial reward. Part of being a happy, successful and fully-socialised human being necessitates a degree of sacrifice, negotiation, humility and deference. These are qualities – and modes of conflict resolution – that shouldn’t need a chuckling demigod, or the dangled carrot of a PlayStation 4, to be fully realised.

Sometimes people will say: “You believed in Santa, and YOU weren’t traumatised.”

You could put forward exactly the same argument for religion. Come on, you sang songs, you listened to some nice little stories, you went on coach trips. What’s your problem? I’ll tell you what my problem is: consent.

Even if the whole Santa myth is benign and beautiful, why do I have to participate in it if I don’t want to, when I can opt out of almost every other cultural or religious convention without raising an eyebrow? Why should I allow fat old strangers to peer down at my children every November and fill their heads with bullshit, when if they were peddling any other lie I’d be well within my rights to tell them to fuck off?

Whose interest does Santa really serve?

I’m conscious that I’m probably coming across as even more of a misery guts and world-class humbug than Scrooge himself. Believe me, I’ve analysed my opposition to Santa endlessly. Was I lied to as a child? Did I have promises broken? Is this what’s driving my dissection: are my trust issues bleeding on to the hem of Santa’s coat? I’m pretty sure that isn’t the case. I just like asking questions, and don’t like lying.

And, this may shock you, but I love Christmas. I love the ceremony and expectation of it all. I love the tree, the twinkling lights, the cosy mugs of cocoa on the cold and windy nights. I’m probably more excited about my kids opening their presents than they are. My partner and I – as I’m sure you do, too – always choose presents perfectly suited to their personalities, presents that will help them play and learn and laugh and grow.

Maybe I just don’t want Santa to muscle in on that. But, more than that, I find it almost impossible to lie to my kids. Santa is a secret I’ve had no say in, that I have no need for. You don’t need Santa to make Christmas magical, but you do require his absence to maintain an honest and healthy stance on both society and the universe itself. My silence is being demanded not to preserve the mystery and magic of the festive season, but to stop me from blowing the whistle on the millions of other families who have chosen to deceive their children. Families who want to keep using Santa as a four-month-long carrot-and-stick combo. This only makes me want to blow the whistle all the more; to send my sons into their schools with information bombs strapped to their brains, ready to blast your children in their faces with the bright light of truth.

But I won’t.

Well, I would give them the information, but I would counsel them not to share it with other kids, and I certainly wouldn’t take the liberty of telling anyone else’s children the truth about Santa. While some people may see it as their inalienable right to warp the world-view of my children, I don’t see it as my right to do the same to theirs. And what my kids do with any information they may or may not get from me is on YOU, not ME. If you want to lie to your kids, don’t fucking rope me into it.

That being said, I’m as much a sheep as the rest of you. I took them to Santa’s Grotto last year. Me. Wilfully. Well, accidentally (I didn’t know the garden centre I was taking them to had a grotto), but certainly of my own volition. I stood like a statue as pseudo-Santa spewed out his nonsense into my kids’ brains, which makes me a Christmas quisling. A hypocrite. A man who fears the zeal of his festive partner. A man who has more and more respect for apostates and cult-breakers (if I can’t even wriggle my kids free of Santa’s soft grip, what hope would I have had as a doubting Scientologist?).

Besides, in many ways the web of lies has already been shot too far and spun too tightly for me to take corrective action. We were at a barbecue this summer past, and my eldest boy, Jack (then 3 on the cusp of 4), and I were sitting at the top of the garden, looking down on the house. It had a sloped, peaked roof.

Jack asked thoughtfully, “How does Santa land on that roof?”

I took this as my chance to gently guide him towards the truth of Santa’s non-existence, asking him to state if people like Doctor Who or Captain Underpants were real people, or characters.

“Characters.”

“And what about Santa?”

“Real.”

“What if I told you he wasn’t real, and that big people just made him up?”

He laughed and shook his head. The more I protested, the harder he laughed. I even just flat out resorted to saying: ‘”There is no Santa. He’s not real.”

How did that go? you may ask.

He wouldn’t accept it. Furthermore, he now thinks I’m a fucking mental case.

THANKS, society.

I guess you win.

Jamie’s Digest (3): Cool Bits From Books – FESTIVE EDITION

Whenever I’m reading I always like to highlight phrases and passages that strike a chord with me, either because they’re emotionally or intellectually resonant, or because they’re exceptionally relevant to something that’s happening in the world today. I’d like to continue to share some of the these excerpts with you.

Santa Claus: A Biography

What a well-researched, interesting, funny and insightful book, charting Santa’s evolution from the swamps of myth into the ubiquitous character we know and love today. He’s terrified little children the world over, helped to advertise everything from soap to guns, and if he hadn’t ‘existed’ we would never have been able to read absolutely tremendous news stories like this. I had a great time reading this book, and I’d like to share a few bits and pieces from it.

“The ideal Santa for department-store grottoes or work-shops is described as middle-aged, plump, red-faced, and possessing his own beard with an ability to charm children and pass a police background check. Such candidates are scarce and becoming more so, according to those responsible for recruiting them. Modern healthy lifestyles have apparently reduced the number of suitably obese men, and head-hunting firms are paid handsomely, and advertise far afield, to produce the proper candidates.”

Isn’t that great? A dearth of Santas owing to an overall reduction in obesity levels and generally improved health: have you any idea how hard I, as a Scotsman, laughed at that paragraph. Honestly, we should just change the name of our country to The North Pole and be done with it. It’s the jolly part we’d struggle with.

I like that, though. Scotland becoming a Jurassic Park for Santas. Anyway, elsewhere in that same chapter we learn a little more about why there appear to be so few new Santas:

“Why should there be a shortage of imitation Santas for malls and department stores? Many veteran Santas complain of a new miasma of suspicion surrounding anyone dealing professionally with small children. Shopping centres fearful of litigation have imposed new rules or, in some cases, even forbidden Santas to hold children on their laps, preferring that they merely extend a handshake to the children who are brought to stand by them. Other stores have discouraged a jolly attitude, lest it be interpreted in an inappropriate fashion, and have insisted their Saint Nicks be more business-like in their approach to kids. Santas are told to keep both hands visible at all times, wear white gloves to heighten that visibility , and have to undergo criminal background checks, and in some cases even drug testing. In the United States, they have become targets of bomb threats and irate parents and have asked for police protection; in tropical countries they have had to go on strike to protest the suits they are forced to wear.”

A few things spring to mind after reading this paragraph:

  1. Yes, it’s a shame that we live in a world where we have to doubt the intentions of those who wish to spend time with our children, but, equally, these past fifty years have taught us that an overwhelmingly large number of clowns, teachers, Santas and kids TV presenters have tried to fuck our kids.
  2. I now know why this year’s Santa at our grotto was quite thin, and came across more like a headteacher desperately trying to tamp down his stress as he stares into the precipice of another violent emotional breakdown than an avuncular chuckle-head with a sackful of hohoho. Or maybe the Santa that was originally hired went down with a heart attack, and this miserable son of a bitch had to fill in last minute.
  3. White gloves for visibility? Man, Michael Jackson’s stylist was definitely trying to signal us from the inside, like Dwight shooting arrows for Daryl. I’m also going to be keeping a very close eye on snooker referees from now on.

Amazon link: Santa Claus – A Biography by Gerry Bowler

Insidious as Fuck

I was reading a chapter of The Christmasaurus to my 3-year-old son, when my eyes skimmed a sentence or so ahead and sent back a message to my mouth to shut down mid-sentence. I’d seen some dangerous, insidious shit; a passage that seemed to come straight from a book of religious short stories. Through these same pernicious paragraphs the book also – perhaps paradoxically – threw a wink to those who would support our burgeoning mono-culture, and tipped its hat to the ‘But it’s NICE’ crowd. Sorry to go full Dawkins on y’all, but I’d rather my son was encouraged to follow the dictates of reason than bid to glug from the shit-filled chalice of superstition.

The titular magic dinosaur was fine, of course, as was Santa himself. I don’t have a problem with them. It’s a work of fantasy, after all. Also, I admire the way the author treats the main character’s disability, and was happy to have my son absorb the sentiments… but… the section below where William’s Dad tries to reignite his son’s belief in Santa  (even though, in the context of this book, Santa is supposed to be real, anyway)? Fuck, no.

“‘I believe this story is true. Therefore it is true,’ he [William’s Dad] said.

‘But… how does that work?’ questioned William, desperate to know more. ‘If I’ve never seen something, how do I know it’s real?’

‘Ah, William! You’ve got it the wrong way round!’ said Mr Trundle, smiling. ‘Believing has to come first. People who don’t believe in things will never see those things. Believing is seeing.’

But William still looked uncertain.

‘But, Dad, some kids at school don’t believe in Santa. What if I believe he’s real and someone else doesn’t? If we both believe different things, then we can’t both be right, can we?’ asked William.”

[Mr Trundle then introduces William to the ‘Glass half-full/glass half-empty’ dichotomy, and uses this as a hammer to bash the sense of reason out of him.]

“William looked at the half-empty mug of milk in front of him for a moment before realising that his dad might actually be right too. Even though he and his dad believed different things, they were both right.

‘You see, William, we both believe completely opposite things, but it doesn’t mean that either of us is wrong. This mug is both half empty AND half full at the same time,’ said Mr Trundle, as William sat there with the expression of a young boy whose mind is in the process of being completely blown. ‘People believe all sorts of wild, wacky, weird and wonderful things, but it doesn’t mean that anyone is wrong or that anyone is right. What is important isn’t what is wrong, right, real, fake, true or false. What matters is that whatever you believe makes you a happier, better person.'”

I’m beginning to think that Trundle’s a Scientologist, the disingenuous c***.

Amazon link: The Christmasaurus by Tom Fletcher

WHATEVER YOU DO: READ. AND READ LOTS. IT’S GOOD FOR YOU.

Why it’s time to bid farewell to Santa (or: Why Santa is bad for your kids’ elf)

I could sit in a circle of peers and announce that I don’t believe in Yahweh, God, Vishnu, Allah or a giant turtle that holds the known world atop its back as it crawls through the cosmos, and most of them would probably accept this declaration with a silent nod or a shrug of the shoulders. Never mind that in certain countries, among certain people and cultures, such a vow would earn me a spell in prison, a steak knife to the stomach or death. Here in the modern, secular west, I can profess belief, or its lack, in whatsoever I choose and be almost certain of a tolerant reception. But try to tell people that I don’t want to play along with the Santa myth we force upon our kids, and I’m treated like a scar-faced leper with a vest of grenades and a public masturbation problem.

The sprawling Santa conspiracy, global in its reach, in which we entangle our children raises a multitude of uncomfortable questions, and comes at a terrible price: not least of which is the spirit of shattered trust in which it’s perpetuated.

All other western cultural norms are fluid, it seems, except for this one. Never this one. The only things that will grant you an exemption from Santa are deeply-held fundamentalist Christian beliefs or adherence to a non-Christian faith, and even then you’ll probably still be regarded as a destroyer of children’s dreams.

It’s clear that there’s something about this little red-and-white lie that’s seen as integral to and inextricable from a hearty and wholesome childhood. There’s a concomitant notion that somehow the act of debunking Santa holds the potential to obliterate a child’s capacity for innocence and imagination, and quite possibly leave them with the dull, jaded outlook of a middle-aged chartered accountant on the eve of his second divorce. Or else turn them into a fleet of joyless androids each with the face of Richard Dawkins.

Santa is but one fictional character in a cast of thousands. Why should he get special dispensation when it comes to the laws of reality? I regularly read my son stories about alien encounters, magical beanstalks, sentient robots and talking horses, without ever feeling the need to perpetuate the entertaining fallacies inherent in the source material. No-one would consider it heresy for me to explain to my son that horses can’t really talk; knowing this fact doesn’t in any way limit his imagination or detract from his very real enjoyment of the story. Penguins don’t have jobs, dogs can’t moonlight as policemen, there’s no such thing as ghosts, people can’t turn green and smash buildings when they’re angry. He knows that, or at least these things have been explained to him. He doesn’t care. He still mimics these characters and scenarios, and riffs on them in his own unique, imaginative way when he’s running about the house or play-acting with his toys.

The power of Santa compels him… to do very little

Here’s a question for you: why does Santa deliver unequal amounts of toys to the children of the world? Why does he deliver more toys to affluent families than he does to poor families? Clearly, on the great sliding scale of political ideology, the red-jacketed sleigh-racer is more tightly aligned to conservative notions of capitalism than he is to communism, or socialism. If your kid goes back to school after the winter break with a new pair of cheap shoes and a toy laser gun, and has to listen to another kid bragging about his £1000 home entertainment system and surprise trip to Disneyland, what is he to infer about his worth in Santa’s eyes? Should he castigate himself for being too naughty, placing the blame for his poor festive haul upon his own tiny shoulders? Or should he just conclude that Santa doesn’t really like him all that much?

Remove Santa from this equation, and you’ve still got a problem with unequal distribution of wealth and resources in society, married to an unslakable thirst for goods and gadgets that’s only heightened and reinforced by our media, but that’s an argument for another time (besides, there are more learned, original and eloquent thinkers out there with better and more important things to say on the topic than little old me).

Consider also this point: Santa is an omniscient being who has mastered time itself, can travel around the globe and back in one evening, and can apparently conjure an endless supply of toys from thin air, much as another bearded magician once did with water, wine, loaves and fish. Santa uses these powers not to alleviate suffering, lift people out of hunger and poverty, cure the sick and the lame or to usher in a new era of world peace, but to drop toy robots down chimneys. What a role model. He’s no better than Sooty, or Jesus.

You can emphasise the magical, imagination-stretching benefits of a child’s belief in Santa as a rationale for deceiving your children, but when I hear Santa’s name mentioned by parents, more often than not his name is evoked as a correctional tool rather than as an instrument of wonder. Be nice, behave, go to bed, tidy your room, eat your dinner, or Santa will cross you off his list, and you won’t get any toys. By weaponising Santa in this way, parents have created a bearded boogeyman to scare or bribe their children into behaving the way they want them to. This may be an instantly effective, no-nonsense behavioural control technique, but then so is smashing them in the face with a cricket bat.

The sad truth is that parents are conditioning their children to be good not for goodness’ sake – as the old snowman song goes – but to be good so they can get a new TV. They’re being encouraged to equate virtue with financial reward. Part of being a happy, successful and fully-socialised human being necessitates a degree of sacrifice, negotiation, humility and deference. These are qualities – and modes of conflict resolution – that shouldn’t need a chuckling demigod, or the dangled carrot of a PlayStation 4, to be fully realised.

My family and I were in a shopping mall at the weekend, and passed by a Santa’s grotto. I couldn’t help feeling that there was something deeply sinister and ritualistic about the line of dead-eyed kids shuffling up to receive their gifts. They were like a cult. Ho ho ho. Here’s your new church, kids, here’s your new Jesus: roll up, roll up, as we inculcate you into the wholesale religion of consumer greed.

We experience rather enough problems with the religions we already have, thank you very much, without adding Santaism to the list. While belief in Santa may be the ‘Temporary Profile Picture’ of quasi-religious micro-faiths, it worries me tremendously that a belief in the supernaturalness of Santa might serve as a gateway drug to harder fictional beings, like Jesus or Moroni.

Imagine the scene in a household where a child who has been raised in a pro-Santa Christian family finally discovers that Santa isn’t real.

CHILD: “Ah, so Santa was all a big lie, was he? That’s hilarious. You had me, you did, you really had me, you got me hook, line and sinker with that one. So, come on, put me out of my misery. Jesus, right? Come on, the cat’s out of the bag. You made him up too, right? Miracles, walking on water, rising from the dead. I knew there was something iffy about that. I’ve got to hand it to you, though, you’ve created a genius fictional character there.”

PARENT: “Em… nope. Nope. That’s all true. Em… Jesus is real.”

CHILD: “…”

(Actually, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that Santa – employed properly – could be the antidote to Jesus: the great flicking wrist to bring down the whole house of cards.)

Parents and guardians are the people that children listen to and look up to above all others, whose word is gospel for a significant proportion of their young lives. For them to distort a child’s understanding of the laws of time, physics and the universe is an unforgivable crime. Nothing should be done to inhibit a child’s burgeoning critical faculties, or to corrupt their very sense of the world as an observable, rational and comprehensible place.

Don’t get me wrong. I myself used to believe wholeheartedly in Santa Claus. I used to get letters from him, in this very ornate handwriting. I thought, this could only be the work of a magical being, he writes like a bloody pro. This guy’s the real deal. I also used to get plenty of Valentine’s cards. I don’t think I can properly express the horror I felt on the day I was old enough to realise that the letters from Santa and the Valentine’s cards were all in the same handwriting. That was a shock to me. “Well, Santa. I see last year’s presents have come with a few strings attached. I’m not that sort of boy. But maybe throw in a few easter eggs and we’ll talk.”

The truth was even more horrible. I cross-referenced the Santa letters and the valentine’s cards with the handwriting on my birthday cards. They were from my gran. “Roses are red, I’m your mum’s mummy, I am going to put you, back up in my tummy.” I know she was just trying to boost my fragile little-boy ego, but I really bought in to the whole romantic fantasy. And all that time the unrequited love of my young life was a bloated septugenarian who smelled of cabbage. I was cat-fished by own gran before it was even a thing.

I guess what really irks me about this time of year is the fact that Santa is a secret I’ve had no say in. You don’t need Santa to make Christmas magical, but you do require his absence to maintain an honest and healthy stance on both our society and the universe itself. My silence is being demanded, not to preserve the mystery and magic of the festive season, but to stop me from blowing the whistle on the millions of other families who have chosen to deceive their children. Families who want to keep using Santa as a four-month-long carrot-and-stick combo. This only makes me want to blow the whistle all the more; to send my sons into their future schools with information bombs strapped to their brains, ready to blast your children in their faces with the bright light of truth.

I always want to be truthful with my children.

“Daddy… what happens to grandma and grandpa now that they’re dead? Have they just disappeared? Will I ever see them again?”

“…”

“Daddy?”

“TWO MONTHS UNTIL SANTA COMES, WEE GUY, ARE YOU AS EXCITED AS I AM??!!”

I think I do, anyway.

Christmas Canine 2: The Wag-a Continues

Imagine my astonishment when I logged into this site’s email account to find that some plucky little reader out there had come up with a Brody-related image that’s as insane as it is festive. Well done, mysterious artist, whoever you are.

card (1)

There’s still time to submit your own to theotherjamie@hotmail.co.uk

Here’s a link to the original picture and mission statement:

http://www.jamieandrew-withhands.com/2014/12/23/the-tail-of-the-christmas-canine/

Merrg Brodymas!

The Tail of the Christmas Canine

A very lovely lady at work gave me a her-dog-themed Christmas card, which was sweet and thoughtful. Here it is:

merryxmas

Isn’t it nice? Isn’t the wee dog really cute?

This is how I repaid her:

dog

If any of you out there with too much time on your hands are up for creating pictures that whisk this adorable little quadruped into other places in time and space, then whip them up and drop me an email with the blighters attached. Let’s make Brody the most famous dog in the universe after Lassie, the Littlest Hobo and Hitler’s dog.

I’ll collate the pictures and we’ll give them their own hashtag on Twitter or something, because that’s modern as fuck and I’ve very much got my finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, whatever that is.

(I already know I won’t receive a single picture of this fucking dog, not even a shit one where he’s at the pyramids, but please let me have my little deluded Yule-fuelled moment. I’m crying now. But my tears are for the dog. He could’ve been somebody. He could’ve been a contender. Goodbye.)

theotherjamie@hotmail.co.uk

Young Jamie: Portrait of a Serial Douchebag (Part 5)

That big tick after the word ‘pitchure’ makes it clear that I was being taught English by an incompetent who was as much a stranger to spelling as I was. Or maybe she was some sort of hippy who didn’t agree with knocking my incipient confidence by doing things like POINTING OUT WHEN I’D MADE A MISTAKE WHICH IS PRETTY MUCH A TEACHER’S RAISON D‘ETRE! ‘Aw, look, he spelled  the word cat using a ‘w’ and the number 9, but I’m not going to be the one to make those blue eyes cry. 10 out of 10, my little genius.’ And what was going on in the pitchure itself? Clearly we’ve got a scale problem; either that or the kid with blue eyebrows for arms is a giant. And what kind of teacher forces the boys to wear Indain (sic)  hats at a Christmas party? A fucking Red Indian Christmas party? SERIOUSLY? ‘OK, kids, let’s pass the parcel around the circle. But be careful. That parcel’s tainted with white man’s smallpox. Now, let’s scalp little Timmy.’ So what kind of hats will the girls be wearing? Well, just look at the pitchure, my young self implores you. Isn’t it obvious??  Em… no. Not really, young Jamie. French baguette and weird blue smudge hats? As worn by fucking Big Chief Blue Subway?

That big tick after the word ‘pitchure’ makes it clear that I was being taught English by an incompetent who was as much a stranger to spelling as I was. Or maybe she was some sort of hippy who didn’t agree with knocking my incipient confidence by doing things like POINTING OUT WHEN I’D MADE A MISTAKE WHICH IS PRETTY MUCH A TEACHER’S RAISON D‘ETRE! ‘Aw, look, he spelled the word cat using a ‘w’ and the number 9, but I’m not going to be the one to make those blue eyes cry. 10 out of 10, my little genius.’ And what was going on in the pitchure itself? Clearly we’ve got a scale problem; either that or the kid with blue eyebrows for arms is a giant. And what kind of teacher forces the boys to wear Indain (sic) hats at a Christmas party? A fucking Red Indian Christmas party? SERIOUSLY? ‘OK, kids, let’s pass the parcel around the circle. But be careful. That parcel’s tainted with white man’s smallpox. Now, let’s scalp little Timmy.’ So what kind of hats will the girls be wearing? Well, just look at the pitchure, my young self implores you. Isn’t it obvious?? Em… no. Not really, young Jamie. French baguette and weird blue smudge hats? As worn by fucking Big Chief Blue Subway?

The Best Shittest Films: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964)

s1The movie opens with a chorus of children singing the song-cum-mantra ‘Hooray for Santy Claus’, which is catchy in the same way that a song played over and over into a terrorist’s ear in Guantanamo Bay is catchy. Look out for the lyrics: ‘You spell it S-A-N-T-A C-L-A-U-S / Hooray for Santy Claus!’ which contain a glaringly insulting error. These happy kids are made to look like spelling-spastics by the song’s rampant disregard for its own rules. Look out for my new song, ‘You spell it J-A-M-I-E A-N-D-R-E-W / Hooray for Jamue Androw!’ A minor quibble, perhaps, but in the end it’s the little things that’ll have you prising out your eyes with a rusty tea-spoon.

So what’s the plot of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians?

'I'll fucking conquer them alright!'

‘I’ll fucking conquer them alright!’

The movie’s title makes it all sound rather kick-ass, doesn’t it? Perhaps you’re already wondering how he conquers them. Does he get his hands on an assault rifle and rip into the alien scumbags John McClane-style? Does he bash those green bastards to death with a concrete candy cane? No, not really. In fact there’s no conquering at all. Not even a wee bit of subduing. The film should really be called: ‘Santa Claus is Really Nice to the Martians, Even Though They Kidnap Him, and He Ultimately Leaves Mars On Good Terms With Its People Despite the Behaviour of a Tiny Minority of Baddy Martians Who Want to Kill Him.’ Not as catchy, but definitely more accurate.

The story begins on Earth. A news reporter is at Santa’s North Pole Workshop conducting a live interview with the bearded chuckler himself, a role actor John Call brings to life by channelling both the lion from The Wizard of Oz, and a paedophile.

VERY Bad Santa.

VERY Bad Santa.

As we meet him, Santa is overseeing the global production of all toys. Quite a feat, considering his work shop is about the size of a small potting shed and his workforce consists of two dwarves. Two dwarves. That’s it. If magic isn‘t involved then Santa’s a more cruel and brutal slave-driver than all of the pharaohs put together, plus Hitler. The dwarves really should form a union.

'Whachoo talkin' about, Space-Willis?'

‘Whachoo talkin’ about, Space-Willis?’

One of the toys on the production line is a doll of a Martian, a wee piece of foreshadowing for our impending trip to Mars. Now, I don’t know if it was the poor lighting, the screen resolution on my laptop, or my own latent racism, but that Martian doll looked less like a Martian than he did… well… black. The toy was essentially a sci-fi gollywog. The news reporter picked up the doll and said, with some measure of fear and disgust: ’I wouldn’t like to meet him on a dark night.’ Of course you wouldn’t, you big Nazi.

So, Anyway, the Martians…

I'd be sad, too, if my Dad dressed me up like a total helmet.

I’d be sad, too, if my Dad dressed me up like a total helmet.

Meanwhile, across the solar system, the live broadcast of this interview is being watched by a duo of dead-eyed Martian kids, who thanks to their nasty TV addiction look like the offspring of a serial killer and Al Jolson. Their dad, Kimar, whose day-job is Martian supreme commander, is worried shitless about them. If he’d been an American dad he would have known what to do: dope the cunts up with beef burgers and Ritalin. Being Martian and ignorant of Earth ways he has to plump for a more locally-based two-prong solution.

Step one: put them to bed and knock them out with a sleep ray, without warning or consent. Nice work, Dad of the Year. Final step: get a crowd of mates together and go out into the rocky wilderness to consult a creepy 800-year-old man. We’d all do the same, and you know it. This old man, of course, needs to be summoned. ‘Dave? Hey, Dave? DAVE, YOU THERE, MATE?!’ No, that would be too easy. In any case the 800-year-old guy is called Chochum. Not Dave. Apparently Dave isn’t a very common Martian name. We’re all learning something today.

Chochum. A magical space mystic on Mars. That makes sense.

Chochum. A magical space mystic on Mars. That makes sense.

So, Kimar and a bunch of Martian elders band together and chant ‘Chochum’ into the unforgiving darkness, until the old fucker appears in a puff of smoke, complete with Gandalf-beard, standard-issue-old-mystic-guy staff and pish-scented wisdom. Chochum delivers his lines like a man receiving a sloppy blow-job as he fends off a stroke, which is pretty fucking funny.

What does Chochum suggest as a way of releasing the children from their torpor? Kidnap Santa Claus, of course. It’s so logical and sensible it’s a wonder they didn’t think of it themselves. So off they fly in their little spaceship, the operation of which is no more complicated than pressing buttons on a child’s fake calculator. The ship itself is a curious piece of inter-stellar engineering, looking for all the world like a burning condom whooshing through space.

The Search for Santa

s7The Martians reach Earth and begin their search for Santa – using a high-powered telescope, rather than any namby-pamby futuristic technology. To their horror they realise that there are thousands upon thousands of Santas in New York alone. With no way of determining which is the genuine article they do what any military group placed in a similar situation would do: they kidnap some kids. Bloody Martians. Always with the kidnapping! The kids tell the Martians where Santa Claus lives, and they all zoom off to the North Pole to get him.

The two kids, Billy and Betty, are incredibly annoying, and very shit at acting. It’s as if immediately prior to each take the director said to them: ‘The last one was good kids, but this time… NO EMOTION. Brilliant. And remember to deliver your lines in the style of a short-sighted, brain-damaged man struggling to read an autocue.’

Unfortunately, the kids learn not only that the Martians intend to whisk Santa across the solar system against his will, but also that they – being witnesses to the crime – must come, too, never to return to Earth. In fact, as if things couldn’t possibly be any worse, there’s an evil baddy Martian onboard who wants them all dead. His name’s Stevie. Yeah, alright, alright, I’m fucking with you. He’s called Voldar. Fortunately, there’s also a kind-hearted Martian simpleton onboard called Dropo, who succeeds in keeping the kids alive through a winning display of consistently retarded buffoonery.

About as scary as a tub of margarine.

About as scary as a tub of margarine.

The action at the North Pole is… shit. Adjectives fail me. It’s shit. The kids escape the ship and run off to warn Santa of his impending kidnap. In the process they get chased by the most unconvincing polar bear in existence. I know the director couldn’t unleash a real polar bear on the kids – some piffling Health and Safety law about not feeding children to large ursine predators, no doubt – but as far as guys-wearing-shit-animal-costumes go, Barney the Dinosaur is more authentically terrifying than this sorry excuse for a polar bear. Anyway, having escaped one near-death experience the kids then fall into the clutches of Voldar’s killer robot, who looks like the robot from Lost in Space if he was built by a class of special needs kids using cereal boxes, and the bin from Oor Wullie.

About as scary as... a second tub of margarine. And also made from tubs of margarine.

About as scary as… a second tub of margarine. And also made from tubs of margarine.

Don’t worry, though. Before the robot can crush the kids’ heads to dust like a couple of loaves of twelve-week-old bread, Kimar shows up to cool things down. The robot is then sent to retrieve Santa Claus, but is defeated when Santa Claus mistakes it for a giant toy, which inexplicably causes it to BECOME a toy, thereby rendering it harmless. Whoever programmed that robot shouldn‘t have been let loose on a hoover, much less a sophisticated cybernetic life-form.

‘Right, brilliant, my robot can kill a man with its bare hands, withstand gun, rocket and laser fire, smash its way through titanium and destroy whole cities with its nuclearised death beam. Pretty much its only weakness is being treated like a toy by an old man. But how likely’s that, right? I’ll leave that in the programming for some reason. What do you want me to build next? A robot dog that explodes whenever somebody makes it think about Sesame Street? I’m on a fucking roll here.’

The End…

'Ho ho ho! No need for mental health professionals, I'll cure your schizophrenia through laughter!'

‘Ho ho ho! No need for mental health professionals, I’ll cure your schizophrenia through laughter!’

Because I’m quickly losing the will to live I’ll speed up this review. Onboard the USS Flaming Spunk Sac, Voldar tries to kill Santa Claus and the kids by trapping them in the airlock and ejecting them out into the cold, remorseless void of space (lovely to see the threat of choking, exploding children in a kids’ film); unfortunately for Voldar (and all of us) they manage to escape through… well, magic. Yep. Santa Claus defies physics, and when quizzed on the specifics of his escape simply tells a few shit jokes, throws back his head and laughs.

Santa Claus then arrives on Mars and cures the Martian kids by… hmmm mmm, you’ve guessed it: telling a few shit jokes, throwing back his head and laughing. Kimar still slings him in jail, though, because he needs Santa to set up a toy workshop for the Martian kids, which he’ll work in until the day he dies. Ho ho ho!

Kimar (right) with his nemesis, Voldar, who looks like an evil Daley Thompson.

Kimar (right) with his nemesis, Voldar, who looks like an evil Daley Thompson.

Meanwhile, Voldar isn’t happy that everyone he twice tried to kill is still alive, and so forms an evil clique with a handful of the most stupid people on Mars. Why do baddies in kids’ films team up with complete idiots like this? They end up spending their valuable plotting-and-killing-time tip-toeing around like Panto villains, shooshing their bungling henchman as they do things like constantly trip over stuff and accidentally detonate bombs, always scratching their heads and saying, ’Uh, um, gee, sorreeee bosssss.’ Don’t hire them then, you fucking arsehole! There’s no equal opportunities directive dictating the make-up of your kid-murdering co-op. Employ real, ruthless killers and criminals; not the guys who turn up to the interview drooling with their jackets on back-to-front. Christ, your heinous plans deserve to get foiled.

This time, though, instead of murdering Santa and the kids, Voldar plans to discredit Santa by screwing around with his toy factory, causing it to spit out weird toy hybrids, like tennis racquets with doll bodies instead of handles. The plan doesn’t work; principally because it’s a shit plan. If he wanted to discredit Santa he really should have gone down the paedophile route. Cast-iron. Anyway, Voldar thinks, in defiance of all available historical facts: ‘Fuck it. I’ll just try to kill them all again.’

s12That plan doesn’t work either; because clearly one man with a death ray is no match for a bunch of kids with paper aeroplanes, water, bubbles and foam.

Santa, Billy and Betty then get to go home, but it’s OK, because Santa leaves the operation of the workshop in the hands of the mentally-deranged Martian, Dropo and a squad of under-age children. Congratulations! You’ve given the people of Mars the Christmas gift of an exploitative sweat shop. Now back to Earth with you, you fat cunt.

SPOILER ALERT: it turns out that Santa was dead all along and the children were the only ones who could see him. Oh, and he was Kaiser Szose.

The Legacy

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians was a great stepping stone for the careers of its principal actors: a stepping stone into oblivion. After his role as Santa, John Call didn’t act for another seven years, appeared in one more movie, and then died. Still, we’ll always look back fondly at the iconic roles he played throughout his career, like Man With Bushy Hair and Ticket Taker.

Head Martian Kimar was Leonard Hicks’ only film role. He never even went on to work as a movie extra. He just must have thought to himself: ’Fuck movies.’

The two child actors, Victor Stiles and Donna Conforti, went on a drug-fuelled sex-killing rampage in the 70s, torturing their mostly elderly victims whilst dressed as polar bears. Either that or they never acted again.

Uncle Wally/Dropo

Uncle Wally/Dropo

The only ’star’ to achieve any modicum of success was actor Bill McCutcheon, who played Martian mongo Dropo. Bill went on to have a distinguished career portraying many more on-screen mongos, and ended his days working on Sesame Street, alongside other respected luminaries of kids’ TV such as Chris Langham.

Young Jamie: Portrait of a Serial Douchebag (part 2)

Here’s another diary entry from my Primary 2 jotter.

OK, first thing's first, the 12th of November is not near Christmas. You'll have to forgive my poor sense of time perspective. I hadn't started masturbating yet, and so had nothing to fill the void between special occasions. I probably thought December the 26th was pretty near Christmas. Anyway, I seemed to be really looking forward to getting this gorilla suit, ostensibly so I could swap it for a Santa suit.

OK, first thing’s first, the 12th of November isn’t near Christmas. Please forgive my poor sense of time perspective. I hadn’t started masturbating yet, and so there was nothing to fill the void between special occasions. I probably thought December the 30th was near Christmas. What a little toy whore. Anyway, what’s the whole suit swap thing all about? Why did I believe that I could only hope to possess a Santa suit if I first donned a gorilla suit? Maybe gorilla is a soft gateway suit that leads you on to harder and harder suits, until eventually you’re way past Santa and standing infront of the Children’s Panel in a blue tutu and a diver’s helmet. In any case, a gorilla suit is WAY better than a Santa suit. What the fuck was I thinking? You can scare an old lady unconscious when you’re in a gorilla suit. In a Santa suit? Not so much. Unless it’s April and you’re carrying a knife. Speaking of Christmas-related violence, I can’t help but feel that the picture I’ve drawn isn’t that festive. It’s ostensibly a warm, happy picture of a family crowded around a fireplace on Christmas Day; but, if you look closely, I’m throwing my hands in the air and screaming in horror. And no wonder! At the left-hand side of the fireplace there’s a tubby, middle-aged guy showing off a whopping blue boner, and at the right-hand side of the fireplace there’s another guy with an even BIGGER blue boner – it’s longer than his legs, for fuck sake! And look again: the fireplace isn’t a fireplace at all, but a giant box with three massive locks on its lid that those rapey bastards are going to shut me in once they’re done perpetrating sex crimes on my young, black ass. Wait a minute… am I wearing a cat suit? That’s it, I’m phoning Esther Rantzen.