I don’t think I ever stopped believing in Santa Claus. Not wholly, anyway. If I extend my mind towards him, there is not absence there; a somethingness still shamefully lingers in that place. There was an age I intellectually understood that the presents from Santa Claus beneath the tree came from my parents and not an outside, magical party, of course, but… no, as an adult, now, 2023, if I close my eyes and will myself to imagine the shrinking, frigid landscape of the Arctic, there’s inevitably a cottage in the distance, lit warmly from within, and I know he’s there still. What nonsense!
How do you experience the nonexistence of something? I’m a professional in the video game industry in my real life; I’ve had all sorts of illusions about the world shattered permanently there1. This year, friends have been laid off, dreams put on hold or shattered, promises made by businesses broken so many times the survivors pick them out of their skin like shrapnel. I live in the world in 2023, I see tremendous death and destruction from all vectors; do you think I only post about Star Wars as anything but an escapist project? 2 I struggle daily with depression. I ache and fall apart at breezes. You wouldn’t believe what my best friend told me today about his last two weeks. It’s horrible. I think we define adulthood, at least sometimes, as a time when we finally lose our connection to illusions. I don’t really even believe in money any more, I don’t know how you track that on the scale.
But goddamn Santa Claus is still out there!
I had this thought a while ago, that Santa Claus is more real than I will ever be. Of course BB-8 is a beloved, fan-favorite orb 3 , but— adults, let’s deillusionate for a moment, as we are hatefully want to do— but the truth is that almost all humans will never no me, my name, my output, my person. My dad just wrote a book with his reminiscences growing up. He also had heart surgery. There will be two copies of his book when everything is done. How long until that’s all that remains of him? How long until he fades from all memory in this world? The most important person in my life and inside a century he won’t even be a rumor. You don’t even know my real name, I’m pretending to be plucky sphere, so even if I generate clout on this esoteric-at-best website 4 , it’s not like it applies to my person.
But Santa Claus! Santa lives! He’s got movies and books and songs and stories; he’s got figures and statues and little pieces of chocolate shaped like his plump body; he’s got 1000 names and he’s married to an immortal dryad 5 and he resurrected 3 children who were pickled for their meat6 and he has an accursed cannibal knight as a bodyguard7 and his adoptive elf-father had an axe that shot lasers at goblins[^8]. People give gifts to their children in his stead and by his name; nobody does anything in my stead or by my name; nobody does anything in the stead or by the name of anybody except Jesus Christ, Gautama Buddha, Karl Marx or the King of Britain, and that last one only grudgingly. Of course, there was a real St. Nicholas, of course, but he’s as inconsequential as me; never mind that, in contrast with our current understanding of the season, he gave all his worldly possessions to the unwed poor women of 3rd century Turkey in a futilely anonymous gesture; being a real man, his attachment to reality is as tenuous as my own. Santa Claus? The strange ideohumunculus of a hundred desperate European gift celebrations and the marketing wing of the Coca Cola company? He’ll exist until the sun burns out of the sky. People have become better people because of Santa Claus. Do I even exist?
I wish I could kill Santa Claus in my mind8. I wish I could take that final, sober step. I wish I could divorce myself from the opiate of Christmas, but here I am, a 34 year old man pretending to be a fictional dome-boy9, living in a painful world, still expecting that if I peek outside at just the right moment on a crisp Christmas Eve, I’ll see a courser of reindeer arcing across the sky, and baritone laugh pealing like thunder from the beneath the crystalline halo of the moon. What am I to do with this. Where do you go with this. What is to be done with this.
The terror in me is that hope, like Santa Claus, is also an illusion I cannot yet remove from my beating heart.
But surely there are things more real than me? Surely the intangibles must manifest some how into this world and prove their reality in some way?
My favorite Christmas movie, it will absolutely not surprise you, is Miracle on 34th Street, the movie about grown adults proving the existence of Santa Claus in court. It’s aged marvelously; I adore the way it simultaneously holds an unalloyed wonder towards Christmas in one hand and an absolutely jaded understanding of commerce and politics in the other10. It’s brilliant. There’s a scene where Kris Kringle allows himself to be committed to a mental institution. His friend, a plucky young lawyer, stops by to ask him why he’s locked himself away. He responds that he’s become disillusioned with humanity; he uses the Macy’s company psychiatrist, the miserable Dr. Sawyer.
“He's contemptible, dishonest, selfish, deceitful, vicious. Yet he's out there and I'm in here. He's called normal and I'm not. Well, if that's normal, I don't want it.”
One more quotation. I have to, embarrassingly, admit I’ve been slowly revisiting The Chronicles of Narnia this year. Lewis is a wild one; I love the reports of the other Inklings becoming nauseated at his potpourri approach to world building11. Nine times out of ten the Ringerverse podcast is a wellspring of bad takes, but I appreciated Joanna Robinson comparing George Lucas to Lewis (and, consequently, Filoni to Tolkien) in his creative approach— absolutely there’s a Lewish quality to especially Prequel George Lucas; how else do you get “fuck it, 50s diner” or “fuck it, Darth Maul with robot legs” or “fuck it, the force is a dysfunctional family” that late-stage Lucas Star Wars embodies12. The most recent book I revisited was The Silver Chair; and in it, the evil Lady of the Green Kirtle convinces the heroes her subterranean kingdom is the full extent of reality. Only the miserable marsh wiggle Puddleglum13— boy, he was on one with this book— can keep his wits about him and even then, only through a moment of profound personal pain. Shoving his hand into hot coals, he snaps out of the glamour long enough to say:
“So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one more thing to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things-trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow.”
I don’t know what to do with Santa Claus. I don’t know what to do with myself, to be perfectly honest with you. At my best I’m a fictional character; what are you supposed to do with that?
Sometimes, though, it does seem like the made-up things are a good deal more important than the real ones. Sometimes though, I cannot help but be incensed by the injustice that I’m out here, and he’s in there. I don’t know.
But what a world if he was real? What a place that’d be. Of all the places that could or should exist, I think that’s the place worth building. If I extend my mind towards it--
Anyway,
Merry Christmas, cohost.
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As Jack Kirby said: "Comics will break your heart, kid."
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Beep boop.
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Time magazine’s Most Eligible Orb of 2022, y’all
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Please purchase Cohost Plus!
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Shout out to Chris Schweizer and Benito Cerino’s exquisite Santa’s Workshop playset, with its insane mixture of ancient regional lore.
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This is a traditional myth about the real Saint Nicholas! Later, the iconography around Nicholas standing around a big barrel of kids got confused, and he became the patron saint of children and brewers. Wild stuff.
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Everybody loves Hans Trapp, the silent warrior that defends the North Pole in eternal repentance for his bestial child-devouring! He’s like if there was a Berserk Christmas special!
[^8]: This is a Frank L Baum original from “The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus”. Absolutely check the Rankin-Bass version of this out, it’s MADNESS. -
"I made my mind a Santa-less place. I share my milk and cookies with ghosts."
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globe chum
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There’s a bit where the judge in the case, who is up for re-election that year, checks literally every sentence he utters with his campaign manager in the crowd, and it kills me everytime.
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Do you know how much shit they gave him for mixing centaurs AND dwarves together???
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To whit, “Fuck it, Santa Claus gives everybody swords”
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Played exquisitely, I might add, by 4th Doctor-slash-Bendu Tom Baker in the anti-budget BBC adaptation.