Truesday: Fifth Of The Magi
*The views expressed in Truesday are those of the author and do not represent Austinist as a whole. Thank heavens.* -The Editors
I don’t want to say that there’s a right way and a wrong way to celebrate The Holidays. That would be foolhardy and dickish. Especially in a city as diversified as this one (we celebrate Christmas AND Thanksgiving!). But something this chick was crying about on NPR this morning got me thinking about the yearly dance between we Founding Fathers Peoples, lousy with all of our disparate and delicate culture-bunion’d feet. And everyone’s just itching to start their annual wailing about getting stomped.
Why the shit do we bother?
Her initial statement was about her having grown up in an intentionally non-Christmas community in Brooklyn, where non-Christmas activities were fastidiously held and apparently ignored by mainstream Christmas Americans, much to the future bitter ire of the non-Christmas NPR speaker.
She couched the discussion that way, and I thought it entertaining, so I’m keeping with it.
Most importantly, it appeared to me that despite all her claims of marginalization and mistreatment by the culture-bullying Christmas American mainstreamers, she really, really, really had a passion for this time of year. Sure, she pissed all over it with weird complaints about an unfair playing field for her ideological hobbies, but I’m okay with that. She obviously needed to vent in a public forum, and in that sense we share a bond.
However, for my own reasons (as she certainly has hers), I’m not as particularly keen on any specific religious interpretations for this time of year. In fact, I feel like all the drumming of mythological roots/causes around the holidays detracts from the potential experience of the thing. The potential beauty. It’s like they’re just shitty advertisements for a product I don’t need, but everyone else is made to appear to want, and I’m getting left out if I don’t ‘act now!’. I don’t want to feel that all these traditions are simply becoming a marketing ploy for hard-jockeying non-profits, but that dark feeling is becoming difficult to restrain.
It makes me want to drive in mad circles around the Furr’s/Pluckers/Golden Corral parking lot, screaming Do They Know It’s Christmas? Don’t these people see the divisive abstractions here? Don’t they see the horrific disparity between the purposes of stories told, and the message that they’re actually taking away to act on? How the fuck does one make the jump from Peace on Earth to a synthetic choco-wax product wrapped in tinfoil by robot slaves? Eh? Without the aide of cable television and Hollywood, how the hell do these logic-gaps form, and then magically bridged?
But I know that in reality, I’m no better. I’ve got no gilded soapbox upon which to embark on my own tangential gospel. I’m just as susceptible. Just as oblivious. I’ve even eaten chocolates molded to look like Nascar racers with Christmas trees strapped to their roofs. I don’t even understand the sport, let alone what it has to do with stockings, winter harvests, Jesus, or Dreidels.
But I ate those fuckers, with a cluelessness rooted in my own life history.
So yeah, again, why the shit do we bother?
First year out of high school, my Mother asked me to play Santa Claus during lunchtime where she worked. I was taking an unplanned break from the “college education thing” and spending most of my time working a fine retail charge where I slept in secret and ate cup-o-noodles in the parking lot. Though I was horribly busy, I took the Santa post as offered.
She also bribed me with a meal, in a real restaurant.
When I arrived at her place of employ, dressed up as Ole’ Saint Nick and carrying a black Hefty bag full of pink (for little ladies) and blue (for little dudes) wrapped gifts, the few children who were there in the fluorescent-lit waiting room went apeshit and proceeded to climb all over me for an hour. And for that period of time, I was just a clueless guy with a fake beard in a bleached waiting room who wanted nothing more than to keep those little kids and their slick-snotty noses happy.
That’s right, I’ve typed it twice now: it was a waiting room. In a clinic. And though I don’t remember the exact specifics behind the purpose of that medical facility as a whole, I was later reminded that my mother worked for a non-profit OBGYN clinic for teenage mothers with HIV, serving downtown Houston and the surrounding low-income wards.
And suddenly that free meal didn’t mean a whole lot to me. But those kids sure did.
Fast forward to last Saturday night, and I’m at (everyone's favorite bar to talk smack about while still somehow managing to be there) Beauty Bar, sitting in a chair in a Santa suit with lunchmeat in my beard, drunk and taking pictures with whoever wanted into the frame. Sure, I had an agenda, but it had nothing to do with anyone else. I was there to get tanked in a plush red suit with whoever was down for the absolute absurdity of the experience. Happily oblivious in all other respects. Because for me, that’s all there was to it. In a real way, I feel it was very pure in its vacant abuse of what might be commonly considered purity.
But I’m not entirely sure of that, nor do I think it matters.
Regardless, I’m not saying the two Santa experiences are on equal moral or life-affirming footing, because they certainly aren’t in my mind. All I’m saying is that they were holiday experiences without strings. Without elitist alienation and abstraction. They aren’t idols. They aren’t promises. They weren’t designed to be anything more than what they were: unloaded opportunities for people to be people. Roast beef, death and all, honored for their honest ugliness and fearless beauty, if only by a witless fool in a Santa suit.
And no one cared about: who worshipped what, why they weren’t getting enough attention, or what brand their gifts were. Because that was never the point.
For any of us, really.
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