Page 27 - Ferry Tales
P. 27

Nestor

        come  from?  Santa,  of  course!  You  don’t  believe  that  anymore,
        Nestor,  because  you  attained  the  age  of  partial  disenchantment
        before you died. But admit it: when you were three or four years old,
        you didn’t think your parents were telling you fairy tales about Santa
        Claus in order to make you behave, did you?”
          “I can’t remember,” she says. I let it pass; lying now won’t be held
        against her.
          “But we do, down here. You and every other child told this story
        really believed God, in the personification of Santa Claus, could see
        you doing bad things even when your parents could not. Yet, when
        Christmas rolled around, instead of the lump of coal you should have
        received,  there  were  all  those  shiny,  new  gifts  waiting  for  you  to
        unwrap. And right there began your disillusionment and cynicism: if
        you were rewarded despite an entire year of secret naughtiness, that
        meant God was not watching you all the time. In other words, you
        could get away with sinning: all that mattered was not getting caught
        by real people. And Santa Claus is thereby revealed as the Devil, in
        his guise as corrupter of youth.”
          “That’s an awful story, Mister.”
          “Blame the adults in your life, Nestor, if you want to pretend you
        had no responsibility. But then you would have to say they were all
        doing the Devil’s bidding. Listen again to the last verse of the song:

               He sees you when you’re sleeping,
               He knows when you’re awake;
               He knows if you’ve been bad or good,
               So be good for goodness sake!

        Now do you see the contradiction? The terrible pun in the last line is
        missed by most children; but there is the crux: are you being good
        because you are being watched, and in hopes of a reward from those
        watching you, or because of the inherent virtue of good  behavior?
        The  resemblance  of  Santa  Claus’s  list  to  Saint  Peter’s  is  not
        accidental, but the child conditioned by Christmas to covering up his
        or her malfeasance and profiting unhindered is rather unlikely to take



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