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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