No Santa Butt Plugs

From the Hampton Union (thanks Tony Renner):

HAMPTON - A parent of a Hampton Academy Junior High School student says the principal of the school told his son to leave the school’s holiday dance on Friday night because the boy was dressed in a Santa Claus costume, which was politically incorrect.

Principal Fred Muscara said he told the boy he couldn’t get into the dance because he was wearing the costume.

"It was a holiday party," said Muscara. "It was not a Christmas party. There is a separation of church and state. We have a lot of students that go to Hampton Academy Junior High that have different religions. We have to be sensitive to that."

This school principal, like many Americans, is confused. He thinks that, because Santa and The Little Baby Jesus compete for ratings during the same eight weeks every year, Santa and The Little Baby Jesus are interchangable, or equivalent, entities. This is patently untrue! Though they are both icons of a feelgood American mythology designed to obfuscate the repulsive truth of human cruelty, and though it is customary to erect in front yards illuminated plastic statues of them both, and though both are honkys, there are are two--and by two I mean three--crucial differences.

One: Santa is completely uncircumcised. I bet you didn't know that!

Two: if you google Santa, you get a fairly lame shopping site, but if you google Baby Jesus, you get butt plugs.

Three: The Little Baby Jesus has the personality of a poached egg, whereas Santa is the evil twin of that nice St Nicholas.

St Nicholas is a formerly pious guy who got the pi sucked out of him by American capitalism. He started out as a 3rd century Turkish bishop, a mystic Christ-like Robin Hood dude who healed the sick and chucked bags of gold at the impecunious through the windows of their stinking hovels. During this early do-good period his behavior and appearance conformed to the ideals of Roman Catholic saintly gravitas, and once his tomb started oozing manna, it was a done deal: he was given a feast day, Feast of Our Holy Father, Nicholas, Archbishop of Myra in Lycia, the Chucker of Gold-Bags, and promoted to Patron of Sailors. For 1500 years he eked out his veneration on a series of ship's figureheads, at the forefront of European imperialism.

One of these figureheads ended up on a Dutch ship in a body of water that would one day be known as New York Harbor.

St Nicholas, however, didn't get a chance to chuck any gold bags in the New World. He had been weakened by the Reformation, and died quietly of acute 16th century politics. Dutch colonists, in dire need of quaint Old World traditions to Americanize and throw in the face of the British, surreptitiously got Nicholas' twin brother sprung from Riker's (where he'd been awaiting trial on a drunk-and-disorderly), and, calling him Santa Claus, which is Dutch for "bad-ass who thumbs his nose at the stinkin Brits and their pansy-ass St. George," pawned him off as the beloved populist St. Nick.

Santa's comeback solo career got a major boost with the jolly elfin habitué-of-chimneys persona, invented for him in 1809 by New York image consultant Washington Irving, but it wasn't until 1822 and the wide release of the sentimental blockbuster verse "The Night Before Christmas" that he acquired his stylin' ride, his posse, and his "jelly"-like physique. The red plushie DSI (Department Store Issue) uniform (the outfit to which the festive junior high school kid aspired--rashly, in my opinion-- to do justice) was invented by Coca Cola in the 30s to market "the Claus that refreshes." The success of the campaign, combined with his willingness to reward the undeserving with booty plundered from the misery of the third world, has made Santa the hardest working man in show business, and the most successful shill in the history of the world.

Thus, Santa is an advertising gimmick, and as such can offend no true American capitalist, whatever his/her ethnicity.

Washington Irving is the same guy who responsible for the tenacious myth that pre-Columbian Europeans believed the world was flat.

And to all a good night.