The Christmas List

It is said that everyone has a purpose in life.

Your parents? That’s easy, to feed, clothe and shape you. Not forgetting teaching you how to wipe your own ass

Your children? To give you the opportunity to experience the pain you gave your parents

Santa Claus? To give little people a reason to behave at least, without losing face, for even or a short stretch of the year.

But could the mythological figure be one of the most purposeful people never to have existed?

People live without Parents and without kids! It’s a fact of life, a cruel one in many cases but there ya have it. But consider a life without Santa Claus, a situation no one in living memory has experienced. Of course every human above a certain ago knows of course that St Nick is a creation of many factors, from various cultures, made in his current form without doubt by the marketing team of the Coca Cola Company

Without him, in his many incarnations we would have no Christmas, I don’t mean the traditional Christian vision of what’s referred to as Xmas. I’m talking about what we all know & count do to from September!

No tinsel, crackers or festive shindigs in silly jumpers? No mistletoe, pointless gift giving or mountains of food.

An entire genre of films, annual Christmas tv specials, countless No 1 songs & of course the toy industry itself, would either not exist or be completely unrecognisable if it weren’t for the man, who despite being the most recognisable human on Earth, never actually existed!

Even the X Factor wouldn’t be around, the only reason Simon Cowell continues to flog that dead horse, other than the money, is to get us all to Christmas! It’s basically a weekly advent calendar filled with a shitty treat!

But the biggest casualty of a world without Santa Clause & Christmas?

Childhood itself!

It may be a flat out lie that we tell to our children, encouraging them to be good so that Santa will visit them, watching them tear strips from the Argos book & Smyths Catalogue as they compile their list. Something that has already begun in our house.

We even go as far to take them to visit Santa, sometimes spending up to £100 for the experience, telling them that this is of course one of Santa’s Helpers as the big man himself is busy at the North Pole. Yet the man sat before them in the red suit, black boots and thick white beard who we openly acknowledge as a fake is more real than the actual truth of the story that each new generation continues to tell our young.

The story of the jolly yet morbidly obese figure of joy and happiness, who every Christmas Eve comes into your home to leave gifts & treats, in a perverse sort of reverse burglary.

It’s only when you consider how ridiculous yet magical the festive season is that you question what other normalities we live with that are in fact a woven tale passed along the tracks of history, which we accept them as the norm.

It raises numerous questions about our reality & if we even exist, but those will have to wait, I have to take the boys to post their rough drafts to the North Pole.

Where did I put those stamps?