Strangely Naked

This post is part of Janie Junebug and Cherdo On the Flipside’s blog hop, “My Favorite Christmas Memory.” If this is your first time here, hello! If you’re looking for sweet tales about love or the wonderment of childhood, you probably didn’t read the title and I recommend checking out some of the other participants.

When first diving into the murky nightmare-scape of my brain to blindly claw at the abyss searching for a memory of Christmas’ gone by, the first thing that I grasped onto was a memory about my step-family and I taking out a remote control plane and demolishing it. It was up for two seconds, crashed, step-dad would fix it, then the next person would crash it, until the plane became unfixable. The toy be damned, it was a great bonding experience worth more than any toy. But that’s too saccharine.

Instead, I’ll share a more poignant, universal experience about when imagination collided with reality: when I found out Santas are real, all too real. As the youngest child in a house of five kids, I defiantly believed in Santa Claus. No matter what my siblings would tell me, my imagination stretched and contorted around their cynical reality to make excuses, to allow for the belief of a magical dwarf-enthusiast/enslaver who can creepily track the deeds of the world’s children and deliver presents accordingly through breaking and entering. I chose to believe. I wanted to continue to live in a world where reindeer fly and an obese, late-middle-aged man working at a break-neck pace somehow eludes cardiac arrest.

Those were glorious days when my palpable optimism would drown the harshness of realism and consequences with my nascent, dream-like fantasy world. But such youthful innocence is unprepared to deal with daily predators, people whose sole method of income is derived from victimization of the wide-eyed.

The optimism I clung to, that was assaulted daily by general adolescence, was finally shattered when I came upon a mall with my mother on our annual pilgrimage to take a photo with a complete stranger in a seldom-if-ever washed ill-fitting red rug with white trim. Walking from the parking lot to the gaping maw of consumerism, we saw the mall Santa, whom I believed to be an “agent of the one true Claus”, smoking a cigarette with his beard off to the side, scratching his toy sack, arguing with a weathered “Mrs. Claus.” My mother knew I was too old to continue the Santa ruse and made no attempt to shield my eyes…or was maybe too high on the Devil’s grass, who knows.

From there it was an avalanche of disconcerting Santa imagery. That year, on the news, was a Santa who was arrested for starting a fight with a dad, another Santa was caught robbing a bank, and a family friend was contemplating joining the Santa ranks. My little brain finally accepted that the Santa game was all a money game meant to capitalize on a societally accepted lie perpetuated on children.

It seems sad to lose that innocence, but I would argue that it was a blessing having the clarity of a cynic bestowed upon me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still generally hopeful, and want to believe that individual people are generally good, but I have enough cynicism to sniff out bullshit with the acuteness of a bloodhound. If it wasn’t for that one, stereotypically disheveled Santa, who knows, I may be festooned with magical magnet bracelets and counting my steps in Shape-Up shoes and sending my personal information to Nigerian princes.

That is my favorite Christmas memory, having the shackles of optimism cast off and wrapping myself in the warm coat of realism with a sarcasm inner-lining.

By the way, this is all interchangeable with how I learned televised wrestling is a choreographed dance of scantily clad gentlemen of various musculature.

If you want more touching Christmas memories, try one of the below links:

This is a Blog Hop.