An obese, bearded man, dressed head-to-toe in what look like red velvet pajamas with white, faux-fur piping, patent leather boots, and a matching belt with a belt buckle the size of a Buick wrapped around his enormous, bulbous waist parks his wagon propelled by flying mammals on your roof.
He manages to squeeze into and then slide down your chimney without getting any soot on him or his outfit, has brought a sack full of presents with him through this narrowest of narrow passages which he kindly leaves under an artificially lit tree that you (or someone) has chopped down and brought inside your house and decorated with baubles, has a quick snack of cookies and milk left out for him by the homeowner/resident, which has, no doubt, led to his obesity and probably type 2 diabetes, and then leaves (presumably the same way he came) only to repeat this billions of times over in every dwelling on the planet.
There must be one helluva cargo area in that wagon!
It may surprise you to learn that I was a precocious child. When I was growing up in the 1970s, California public school districts had a grade-school program which was called MGM – “Mentally Gifted Minors” – that had been established by the state legislature in 1961 focusing on the top 2% (IQ 132+) of students. 286 of the state’s 986 school districts, which accounts for 74% of California’s K-12 students, offered these programs which included enriched curriculum and accelerated learning opportunities beyond the standard classroom setting. Before transferring to a private Catholic school, I was in the Glendale Unified School District’s MGM program, which the teachers called MOTHER’S GIFTED MONSTERS. I didn’t need to be smart (or a smart ass) though to see right through the Santa Claus story. I figured it out because of Chris Esposito.
I learned a lot about life from Chris, or, more specifically, from his family. First, not everyone has a mother and a father (well, I suppose biologically they do, but let’s not get hung up on literalism). Chris didn’t have a father, he had a Carlos who drove a tricked-out Dodge van with carpeted walls and a CB radio that had an enormous antenna with a tennis ball on the end of it. Carlos was like a dad in that he and Chris’ mom, Helen, went into Helen’s room and closed the door like mothers and fathers do; but Carlos was only there on weekends. The rest of the week, Helen played like a father and even went to work during the day like dads do.
And the Espositos – Helen, Chris, his little brother Curtis, and Carlos on the weekends – lived in something called an apartment, which did not have a yard with a dog in it (which, if I’m honest, I always thought was the weirdest thing about Chris, because even my archnemesis, Gene Wood, had a yard with a dog in it, a Golden Retriever with the uninspired name of… wait-for-it… “Goldie”). This is key. The apartment not only lacked a yard with a dog in it, but it had no fireplace.
Now, I worked out the Modus Tollens formulation (If p then q is true and q is false, then p is false), normally written as an Aristotelian syllogism:
- if p then q
- not q
- ergo, not p
I wouldn’t have called it Modus Tollens until I studied propositional logic in college, but I understood it. It expresses the general truth that if a statement is true, then so is its contrapositive. Now, on Christmas morning, Chris and Curtis had presents, just like me and my sister Patty did; therefore:
- presents mean Santa (p) slides down your chimney (q)
- Chris and Curtis have no chimney (not q)
- ergo, there is no Santa (not p)
On Christmas morning, Chris and Curtis did have presents, but they had no chimney. To be accurate, this formulation does not disprove the existence of Santa, all it does is definitively show that he is not the delivery mechanism for the presents. But that was enough for me to conclude, using deductive reasoning, that Santa was irrelevant. The important thing was the presents, and if Santa wasn’t their source, I could do away with him. And the unseemly things associated with him, like sitting on a stranger’s lap in a Mall and telling him what I wanted that year, or worrying about my name making it onto the so-called “naughty list.”
Chris is now a deputy in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which is ironic, because whenever we played Cops & Robbers, Gene and William Schulz were the cops while me and Chris were always the bad guys, the robbers. Helen and Carlos split up, and California’s MGM program evolved into the more widely recognized “Gifted and Talented Education” or GATE program. And Santa – come December, he harnesses up the reindeer and heads to his timeshare in Ft. Lauderdale.
This is why I call the festive holiday we celebrate in December every year CHRISmas.
Gordon and I would like to wish you the happiest of holidays, as well as friendship and peace in the new year.