Christmas - 2016
The other day I got to thinking of what Santa Claus did for a living before he grew old, fat and bearded (no doubt inspired by John Prine’s song Jesus - The Missing Years). Also what kind of man dresses in a red and white, fur-trimmed suit? Throw in the global warming consequences of establishing a major manufacturing operation atop an ice field, his anally obsessive, judgmental list making and you’ve got yourself a man bordering on the mentally deranged. Also not too smart. So I did what any normal person would do, fired up the laptop and consulted Wikipedia, the God of All Knowledge (At the top of the page they asked for a donation, then had the gall to say ‘piss on that noise’ had no monetary value).
There I found all kinds of references to a Polish bishop, the Norse god Odin and what hit me most, the Finnish Christmas figure of Joulupukki, also known as the Christmas Goat. And I thought Santa Claus was weird. Top that off with his outfit of “…tight red leather pants and a tight fur trimmed red leather coat….” I don’t know about you but there’s no way I’d let a goat dressed like a Fire Island hooker down my chimney. And get this; come Christmas Eve in Finland, good ole Joulupukki comes knocking on doors at random and asks, “Are there any well-behaved children here?” That kind of crap happens here in the good ole U.S. of A. and, goat or no goat, he ends up doing five to ten.
Sorry, I got sidetracked. You read stuff like that and the idea of Europe being at war, on and off for about three centuries, comes as no surprise.
So, what exactly did Santa do for a living before becoming Jolly old St. Nick? Near as I can figure, back in the days of yore he was some kind of mythological herdsman floating in the sky up there with the aurora borealis. Years later he found employment as a Viking mercenary sailing the seas in his ship named, “I’ve got a Little Something for You.” (While searching fruitlessly for the Norwegian translation I came on this and couldn’t resist - “Luftputefartoyet mitt er fulltar al”- which translates as “My hovercraft is full of eels” - which is close enough for me.)
In the late sixteenth century S. Claus could be found posing nude as a model for background cherubs in the heyday of the Italian Renaissance. Yup, those happy days put the jolly in old St. Nick. It was in Florence after an evening’s tryst that Santa’s red suit was born. A little mixup in the guest bedroom and Claus frolicked out the door in Cardinal Guanella’s cape.
After a lover’s spat with Oscar Wilde in 1898, he took up acting and starred in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado as Yum-Yum with rave reviews. Santa moved to New York City in 1912, sailing aboard the Titanic as the Countess of Rothes. A spat with George M. Cohan over the lyrics to “Yankee Doodle Was a Dandy” got him blackballed on Broadway. For the next year he made a living standing outside Macy’s with a red bucket scoring spare change and waiting for Natalie Wood to show up. An opportunity in the mailroom at Coca Cola led to him posing for Haddon Sundblom and the modern image of Santa was born. No longer satisfied with the peanuts of posing and hustling envelopes, Santa moved into the advertising end of the business and for a while, ruthlessly ran Coca Cola Asia. It was he who first realized those tiny little fingers could work magic with any task set before them and do it for a bowl of rice and a bowl of opium a day. In Bangkok, Santa is still known as the Red Swine. Finally, in 1953 he fled to the North Pole where he now lives in exile with an old woman and the few remaining Munchkin’s from The Wizard of Oz.
Additional research is needed for the above.
Merry Christmas from Uncle Emil
No comments:
Post a Comment