When I worked full-time as a newspaper reporter it was always difficult to come up with really unique ideas during recurring events each year such as the county fair or July 4th or Christmas. Sometimes we would come up with something that was a real winner and other times it would be a real turkey of a story.
At one paper my editor had a very good Christmas story idea. However, he wanted ME to do the story which was spending several hours as Santa Claus at the local mall. I wasn’t too keen on the idea at first and it didn’t get any better putting on that hot and scratchy Santa suit. But it turned out okay. Kids thought I was the real thing and a couple of attractive women jumped up in my lap for a picture. Try getting the latter to happen at a steer show at the county fair and you may just get gored, or worse.
The whole Santa Claus myth is really strange once you get older and think about it. It is not a story for those steeped in logic and science. Santa and his deer fly around the world on Christmas night delivering presents and there are how many time zones and there are how many homes? And flying deer?
But the good thing about being a kid is you can suspend belief for a little while. I suppose you can fantasize as an adult — sometimes with even better fantasies than Santa bringing you a Sponge Bob Square Pants action figure — but I mean the Santa fantasy is something that you can only imagine because the math, science, logic and a whole lot of other disciplines don’t work out. Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt or even Angelina and Brad might not ever crawl into your bed in the middle of the night. But it theoretically could happen. It most likely, hell no, never, won’t happen for most of us, nor would some of us want them in our beds (Sorry, Brad’s not welcome here). But even such a wild fantasy as that has the possibility of reality even though it has probability of jack.
That is why I found Jesus as such a good being to pretend when I was as a little kid. The guy was a magician, a superhero, immortal. And no one I knew back then could ever do the things JC did. That’s part of the reason I find as so disgusting those so-called religious people who purport to know what Jesus would do and telling everyone else they must do it or else. Hey, I was a childhood Jesus! Or at least I played one.
So ho, ho, ho, for Santa Claus. Even if you’ve outgrown believing in him take a minute and remember how rich the fantasy was. And then you can go back to fantasizing about Angelina and/or Brad.