Eight Feet Deep

 Tonight mil­lions of lit­tle boys and girls will be nes­tled all snug in their beds as visions of sugar plums dance in their heads. Or else, they will be in bed play­ing some hideously vio­lent video games, per­haps in between, think­ing of the gore which the game they will find tomor­row morn­ing under the Christ­mas tree contains.

 Per­haps par­ents in “more tra­di­tional” homes will read their kids “The Night Before Christ­mas,” a rather quaint yet endur­ing poem about a visit from St. Nick orig­i­nally pub­lished in the early 19th cen­tury. Cer­tainly the chil­dren hav­ing “sugar plums” danc­ing through their head is a quite obso­lete ref­er­ence these days, unless the kids hap­pen to be ripped on some kind of illicit drug.

 Great lit­er­ary works usu­ally are rewarded with a par­ody some­time along the line. As for our “Night Before Christ­mas” one might see vari­a­tions such as this, for Penn­syl­va­nia deer hunters, “The PA Deer Hunter’s Night Before Christmas.”

  “… I looked out the win­dow across the moon­lite snow with glee,
  HOLY COW, there was 8 big buck stand­ing under­neath the tree.
  I grabbed the 30–06 and started the sneak,
  because I knew the game war­dens were all asleep … ”

 And in the south­east cor­ner of Texas, adja­cent to south­ern Louisiana, where I live and itself home to a large Cajun pop­u­la­tion is the “The Cajun Night Before Christ­mas” com­plete with a fractured-English-Cajun dialect:

    ” … Then up through the bayou
           Dey got such a clat­ter
           Make soun’ like old Boudreau
           Done fall off his ladder … ”

Christ­mas sto­ries are just as large a part of the hol­i­day itself. Take for instance, the story of the Baby Jesus, de t’ing what got it started all. And over the years I have kept a keen eye out for a good Christ­mas story only to come up empty. That is, until read­ing a story by a witty writer named David Sedaris. Sedaris was raised in North Car­olina, is gay and now resides in France. Not that there’s any­thing wrong with that. He has writ­ten a num­ber of books which are com­pi­la­tions of mostly autobiographical-to-auto-fiction-graphical essays, many of which tales either involve his trav­els or life with a rather unusual fam­ily that includes his sis­ter, come­dian Amy Sedaris.

 I first read the Christ­mas story to which I refer in the Dec. 1, 2002, edi­tion of Esquire. The piece is called “Six to Eight Black Men.” It is a tale of Sedaris try­ing to under­stand the sub­tleties of the Dutch ver­sion of Santa Claus, who was tra­di­tion­ally accom­pa­nied by “six to eight black men.” These black men were orig­i­nally slaves but mod­ern sen­si­bil­i­ties trans­formed them in more recent times to “just good friends,” albeit with noth­ing in between. It was teased in Esquire thusly:

    ‘A heart­warm­ing tale of Christ­mas in a for­eign land where, if you’ve been naughty, SAINT NICK and his friends give you an ass-whuppin.’

 So set­tle back for a glimpse into another country’s ver­sion of Santa, have a few chuck­les and be glad you’re an Amer­i­can where you might just find your­self in the deep woods star­ing at a blind deer hunter.

 Click here to read: “Six or Eight Black Men,” by David Sedaris

  Have a Merry Christ­mas.