Get Behind Me, Santa

Last week, some nutter dressed in a Santa suit broke into a flat in East London, and stabbed a man to death. I mean, seriously. Did I miss something? When exactly did life turn into a bad John Carpenter movie? As if that wasn’t enough to dampen the Red Pants of Justice’s slowly building spirit of festive fun, this was also the week in which an employee of Wal-Mart in the US was fired for an email he sent to a customer, in which he observed that Christmas was not a purely Christian festival, but an amalgam of traditions from several cultures, many of which could be traced back thousands of years, some of them Pagan in origin. That's it. No shoplifting, no fingers in the till. Just expressing an opinion that would not even be considered mildly controversial among most educated people in America, or the rest of the world; to no-one, for that matter, except for the most zealous of Christian fundamentalists.

Now consider the following fact: Wal-Mart is one of the biggest commercial retailers of guns and ammunition in the world, with an annual turnover almost equal to the GDP of Austria. Do you suppose their Christmas cards mention peace and goodwill anywhere? It’s almost enough to make the RPOJ take back some vociferously expressed rebuttals he made some years ago to a particularly joyless Godbotherer of his acquaintence, who argued that Christmas had no place in the secular calendar and should therefore be abolished as a public holiday. Tosser.

However, neither of these tales quite top last year's winner of the award for un-cheeriest Christmas story. During a charity fun-run in North Wales, five men were arrested for public order offences following a drunken riot, during which police used pepper spray and batons to break up a crowd of thirty people. All of whom were dressed as Santa Claus at the time.

How ironic! In direct contrast to how he usually feels at this time of year, the Red Pants of Justice is trying his best to get a bit festive, but the rest of the world just won’t let him do so. Perhaps he should just revert to his usual assumption: that Christmas is probably going to suck, so better just to accept the fact and get on with it. Roll on New Year, with all the commensurate disappointments it will probably bring too. Bah, and indeed, humbug.

Actually, the story of the psycho-Santa did remind me of something an old university tutor once told me. This was a popular guy, who also happened to be a world-renowned expert in folklore and urban mythology (although the fact that this meant he had the same degree as the comic book store guy from the Simpsons was lost on precisely no-one.) Anyway, he had a theory that almost all horror-based urban legends that appeared from the early-1980s onwards could be traced back, directly or indirectly, to movies. You know the sort of thing; babysitter receives phone call from a crazed man saying he’s coming to kill her, so she locks all the doors and windows, before realising that the call was made from upstairs. Modern campfire tales, in other words; (mostly) harmless fun. In fact, my tutor had found only one prominent example that didn’t seem to have entered the popular consciousness in this way - a 1984 slasher film called 'Silent Night, Deadly Night,' about a psychopathic killer, whose questionable modus operandi involved climbing down chimneys on Christmas Eve and brutally murdering people with an axe. You know, like you do. Anyway, my tutor theorised that the reason why this idea - apparently so ripe for urban legend material - doesn’t seem to have cropped up anywhere else is because the idea is just too horrible for Western society to cope with. We can almost take any amount of war, violence and bloodshed in the name of entertainment, but a psycho Santa? That's just sick.

So, as 2005 starts to shuffle its ugly scrag-end out of our lives and into the pages of history marked 'years that sucked', the Red Pants of Justice is left contemplating this motley, post-millenial cast of alternative Santas, and wonders what conclusions can be drawn. At least he hasn’t the added indignity of having been invented by the Coca-Cola company, too; that old dinner party chestnut is, in fact, an urban myth itself. My heart was never in the whole boycott coke thing, anyway.

Nah, who am I kidding? I'll probably have a perfectly fine time at Christmas, participating enthusiastically in the one Christmas tradition of our age that is truly alive and flourishing: the right to stuff yourself silly and not feel too bad about it. Gluttony may mot be the purest path to enlightenment, but as sure as a Boxing Day bulge, it's the most enjoyable. So, with due reticence, the Red Pants of Justice approves of Christmas, in all it's homogonised, commercialised, secularised and de-Paganised glory.

Just don’t get him started on people who call it ‘Winterval.’