It happens each holiday season, when during an otherwise random conversation about New Urbanism, heirloom tomatoes or the reasons why the Confederacy got whipped in the Civil War, someone will look at me with dismay and say:

“You’re such a Grinch, Roger.”

My response never varies:

“Thank you very much.”

The roots of my longstanding Yuletide antipathy might be traced to any number of Freudian conceits, Jungian counter-thrusts, references to childhood toilet training habits or the sheer pervasiveness of psychological repression stemming from Jethro Bodine’s inexplicable role as my 3rd District councilman, but in truth, it’s far simpler than all that.

It goes back to that original, defining moment in every person’s life — not when we realize that we’ll die some day without so much as the saving grace of being able to hit a curveball, but the sudden, gut-wrenching discovery that in spite of the shameless propaganda constantly fed to us by adults, who kept assuring us that a year’s excruciating behavioral self-regulation would be rewarded by a gaudily costumed fat man parking his tricked-out sleigh on the roof and descending the chimney, that nope, in the end, it was a transparent ruse.

Santa Claus doesn’t really exist at all.

Where I grew up, our house didn’t even have a chimney, and this fact alone should reveal much about my gullibility as a child, as well as my youthful eagerness to believe the palpably untrue out of no better motivation than sheer greed, because I can no longer deny it that from the start, I was in it for the loot.

Then, there came a shameful day of embarrassment and infamy. One of my friends obliterated my comfy bubble of faith in Santa with a remorseless machete of pure elementary school rationality, and suffering silently as the other children giggled at me for being a mental pygmy, I did much more than shake Santa’s grip, cold turkey, right there on the spot.

I irrevocably disavowed the whole Christmas spectacle, because even at such a tender age, I could see the dominoes falling as the previously sacrosanct myth of Santa Claus vaporized in plain sight.

The message was unmistakably clear. If the adult authority figures could so painlessly mislead us about Santa, where would it end? They might also be fibbing to us about the many other edicts demanding compliance and conformity, especially the presumed civic foundational edifices of religion, patriotism and obedience to the logic of the crosswalk.

In short order, I became an atheist, a multi-nationalist and a serial jaywalker, but the worst part of it at the time was sitting there in my room, alone and cross-legged on the cold tile floor, and experiencing the devastating frustration of knowing that I was far too young to properly drink my way through the rampant disappointment.

Santa’s unused cookies and milk were the best I could do, and then, as now, I hate milk.

•••

In 2008, Santa Claus unexpectedly came back into my life when various kill-joys in my vicinity began insisting that they were the true guardians of his legacy.

It so happens that NABC produces seasonal ale called Naughty Claus, and long ago, our house graphics wizard playfully illustrated it with a drawing of Santa affably leering in the direction of a Marilyn Monroe lookalike in the process of suffering through a wardrobe malfunction astride a subway grate.

There were no complaints about this blatant sexual allusion, presumably in acceptance of Santa’s roving eye.

However, when one of my other artistic helper elves designed a promotional poster depicting Santa Claus smoking a cigarette — in fact, the illustration was borrowed verbatim from 1950s-era advertising copy — fingers wasted no time in wagging: “But ... but ... you can’t show Santa Claus smoking!”

Why not? It’s FICTION, people.

Then: “What if children see it?”

Which children? The ones who aren’t legally permitted to enter barrooms in the first place? The ones who can’t legally drink beer, anyway? The same children whose parents knowingly perpetuate Santa worship in the first place?

Incredulous, but not wanting to risk the wrath of militant health fascism, we relented, retiring Santa’s nicotine-infected mug shot to the archives, and concluding along the way that there is much irony in beer advertising’s history of using scantily clad women to sell swill, in spite of larger issues of female self-image pertaining to very real women, yet we must protect the reputation of a completely imaginary male character from being tainted by tobacco.

Actually, I have it on good authority that Santa smokes Cuban cigars, so there.

•••

Through it all, music soothes the heretical breast, and I just finished listening to a recording of “Ring Christmas Bells.” As always, it reminds me of our high school choral director, Michael Neely, who warned us that later in our lives, we’d come to regret taking our singing voices for granted. We scoffed, and of course, he was proven right.

Three decades of beer and tobacco have rendered my singing voice moot, and now I’m little more than an interpreter of songs, with the atonal wailings occurring well out of human earshot. Our four cats suffer the most.

Imperfect pitch aside, the only Christmas songs I like are the ones we sang in choir, back in the day, and so here’s to Mick. Music still makes the season tolerable, even if, quoting Chico Marx, some things never change, and “there ain’t no sanity claus.”



Roger believes that contrarianism is the gift that keeps on giving, although craft beer works, too. Read more at the NA Confidential blog: www.cityofnewalbany.blogspot.com