Xmas (1970)

Santa Claus does nearly anything he wants because his whole existence is a falsehood. He’s completely nice because benevolence is built into his character, and he’s also screwed since altruists are self-destructive. He manifests every act of niceness that could be given to a character in fiction, but the acts seem passionless and automatic to our minds because whoever built him either forgot to give him motivation or else thought his premise would only seem realistic if it functioned out of nowhere.

For all the magnanimity, his powers are de facto and burdensome in private. For instance, no amount of selflessness could melt the endless snow and ice that boxes in his outpost of a life into a navigable path, much less a “worth it once you get there” Mount Everest–y kind of thing. That power would be implausible. His kindness makes him lonelier and less real, if anything. He knows a billion people telepathically, but they don’t realize he’s overhearing them. He’s like a hidden microphone. They think everything he does for them is disembodied magic.

He’s just the circumstance that causes everyone to get some things they love once annually. They don’t care about him whatsoever or wonder what he’s feeling when they look at illustrations of him. His fault entirely. He’s so nice and nothing else in concept that every portraitist for generations has rendered him with such a shine he automatically deflects thought, and no one even tries to undermine the pleasure he portends with an analysis.

To nearly everyone, Santa Claus is a self-sustaining bore of vast utility, a kind of machine padded and disguised with human attributes that gives out treats as blindingly and without meaning as the sun. He’s like the sun dressed up for Halloween: more fattening than fat, unconscionably jolly, with stop sign–colored clothing and no sexual inference whatsoever. No one cares if he’s as happy as his features look, or if he’s sick or mentally ill just so long as he’s dependable. He’s not even a he. He’s an it.

People think Santa Claus is so abstractly nice he doesn’t differentiate between the targets of his kindness. They think he just skims their billions of requests and answers by necessity. They think he’s not just moral but inhumanly objective and that, to him, they’re traditionally good or bad and, thus, deserve to be rewarded every year or not. They think he thinks in the most average suppositions. They think his brain is almost a computer and his heart is like a Christian church. Actually, they don’t even think that. They just think about gifts or no gifts.

This is a secret, but Santa Claus does in fact evaluate his audience and pick out favorites. Whoever made him left that loophole. His mind grows hopelessly enamored with the twists of certain minds he reads on rare occasions, just as we real humans fall for dreamy bodies that have someone else coincidentally inside them. Given his unbelievability and laughable appearance, he knows he’ll never warrant love for real, so he tries to pinpoint people whose reaction to his charity is so unsolvable that, upon responding, he thinks the equivalent of “huh.”

Since Santa Claus is a kind of genius, he needs to love someone who’s very complicated. Yeah, his generosity is actually love. That’s not a typo or a slip. It’s love without the bombast of eroticism, or at least without the oomph that makes having sex love’s ultimatum. Sometimes he thinks that means his love is true and pure, and sometimes he masturbates like anybody else. His emotional deficiency is a big, tragic secret that would be obvious if people loved where gifts come from. Or if they didn’t think politely asking is a form of caring.

If Santa Claus can do almost anything, why won’t he? Why doesn’t he fly his sleigh into the real world all the time? Why won’t he give his favorites the gift of liking nice old men and then schmooze them to befriend him? Why won’t he use his superpower to manipulate his favorites into loving Santa Claus and make them want to move into the middle of the freezing, bleak nowhere to live with him? Because that wouldn’t be kind. His kindness seems so absolute to those who benefit from it, but it’s a saintly ruse wherein he hides his loneliness. No one ever thinks to look for pain there.

One day, to stave off a depression, Santa Claus decides he’s an artist. He knows enough about contemporary art through handling wealthy folks’ requests to guess that fabricating people’s wishes into objects and then manipulating people who are in the wishers’ inner circle to fork the objects over and take credit for his kindness is sufficiently subtextual to qualify. He knows enough about humanity to understand that, for artists, making things that sell for millions is a decent substitute for being personally loved. He would really, really like to feel like that.

Art upgrades Santa’s self-defeating kindness into an associative conceit and makes him feel even more connected to his favorite human, who is, like him, an artist by default. George is the favorite’s name. He’s 14 now, but Santa’s liked him since he asked to have the moon fitted with giant Mickey Mouse ears as his gift for Xmas 1965. George began to call himself an artist when he reached the age when other people wanted more than others’ names and looks as an ID because the only other option was a depressive kid who plays guitar ineptly and is a massive drag to be around.

George counts as Artist by Santa’s self-serving definition because the things he wants are physical impossibilities, and his wishes are too misappropriated to qualify as anything but art that’s . . . what’s that term . . . conceptual. I.e., things that are the things they offer technically but, when recontextualized into a space that’s meaningless without them, become ingredients in viewers’ newly activated thoughts or, in George’s case, that make him not depressed. A pill that cures cancer would qualify, for instance. But even if they’re art, George’s hopes are like the chimneys through which Santa Claus supposedly can but doesn’t scrunch.

So George the artist never follows through. Or, rather, he fashions art’s equivalent with every thought he has, but the things that art traditionally inhabits are just too solid to be piggybacked. His ideas remain construction sites, either eking out on a guitar that he can barely play or over-embroiling in his mind. Those who think artists must deliver stuff to qualify assume he’s just a wannabe who stares a lot. Or, and this is key, if they’re like Santa Claus and feel ambivalent about the object’s vaunted status, George is like the concept of, oh, Michelangelo without the disappointing, dated things he actually made.

Sussing George’s fantasies for reciprocating doodads with a checklist in his mitt is the most invigorating thing that Santa Claus has ever felt. George wants items from the real world that challenge even Santa’s knack for manufacturing. Or, rather, things for which even Santa, the Zeus of gifts, can only supply the faulty parts. It forces him to think about his talent literally. George wants things wherein the things’ assembling, which is Santa’s forte, is more like handing things-to-be a menu. For instance, George wants a gun, or rather his imagination wants to put a gun at the disposal of his hands, which would consequently do his far-fetched bidding.

In other words, George wants a gun that would manifest his way of using it. It could be cocked and raised and pointed at his head, all within the lexicon of real guns’ functions, but his mind would cause his hand to make the gun’s blast as benevolent as he alone believes it would be. What George needs from Santa Claus or anyone isn’t just a gun but for the world to watch and think, Okay, that’s scary on the surface, but, more important, I wonder what he’ll want when he employs it, not that I want to be there and find out. Huh.

To give George the gun he wants, Santa Claus would need to turn the world into his illustration à la everything about Pinocchio that makes a piece of wood become a boy and causes children in the real world to think a toy is secretly a universe for the book’s duration. It’s a brilliant proposition, but since Santa’s affability is all-inclusive, he can’t just turn mankind into a foil, but he wants to. George is asking, in effect, to have his body formed into a kind of introverted or inverted Santa Claus, but one whose altruism is entirely focused on himself rather than on a billion people.

George is Santa Claus without the willingness to compromise and the reliance on the power of suggestion and the longing for secondhand appreciation from an audience. Still, Santa would excitedly turn gift hounds around the globe into a rapt, amoral crowd scene, and even render them in CGI, fuck them, and even give himself a little gift—love, George’s—but George only loves things that look like things that are unrealizable, and Santa has the stupid, overly articulated image problem. He’s useful, but he’s not George’s type.

Santa’s tortured. What the fuck is he to do? When Xmas comes, he reluctantly surrenders to the strictures of his practice and searches George’s friends and family for someone who has awesome gift ideas that he or she would pass out with sufficient thoughtfulness to land near George’s bull’s-eye. Someone who could lend Santa’s silly workshop’s lame-o gifts’ effect an undue amazingness. Someone who won’t handicap their impact by using them as a currency to buy something untoward from George, for instance sex. And he weirdly finds someone.

Dennis, 17 on this occasion, is someone whom Santa Claus has always vaguely noted, and always thought to help, but nah because what Dennis used to want fell within the realms where Santa has no business or finesse: talent, sex with teenaged pop stars, the ability to kill someone without that person really dying, etc. He was like George, but in a very dark, off-putting way to Santa. Eventually, Dennis became a writer by default, and Santa thought, Okay, here’s hoping fiction helps him, ’cos I can’t. But something’s changed.

Dennis has fallen unobtrusively in love at last, with George and thanks to George. His love seems just the kind of crazy, dead set, blinded type that George could theoretically incorporate. Dennis loves George almost too much for one source of love to bear. Even reading his thoughts is, like, ick. And, like George’s art, this love is too onerous and unrealistic to be fully manifested in the love poems he incompetently pens for George, much less register in George’s head, which is busy elsewhere spinning damning evidence against himself.

But George susses love from Dennis’s persistence, and even feels a bit, remotely, just as Dennis thinks he’s being loved when George lets him stick around. To Santa’s limited perspective, granted, Dennis is the only person still in George’s life who’s nuts enough to similarly think, what’s stuck behind his staring eyes and bundled in his monosyllabism will, if George can just not kill himself beforehand, eventually define him as a kind of cross between the Andy Warhol of his age group and a budding Jesus but without that myth’s control freak–dom and “I know best” didactic shit.

Dennis finally wants something that Santa doesn’t have to rack his brains to match. A book. A book that, granted, has more powers of persuasion than any normal looking book, even in the self-help field, and whose linguistic goals are as overzealous as the items on the wish lists made by kids still too mushy brained to realize Santa’s not unlike the guy who fixes Mommy’s car, and that Dennis doesn’t have sufficient talent yet to write and never will, but nonetheless a book. Maybe lots of them. Things. Things that could ostensibly be wrapped and treed.

Still, given that fatal lack-of-talent problem and related hassles, Santa arranges, as a mental exercise, for Dennis to give George the only thing he wants that Santa Claus can easily arrange: a gun. Then he shuts his eyes and fast-forwards through the wrapping and delivery and George tearing off the wrapping, then hits play. George barely smiles, but still. Dennis aka the friend-shaped substitute for Santa feels loved. George puts the barrel in his mouth and pulls the trigger. Blood splatters everywhere. Santa Claus watches this and thinks, I couldn’t handle that.

He writes George a make-believe email, meaning George thinks idly about the myth of Santa Claus, edits out the corny parts, and imagines what Santa would say to him if they could correspond. In any case, the email says, Dear George, I understand you like my work, and it would be difficult to explain why much less put my evaluation into words, but I love yours. I love that, just like me, your art flies over people’s heads, ha ha. I say that as a fellow victim of the despotism of consensus. I’d really like to know you, face to face, but being made-up leaves me stuck in a supposed mulch. So, here’s what I’m going to do.

You have a friend named Dennis, as you know. As I am just a bunch of bullshit, I’m internally revised by every person who has heard about me and imagines what I’d be if he or she were seers. In the huge majority of cases, I’m as simple as that human bauble in the bedtime stories that first brought me to your world’s attention—a trite conceit with an absurd appearance, who, if I actually existed, would freak everybody out. I am thereby left alone to do the nonsense liars told kids I can do, and who cares why or how just so long as people get a piece.

The difference in your friend’s case is he believes that, if I did exist for real, I could and would give you everything you ever wanted and let him be the guy who hands it out. And he’s right, I would do that. I would because I’m nice and you’re deserving, and because his love for you is ultra-sympathetic. I can’t love, other than in a generalizing way. The whole “Christian love” crap, essentially. I know that’s convoluted, but try this. If I were writing this email to Dennis instead, meaning if it were he who was pretending I could write to him, this is what he’d have me say.

Dear Dennis, I’m in 100% agreement with you that George is the most amazing sentient being who has ever lived, and I should know, since I’ve known everyone, and I’ve been able to assess them without you humans’ thing for physical appearance, so without the lust that that makes a certain segment of you fellows, say, priests and social workers, creepy. I would be happy, no, exuberant to honor your request and give him everything he wants and let you be the stuff’s deliverer.

However, I can’t tell you if he loves you or make him love you, which I know you didn’t ask from me in so many words, but I’m a mind reader. I can’t because my specialty is giving things to intermediaries who then autograph and dole them out as if they were their beings’ souvenirs. And, to be honest, if George loves you, he doesn’t think about it, as far as I can tell. Still, I will suggest, by my admittedly skewed logic, that he must love your generosity at least. Or if that thing + gratitude for thing = love for thing’s originator isn’t logical, I’m fucked. Giving gifts is all I’ve got.

Now I’ll write to both of you at once, which I’m already doing, actually. I have an idea. It’s very simple. We all agree that George deserves as much happiness as anyone on earth could ever feel without physically shattering or something. Well, George doesn’t think he “deserves” that per se, he’s just desperate that it be made available to him. Some of what would make him happy is too unrealistic even for the likes of beatific me. Or let’s say the delivery is punishing. Reality’s a line where unrealistic things dissipate into sci-fi or become explosives, and I’m that boundary’s bitch.

Still, I’m Santa Claus, right? I exist in a fairy tale, to your minds. I think you guys would really like it here and thrive. Nothing here is circumscribed. At the same time, everything is very simple, right or wrong, and Dennis wants answers. Granted, my life was set in stone, apart from minor contemporizing tweaks each decade, by whoever made me centuries ago, and there are flaws in me, such as how my powers only switch on in the realm of things that can be bought in stores, but, theoretically, I could have been anything, even God in your outlandish concept.

To you, the fairy tale’s a cheesy medium that builds physically unsound worlds that one eventually outgrows, and to me a fairy tale is city planning. So, here’s what I’m going to do. I think that since the fairy tale becomes a thing that’s available in books when it crosses over into your abodes, that makes it something I can give Dennis to give to you. Also, fairy tales aren’t Proust or even Stephen King, so, Dennis, you could write one, if, that is, you can lift your pen out of the pornographic slaughterhouse that you call prose for long enough. So you get ready to do that.

The only trick or problem is I think I’ll need to be there too. Maybe manifest myself in something that reminds you I’m your fun’s provider, even just a logo. There was obviously some reason why you humans felt the need to mediate windfalls of generosity by putting harmless Santa in the middle, and, given Dennis’s involvement, no offense, I fear if I’m not co-Svengali, he’ll launch a scary avalanche of something. Plus, okay, I’d like to watch, inconspicuously, mind you, even through peepholes masquerading as some unobtrusive bunny, but I have so much else to do here. Let me think.