If you don't believe in Santa, how can Santa believe in you? The big man gets lost in the annual culture war over Christmas. Maybe he's hiding, his jolly heart broken. It's odd, I know, to say he's missing when his merchandising imagery and pre-stocktake sale discount signage is everywhere. But Santa lives in our hearts first – his condo at the North Pole is just a residency requirement of the job – and our hearts are increasingly hostile places.
It's not so much the phoney war on Christmas that makes him sad. It's the real war of all against all that we wage on each other seemingly every day of the year. I'm sure it made Santa very sad when he heard Mr Dutton and Mr Hadley talking about how angry they were with the school that banned Christmas, because Santa has no truck with fake news and he knows, because he reads Brisbane Times every day, that no such crime against the festive season was actually committed. It's was all a made-up story.
Santa could only sigh and shake his head and sadly make a few more notes on his extensive naughty-and-nice list. I think that if Mr Dutton and Mr Hadley want to find anything under the tree this weekend, they'll need to be on their extra specially best behaviour before he checks that list for the last time on Saturday night.
But you know what? The rest of us probably do too.
I know that every year at this time I get a little nervous about all of the entries on my naughty list and I wonder if there's any number of copies of The Big Issue I could buy that might balance the ledger. It's the karmic equivalent of doing five hundred sit ups after a bucket of KFC. Because I'm not always nice, and I don't always have the excuse of "Well they started it!"
I reckon Santa is not much interested in that sort of thing.
So, in a possibly hopeless attempt to make sure my stocking is stuffed with goodies and treats, I offer my apologies to everyone I was mean to this year. Sometimes when you write the sort of column I do, you get a little bit carried away. People's feelings get hurt. And Santa makes a note on his list.
So I'm sorry.
We all of us believed in Santa at some time. When we believed, we were at our most innocent. When we believed, we also understood the simple difference between naughty and nice. It was always, always, always about how we treated each other. In this way, Santa knows us better than we know ourselves. We need to have some faith in him and each other.
Merry Christmas to all, best wishes for the new year.
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