Winter Solstice, and the snowflakes are out in force

Dear Father Christmas,

All I want for Christmas is attention. (And a pronoun of my own.)

I want recognition of my identity. And validation of my neuro-difference. After all, I am a survivor. And autistic and marginalized and BIPOC. Please keep that in mind when you put the goods into the stockings. I'll send you a list, okay?

You'll remember I'm two-spirited, right?

Speaking of spirit, a stocking-full of spirits would be great. Or wine. (Organic grapes.) Chocolates too if possible. (Fair-traded.) I look forward to having my needs met by your largesse, Father Christmas. After all, snowflakes are your world, right?

You can just leave the stuff by the hearth when you do your Chimney-Dash. (But nothing triggering, okay?)

Thank you, and Happy Intersectional Multiculturally-Diverse Holidays.

(PS: I don't care for that sexist title you use, by the way. Why not Mother Christmas, or something Trans? I can't call you Santa Claus because “santa” means saint which sounds Euro-centric and colonialist. You need to work on your intersectionality, FC. In time for next year, okay?)

(PPS: Is there any way you could let me know when you're coming so I could get a photo of you giving me the stuff? Except without you in the picture, of course. I like selfies best.)

Santa Clause's Retirement Letter

(From  Short Humour Magazine:    http://www.shorthumour.org.uk/10writersshowcase/santa.htm )

Dear World,

Boy, have things ever changed in the toy-delivery field since I started my career. Remember when people wrote letters to Santa? You didn't expect to get one from me, but here goes ... I need to give you notice of my imminent retirement. I used to deliver a sleigh-full of dolls, teddy bears, train sets, roller skates and pencil sets on every magical Christmas Eve. (Pencils! Can you imagine?) But no more. Gifts have gone electronic. It's all game-boxes now, and fit-bits, gift cards and peculiar little digital devices that fall to the floor and get lost at the bottom of the sleigh.

I used to be able to park right beside the chimney I would be slipping down. Now there are few chimneys left, only “smart heating” and roofs cluttered with solar panels. Last year, one sported a poster saying “REINDEER SLEIGHS EXPLOIT UNGULATES”.

Some houses even have notes on theirs roofs warning “mask is mandatory”. A mask, over a beard like mine?! No one needs a mask if they're already muffled by a deep thicket of white facial hair.

I used to find thoughtful treats like cookies and warm milk waiting for me beside people's hearths, but now everything they leave is stuff I'm scared to eat, like Guatemalan Keto Shark-free Spice Balls, and Dirty-Snowman Vegan Nut-free Kumquat Squares. And whatever happened to a nice cup of tea? Now I find a note advising me there's a Pomegranate Gingerbread Iced Latte in the fridge, or a Jagermeister-Curcumin Espresso Shot in the microwave.

And no one's decently in bed taking their long winter nap while I lurk in their living rooms; they're all hunkered down with smartphones and laptops. I see the light from their digital devices glowing at windows and under doors. Even the kids aren't asleep, dreaming about what might be in their stockings while visions of sugar plums dance in their heads. They're texting their friends from under the covers.

No: Christmas Eve isn't what it was when I started out, apprenticed to Great-grandfather Claus. Nor is the elf staff! Not one knows how to wield a hammer and nail. The North Pole is all immigrants and refugees now and many don't speak English. Some elves are illiterate and can't even write the lists I need, so I can't check them twice. Luckily every kid wants the same thing anyway: digital stuff. High-tech robotic amazon wares. I might as well retire, I'm beginning to feel, and be replaced by a drone. I'm just not as jolly as I used to be. I guess drones do go further and move faster than anything a bunch of reindeer would pull. They're much more efficient ... So, Tallyho-ho-ho, drones!

Still, I can't help thinking something magical is being lost.

Yours truly,

Old Man in a Red Suit

Santa's Workshop is Hiring Seasonal Helpers

HELP WANTED

Santa's Workshop Is Hiring!

Seeking experienced reliable elves for the busy season

Must be available for weekends and overtime

Skilled craftsmen only need apply (this position is not about

building bits of carpentry and painting wood)

Certificates in Electronic Toy-Making, 3-D Printing,

Advanced Digital Design and Robotics are mandatory

(Applications from Robots also considered: we guarantee

equal-opportunity for the artificially intelligent)

HazMat, SafeShop and Group-Thought certification is mandatory

Steel-belled work-boots and tassel-topped helmets are required in the shop

Our workplace encourages neuro-diverse two-spirit applicants

We guarantee non-misgendering allyship with the elven BIPOC community

Dr. Seuss Invents Christmas-Cancel Genre

Christmas Cancelled, 2020

    Dr. Seuss said it would happen, and he was right. It did, although everyone else had thought stealing Christmas was just a horror plot from a kids' book. 

    Dr. Seuss invented Christmas-Cancel lit, featuring as his main protagonist Cancel-Cultural hero The Grinch. Dr. Bonnie-Lou Who saved the day however, by leading the people of What-the-Heck-Happened-Ville in quiet renditions of “Be Safe, Be Calm, Be Kind”. 

    Everyone is encouraged to mask up and stand around a huge tall tree to sing it on Christmas Day. Just don't hold hands.

Is Kid-Lit Too White?

 How long before “systemic racism” comes for children's literature, with its shamelessly sparkly-white characters such as Snow White, Caspar the Ghost, and Frosty the Snowman? Christmas is of course already beyond the pale (if one may use such triggering language) and children's literature has always been a target of censorship, but formerly for reasons of eroticism or fairy-tale gruesomeness. The attack on all things white-suggestive is new.

Comfort-characters such as the shy, polite and kindly Rupert Bear, and T. H. White's “Wart” (boyhood name of King Arthur), are no longer vouchsafed to children, and innocence (“in-nocere”, not-knowing) is equated with silence, which is now considered "violence".

Rupert the cheerful bear-child was once in fact a brown bear, but was made white by editors who wanted him to show up well in illustrations when the Rupert Annual was printed in colour. He set forth each day in his yellow sweater and plaid pants for Nutwood Forest, where he had adventures and Did Good Things. It's surprising there hasn't yet been a march demanding the publisher “Make Rupert Brown Again”. (1)

In T. H. White's youth novel The Once and Future King, Arthur upon becoming king took up nobility as a “glorious doom”. Originally, to be noble meant having a known name, plus character traits like magnanimity and moral excellence. We however are only interested in “inclusion, diversity and equity”, which aren't necessarily magnanimous, moral and excellent. To admit the existence of excellence would be to acknowledge that not everything is equal. Nobility has toxic connotations, today.

No wonder everyone's at loggerheads, adding to what Matthew Arnold in Dover Beach called the confused alarms of “ignorant armies that clash by night”. (2) Some might say that the violence lies in that – manifested as street rallies and online attacks – not in the wise restraint of silence. Only the kindly decency of a simple hero like Rupert could sort it all out -- but we've moved a long way from Nutwood.

1 For the story of Rupert's transformation from brown bear to white, see:

http://www.canterbury-archaeology.org.uk/tourtel/4590809564

2 For Matthew Arnold's poem see https://poets.org/poem/dover-beach

First Day (Never Do Anything By Yourselfie)

First day of the term, and Mom drives you to the University. She wants to meet all your new teachers. She wants to make sure they all have her email address. She drives you up to the main door and says, "Now don't move 'til I get back, don't get lost while I park the car."

She manoeuvres around others parents' vehicles, and then dashes back waving a large bag: "You forgot you lunch!" You enter the building together, crowding in with other students, parents, grandparents, social workers, guardians and counsellors. 

"Is there a 'fridge where you can keep your medication?" Mom asks anxiously. 

First day of kindergarten? No: first day of university. 

Remember the old days when First Year students went to University by themselves? Finally free of adult supervision they could pilot their own educational boat and plot their route through adulthood.

They didn't need counselling because the buildings were big and there were other students they hadn't met before, and they had to find a room on a map and choose a desk to sit at, all without consulting a therapist. They arrived in their own second hand car, bought with money made in summer jobs. Or maybe they arrived by bus, and picked up its schedule because they'd be coming here every day -- by themselves. With parents here, they wouldn't have been seen dead.

Maybe they'd be living in Student Residence -- where Mom had not performed a hygiene-sweep ahead of time. Or maybe they'd still be living at home, but no one would tell them when to get up in the morning and what time their first class was; they just had to know that, as if by magic!

What has happened to independence and growing up? To being "able," instead of fetishizing "disability"? Such nostalgic concepts for those who started University in the 1970s and '80s. High school classmates melted into memory as we left our home river for the big ocean, like human salmon (me, I was entering a Biology program …) Salmon have a juvenile stage and adult stage in their life cycle, but it seems humans have evolved an endless recycling of juvenile stages. (An evolutionary decline?)

For us those first heady days of university were a rocking roll-over from grade school to independence, experienced against the throb of The Stones, Queen, Led Zeppelin. We picked up our course reading lists (we read books back then) and checked out the masses of cute guys who had materialized all around us. 

Today, Mom is here, asking, "where are your anxiety pills? Have you got your smartphone? Have you taken any selfies yet? Here … let me take one of me! Got one! Straight to YouTube! Here, let's take one for your ex-step-father who said he'd be here but of course isn't ..."

"Look at all these cute guys!" adds Mom, and she doesn't mean the 18 year olds; she means other parents. "There's one heading for the Starbucks across the street," she says. "You know what, I should get a double latte to celebrate -- this is such an important day for me! So I'll just pop into that Starbucks -- if you'll be okay on your own for a bit? Have a look around, but don't get lost. I'll be back soon -- text me if you need anything, okay?"

Project Amnesia

Welcome to Trigger Town 

-- but enter at your own risk. You may see a sign, place-name or something colonial that offends, like a statue, library, court house or legislative building. We're doing our best to get rid of them. History is trouble. A noxious weed. Best to re-write it. 

Should the name “Victoria, BC” survive? It commemorates a Victorian monarch, which triggers PTSD for some. Arguably, native Victorians should have their birth certificates changed. (“Place of Birth: FORMER-Victoria”, like "Former-Yugoslavia) The Province is demanding the federal government come up with COVID funding for this (since history too is a nasty virus.)

Trigger Town will eradicate street names so people don't get a shock every time they read Douglas, Tolmie, Blanshard and Finlayson. Few know anything about the character, achievements, education and dedication of these people (history hasn't actually been taught all that much), but they've got to be disappeared.

Since it's safer to forget than understand History, the education system has launched Project Amnesia, to help students come to proper conclusions (i.e., forget about) the values and accomplishments of "settlers" who had put too much emphasis on things like parliamentary democracy, habeas corpus, education and mass literacy. In the school setting, enquiry is dangerous but group-think is safe, less likely to trigger curiosity or independent ideas. Ideas offend. Best to ban them, inclusively.