December 22, 2021
-by Frank Macdonald
Who’s been naughty?
I remember when December had an overpowering effect on people fortunate enough to believe in Santa, the bookkeeper of which boys and girls had been naughty or nice. It was a book that had very real childhood rewards and punishments: toys or no toys.
Once a year, Christmas turned up on the last page of the calendar. It was a month of best behaviour. Parents, aside from daily tripping over the toy section of the Eaton’s catalogue, could hardly believe that those little hellions to whom they had given birth had transformed themselves into young ladies and gentlemen.
Teachers, too, got to teach the A-B-Cs and the 1-2-3s without spending half their class time threatening the back seat occupants with a two-inch-wide, one-foot-long strip of stinging rubber.
It was, as so many Christmas cards proclaimed, a period of Peace on Earth.
The Baby Jesus (whose birthday party Christmas actually was…is) gets a lot of credit for the epidemic of saintliness that swept over childhood every December.
But in a 10-year-old’s theological thinking about The Christmas Story, Santa Claus also got marquee billing. Generally speaking, he got the lion’s share of credit for December’s drought of naughtiness, the month’s quantum increase in niceness.
Santa Claus was a flawed Christmas character. He was old, for one thing. He was unhealthily overweight. He ate far too many cookies on Christmas Eve, and after every feed of milk and sweets he would light his pipe. But he was jolly, loved children, and employed in his toy shop scores of elves that no one else would trust or hire.
What led to this make-work project was Santa Claus’s reading of the New Testament. Or maybe it was Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Whatever his source, what stuck in his craw about that Silent Night, Holy Night, wasn’t the shepherds and their gift of a newborn lamb for the newborn lad, nor the choir of angels whose singing kept the kid awake. It was the Magi.
Scripture tell us that the three kings arrived at the manger a few days late, but any child who examined a manger scene (whether in their own living room, in a neighbour’s yard, inside a church), could see the error of the Bible’s telling.
It was obvious that the Magi were also on site for the celebrated birth. In every manger scene the three of them are always crowded into the barn with the Mary and Joseph and the Baby Jesus, with the shepherds and cows and other animals whose breath warmed the youngster on this cold winter’s night in Bethlehem.
What Santa Claus (a.k.a. Old Saint Nick) saw were the gifts of the Magi!
“For all their reputed wisdom, how little the Magi know about the magic of childhood,” Santa muttered, thinking he could do the child in Bethlehem better, supposing he had to move to the North Pole for enough peace and quiet to work out his annual plan. “Frankincense and myrrh, indeed! Just what every kid needs! Those use men might as well have given him more homework! Ho! Ho! Ho!” And production began on trains and hockey games and dolls and sleighs and…well, the whole of Eaton’s and Simpson’s catalogues.
While our letters to Santa (and not to the Magi) made their way North, there was shopping we needed to do ourselves for friends, seat-mates and family.
Inverness didn’t have a lot of shopping malls at that time, not many more than there are today, actually, but it did have stores.
The Shean Co-op, at 85 this year, seems almost as old as Santa himself. During those earlier Christmases though, the store didn’t carry all that much frankincense or myrrh. Or gold, for that matter. It did stock up on oranges and ribbon candy and other Christmas booty for kids to find on Christmas morning. Mattie’s Rexall and Freeman’s Pharmacy had gifts for your parents. Evelyn Cameron’s elegant store carried china cups to buy as gifts for our teachers.
Once children had been paroled form school for a week or so to play with their Christmas gifts, and everyone’s shopping and wrapping had been finished, it was suddenly The Night Before Christmas, the night upon which children were stricken with a restless bout of insomnia.
It wasn’t what was under the tree we worried about as much as what was in our stockings and hockey socks. The world over, the kids on Santa’s naughty list expected to wake up to that proverbial lump of coal in a Christmas stocking. But it was no joke here in Inverness. The town had tens of tons of coal lying around, enough to stuff the toes of every stocking hung by the chimney with care. Kids growing up in coal towns didn’t worry about frankincense and myrrh as much as they did about their mothers cooking the Christmas turkey with the coal from their stockings.
Eventually, sleep would come, and so would Santa, the world’s busiest chimneysweep; Santa, who always seemed to misplace his Naughty List every Christmas Eve and tried to treat every child as though he or she had just been born in Bethlehem.
But there were no camels clattering around on the roof, no smell of frankincense or myrrh. Just a huffing, puffing, bearded old man who understood what he would have brought to the Christ Child on that first Christmas night. Toys! Lots of toys! Batteries included!
And then the reindeer making their departure towards another house, another feed of cookies and milk, and children half-waking to the sound of HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD-NIGHT!
Merry Christmas, all!
