If this vent is a little too vehement, just blame it on Calypso John...he started it with his current post, "Here Comes Santa Claus."
John says the teachers at his local school in Veracruz are using Santa as an opportunity to teach the kids letter-writing. As in "Dear Santa, for Christmas I want..." Apparently the school's playing the "Santa's real" card to get the little darlings motivated. Imagine how the parents feel when their niños come home and insist Santa's coming.
Here in Northwest Mexico I suspect that kind of chicanery took place a generation ago, for the whole ambience here is the typical US holiday theme, complete with tinsely street decor. Walk into Ley and you'll see Santa, reindeer, snow, sleighbells...all the irrelevant North-centric trimmings that seem to come from another planet when they show up in Mexico. Plus the lights, tinsel and glitter that has come to symbolize the holiday. (Maybe all the glitter is a way of combating the SADD-inducing lack of sunshine experienced in El Norte now, but we've no dearth of the real thing here.) It's all geared to the monumental push to get everybody spending, whether they've got it to spare or not. Of course, theft becomes a correspondingly monumental problem, as the have-nots try even harder to catch up with the haves.
In olden days we had the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the witch-burnings. Now we have "You vill buy and buy and buy, or you vill ruin the economy and the recession vill be all your fault."
"Christmas is all about giving," is the cloying rationale. "Santa is the symbol of the giving spirit." But somehow the qualifying and quantifying come in and twist it all into "Christmas is about giving all the right things to all the right people."
Relegating giving to one season of the year, how tidy. The rest of the year we can limit our generosity to bailouts and golden parachutes. I guess I'd better shut up now, I'm starting to get incoherent. But here's the song that keeps coming to mind for me this season:
"Santa Baby, slip a sable under the tree for me
I've been an awful good girl
Santa Baby, and hurry down the chimney tonight...
Santa Baby, a '54 convertible too,
Light blue. I'll wait up for you, dear...
Santa Baby, one thing I really do need--the deed
to a platinum mine...
Forgot to mention one little thing,
A ring--I don't mean on the phone..."