There’s no right or wrong if it’s all a myth

We need to get our lies straight if we ever want to pull this off again. Firstly, if you’re 10 years of age or less, and you’re reading this, then you should stop right now. Actually, if you’re in that age range and a reader of these fine columns, then congratulations: I salute you. But I need to warn you there are potential spoilers ahead about a certain Christmas-related story. I recommend you get Mum or Dad to read it, and then discuss it further before you continue.

OK, for decades we have been complicit in a terribly performed conspiracy. This was no smoothly executed fake-out, like the moon landing: nope, over the years Santa has had bad breath, or booze breath, or nicotine stains on his index finger and thumb. Sometimes he needed glasses, and sometimes he didn’t. His weight fluctuated. The underlying structure of his face changed: long face, round face, pointy nose, flat nose. His cheeks were often, but not always, full of burst capillaries. Maybe his skin colour didn’t match the broadly distributed illustrations in popular media, or even last year’s skin colour. Strange little details were amiss.

Fortunately kids – much like adults – ignore slight but irreconcilable inconsistencies to cling to commonly held beliefs. That is how Santa survived all these years.

But then everything changed forever in the Christmas Matrix.

I know the Nelson Santa Parade organisers have apologised for the non-conventional, nonPa¯ keha¯ appearance of their Santa this year after what appears to have been a severe backlash. But their push to include a bicultural take on the Christmas guy was a suicide mission from the start. You don’t need to be a nerd like me to know that you don’t mess with cosplay. You either have Darth Vader, or you have Captain Picard. You don’t have Vader deep-breathing ‘‘make it so’’ into a tricorder.

Because, let’s face it, Santa Claus is supernatural genre fiction. You find him in the children’s section of the library next to Moomins and giant peaches. Adding to the weirdness of it all, it’s as if the grown-ups then decided to try to convince kids that this particular storybook is real. Super-intelligent spiders? Yup kids, Charlotte’s Web actually started as a true crime podcast.

To be fair, I think most of the angry backlash came from people who were exposed as participants in the ongoing lie, blown wide open on the street’s of the country’s sunniest city. I’m not judging here – my daughter was a believer in Santa too. Now she’s a little older, I assume she stopped believing, but we don’t talk about it out of politeness. It’s embarrassing for all concerned.

I was never much of a believer in Santa myself as a kid, so I wasn’t interested in making him seem real. But even so, I allowed myself to become part of the lie. It is this passivity that has been one of my central moral failings in life. At some point, I hope she realised it was just a bit of fun.

Anyway, I like to believe that most of these upset people don’t care whether Santa has brown skin or white skin or any other characteristics, or even gender, as long as the costume generally matches up. Just for God’s sake don’t make them look like the liars they are in front of their kids.

But then there were the others – the anti-PC grinches; the pompous idiots who raged against the idea of having a bicultural approach to Christmas. The keep-Santa-pale brigade who see Hana Ko¯ ko¯ as a brown-skinned outrage. Truth is crumbling. European culture is being appropriated by Ma¯ oris!

Seriously, if this is your treasured culture, then your culture is lame. Or rather, your culture is simply pop culture. Santa was, and is, just another bit of shared, ongoing corporatised fiction, like James Bond, or the Briscoes Lady.

With this in mind, we should perhaps fight to take Santa back. We could hew more closely to what I assume are the reasons most people joined the fiction in the first place. Remember: we presumably just wanted to give our kids a few years of magic and wonder, before cold, hard reality kicked in. It was about generosity.

Maybe empires are crumbling. I guess we’re just in that difficult transition period where we move from Classic Pa¯ keha¯ Santa to a world where Santa can potentially look like anyone. (Heck, I see Dr Who is now a woman, which seems just fine to me.)

The key to avoiding any problems in the future is to let our kids know the truth that good people come in all shapes and sizes and colours. The important thing is what Santa represents.

So like I said, if we can all just get our lies lined up, then we can move on together.

Seriously, if this is your treasured culture, then your culture is lame.