All Christmas is, the one with the Santa Claus dropping mysterious packages into homes and running off before coffee-stained guards have a chance to ask "Whose bag is this?", is a way for people to get together and suppress the minorities in a way that makes it feel inclusive.
If you're not with the Big Red, you're better off dead.
But that's the surface level news story. The one about the school no longer having a parade of children sitting on an old fat man's lap while his workers' union is out in the back slaving away doing deals to lessen the import tariffs on toys and choking hazards streaming in from China. Or the one about the lone parent who shuts down the Christmas Santa-posed parade because it doesn't respect their (non-)beliefs.
Skimming the cream off, it's a clear ask to have their voice, religion or culture seem to be wanted, included, in the party. Most of the time it ends up with the other parents staking out with rocks and hubcaps, ready to take down this selfish mad scientist by any means necessary. The Suffragettes may come and go but never waiver the community shaken up by those in their midst of anti-Clausers.
How dare they bring their miserable mung beans into the commercialised aspects of parading around credit card debt and year-long held threats? But truth is not following a lactose-tolerant service worker.
Every year it cries out like Bambi at her mother's dirt patch. Every year it washes away.
Santa Claus represents the times. Once a man going about dropping boxes full of kebabs. Then soft drinks laced with cocaine. He's now ever more in line with the watchful eye of the government. Keeping a list of names under surveillance. Charging down for a union-free workforce. Covering everything in red as he violates countless no-fly-zones.
Protesting Santa Claus then is really protesting the big man, the government intrusion in and on our lives. Always listening in. Always there ready to jackboot their way into your living room. Always there to put the red scare in you.
It's easier, safer, to pocket protest the jolly obese one in red that drops a load every December than it is to speak out overtly against the invasiveness of wiretapping, meta data retention and all that harassment of civil rights.
Either follow the script and toe the line of fealty, or leave the block and your liberty.
Written on Sunday, 20 December 2015