It's almost December. In or around December every year, Christian Western culture changes. The anticipation of Christmas makes many of us do funny things. We don ugly sweaters, drink an unbelievably heavy beverage made with raw eggs, and subject ourselves to the saccharinity of songs such as “Christmas Shoes.”
And, of course, there are the movies. An entire subgenre of film that both celebrates and exploits the mythology that surrounds this one important day. Some movies are classics, (“Miracle on 34th Street,” “It’s A Wonderful Life”) others are kitschy but fun (“The Santa Clause,” “Elf”) and many are downright offensive (allegedly, there’s a “Christmas Shoes” movie).
Any decent Christmas movie has some kind of magic. Whether that magic consists of ghosts, an express train or just plain-old love, Christmas challenges the rationalist way we tend to think for the rest of the year. At the best of times, I can put aside my anti-consumerist critiques and accept how Christmas magic just makes everything OK. Christmas magic is the biggest cliché on earth. Nothing could be gaudier than a children’s choir singing about angels in the background of a Lifetime movie. And yet, social rituals are the closest thing to magic that we have. It’s amazing to have a society where many people put a tree inside their house and listen to the same music for a month. It’s even more amazing that I love this shit. I enjoy seeing dogs dressed up as reindeers, looking at blinding neon lights and drinking peppermint lattes.
But I don’t know anyone who loves Christmas more than my sister. Amanda wears reindeer socks in July, and watches “Holiday in Handcuffs” and “Christmas with the Kranks” in August. Most importantly, my sister genuinely and unironically believes in Santa Claus. Several years ago, my mother and I decided to break the “truth” to Amanda. We tried, time after time, to empirically prove to Amanda that there is no man who lives at the North Pole and delivers presents across the world on every Christmas Eve. But our rationalism never took hold. She was (and is) too deep into the Christmas mythology to ever change her mind.
Religion is strange, as an academic subject. The secularization of knowledge prevents scholars from openly buying into any religious dogma. Rather, academics have to talk about religion in conditional phrases, outsider language. And there’s a funny thing that secular liberal education does to disarm radical or anti-rationalist ideology. Consider my friend, who believes in ghosts. She once told me that it isn’t that she just interprets something as a ghost which someone else interprets otherwise. She actually believes in ghosts. School will often trick us into thinking that there’s an objective reality that we each interpret and signify differently. As if one culture’s alchemy is another person’s chemistry. Of course, for our academic culture, alchemy is the wacky, outdated ancestor of legitimate science.
Unlike my sister, my thoughts have been really, really expensive. As I approach the end of my seventh semester at Bowdoin, I’ve undertaken hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of education. As I mentioned in an earlier article (“Intellectual privilege, money and harmful exclusivity at elite institutions”), Amanda could never have that privilege. As a woman with Down syndrome, she’ll never attend an institution like Bowdoin, and never develop the critical skills to investigate Truth. But despite the capital that’s been funneled into my brain, I don’t have a monopoly on saying what exists. I can speculate, but I know literally nothing about how it feels to be someone else. Instead of using my education to try to find objective truths, I should learn to accept other realities.
I’m afraid that I’m falling into a trap. By writing this article, I am using critical inquiry to justify someone else’s belief. I’m mansplaining to my own sister why her favorite cultural narrative is not just an illusion. But as long as I have the privilege of intellectual authority, I might as well give it up.
So yes, Amanda, there is a Santa Claus—but you didn’t need to be told.