Santa Claus is completely out of touch

Santa clearly advocates the murder of innocent animals and the pilfering of their skins for his own adornment. This is outrageous in any civilised society. How PETA could have ignored this for so long is beyond me.

Forget the celebrity nudie posters PETA and get back to some good old-fashioned picketing of Santa’s Grotto I say!

Every year hundreds of thousands of seal pups are clubbed to death in Canada and shipped to the North Pole just so the fat man can look “Christmassy”. It’s appalling.

As for work practices, the outrage continues.

Here we are (as paragons of virtue) worrying about ensuring our workers are entitled to penalty rates should they be required to work on Christmas Day while Santa shamelessly exploits the vertically challenged, forcing elves into non-union labour conditions similar to Third World countries. 

Those of you who thought Work Choices was dodgy hang your heads in shame. 

There are no penalty rates for your average elf you know.

Christmas Day is, in fact, the only day the poor bastards get off and even then they are on-call in case there are technical problems with the sleigh or an administrative error in allocating presents to the kiddies.

A decent days work for a decent days pay is a basic right of the elf proletariat and it is about time it was enforced. But Santa is a cunning disseminator of disinformation. A lot of people don’t even think elves exist – does the man’s ruthlessness know no bounds?

And if the workers are relegated to second-class citizens then it is even worse for the advancement of women’s’ rights.

Santa is quite happy to have Mrs Claus shackled to her cold, isolated home, bogged down in patriarchal oppression and never fulfilling her potential. Who knows what brilliant career she had to give up in order to support him in the “early years”.

Does she get a say in anything? Of course not! I suspect that when it comes to suffrage poor old Mrs Claus continues to suffer. 

It’s hardly surprising though when you consider how little effort Santa puts in to looking after himself.

Apparently unaware of good nutrition and the need for an exercise regimen, he is not only grossly overweight but also has rosy cheeks (a sure sign of an alcohol problem or hypertension). 

He ignores smoking bans everywhere (still regularly seen puffing away on his pipe) and is clearly in denial about his toxic lifestyle insisting that he is always jolly and happy.

He can’t even get past two houses without wolfing down a glass of milk or can of beer and as many Christmas tarts or cookies as he can get his chubby little fingers on. Does that sound like a happy person?

His influence is insidious and all encompassing. Like Homeland Security in the USA, Santa Claus keeps a list of everyone who has been acting in accordance with his wishes.

He lectures us on the importance of knowing the difference between bad and good yet every year he breaks into the homes of innocent people and vandalizes them by littering them with boxes and paper.

In order to do so he exploits rare flying reindeer as a mode of transportation, forcing them to travel around the entire world in just one night!

His coming is used as a tool of parental control, and he encourages greed among children. Fulfilling his own middle class guilt (perhaps just a pawn of the media-driven toy dynasty), he hands out toys, encouraging a dependency on the false comforts of a materialistic world.

Above all, he’s a white male. Need we say more?

The Opposing Argument

But then there is the flip side. Here we have, in the persona of Santa Clause, an active person who defies ageist stereotypes.

No mandatory retirement age for Santa nor the faux activeness of his pensioner contemporaries travelling up and down the country in campervans lamenting the demise of the good old days. 

He is hundreds of years old but still puts in a full days work with the sort of energy that would put the most enthusiastic Gen Y person to shame.

Not only that but his work is labour intensive and he is a producer – he actually makes stuff rather than sit in an ivory tower shuffling paper on a salary 200 times higher than that of his lowliest elf.

On the personal front, Santa has comes to terms with his own body image and doesn’t judge others concerning theirs. He wholeheartedly embraces his extra kilos but at the same time doesn’t consider his own example to be one that should be championed or universally followed. Y

You will never see him on Oprah telling us “fat is all that” nor will you see him crying to Dr. Phil about how he was always picked on as the “chubby kid”. 

Santa is someone who actually goes out of his way to judge everyone else on his or her merits.

There is no generalisation of naughty and nice and despite the fact that he has been subjected to endless stereotyping himself Santa refrains from stereotyping anyone else.

Santa accepts you for who you are. 

He is a champion of the individual and yet he is also one of the world’s major contributors to a sense of community.
He is a staunch conservationist and takes environmental protection so seriously that the entire area around his North Pole home has remained pristine to the point where you can’t actually see where his home begins and the North Pole ends.

He is environmentally friendly, conserving energy driving a non-gasoline-powered vehicle – an example we have all steadfastly ignored. He gives without expecting anything in return and, best of all; he gives without regard to race, creed, colour or national origin. 

All of this without once having to resort to Government funding. 

The problem for poor old Santa is that, either way, there just doesn’t seem to be any place for him in the modern world.

The left see him as an outdated, sexist, apologist for rampant capitalism and the right as an obese, leering alcoholic with a thinly veiled communist agenda.

The rest of us wonder whatever happened to the jolly and kindly hero of our youth and who exactly thought it was a good idea to kill the happiest time of the year.