A Message from Father Christmas

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls of all ages! This is the big white man with the long white beard, and the red jacket; the one who knows whether you are awake or asleep, who knows whether you’ve been good or bad, the one with all the Hoh, Hoh, Hoh’s!  

I’m the one who comes to your home in the night, the one you leave offerings for, milk of the holy cow, and sweet, tasty, morsels of cookie manna from ovens.  You know what I like, and you aim to please me so that I shall reward you in the hereafter-coming year.  That’s right, I’m Santa Clause, most people call me Santa, but just try moving that n to the end.  You can see my Santa Claws.  With just the move of that one letter, my letters transform into the name of that oft disparaged nemesis of the being who’s birth I come to remind you to celebrate!  Satan?  No, I’m Father Christmas.  But you won’t find me in the Bible, nor will you find me in the North Pole. 

Your parents, at some point, will probably fill you in on the fact that I’m not real, if you don’t figure it out for yourself.  But it’s pretty amazing, considering how many pictures there are of me everywhere, or simply how many car commercials I show up in, that so many adults seem to know that I’m not real.  

Well, they tell you I’m not real, but so many of you still leave me milk and cookies, so many of you bring your children to sit in my lap.  What are you trying to do to yourselves?  

Are you trying to train yourselves to believe in a white bearded being who flies through the clouds, surrounded by cherubs, I mean elves, and judges your actions and either punishes you with coal or no presents, or rewards you with stuff? 

I’m just curious.  This is a pretty incredible cultural phenomenon, in case you haven’t noticed.  Just listen to all the Christmas music on the radio, see all those Jesus stories on TV, look at the big Christmas tree in Washington D.C., how about CNN, FOX News, and other news outlets, showing one Christmas related story after another?  Christmas is a Christian Holiday, in case you didn’t know.  Have you noted my remarkable resemblance to Jesus’s father, as depicted by Michelangelo, one of the first images of God in a simple Google search for God? 
Weird, right? 

Now go shopping, I command thee.   

    

 

It's Not the End of the World

         Since Dec. 21st, 2012, is upon us, and since I can’t seem to get away from advertisements for End of the World celebrations in Aspen, I must speak up and defend my consciousness from this assault.  I’m sorry to be the bearer of good news, but I must inform you, despite your highest nihilistic hopes, it’s NOT the end of the world.  Belly Up, our little local music venue, is having an “End of the World Party.”  There are lots of “End of the World” parties on this day of “planetary alignment.”  There are rumors of a “cosmic shift,” or a “radical transformation.” But rumors of some predicted Mayan apocalypse are an insult to our archeological and anthropological education.  The mainstream seems to be missing the information boat, the one carrying the facts, rather than the imaginings.   

         One fact is, the Mayan’s don’t have an apocalyptic cosmology.  We do.  The Mayan astrologers and priests, who created this calendar that we have interpreted as heralding the end of the world on the equivalent day in our own calendar, Dec. 21st, 2012, did not see the end of this particular period of time as being the End Times, but just the beginning of a new B’ak’tun.  A B’ak’tun, it turns out, is approximately 394 of our years long.  20 B’ak’tun’s make a Piktun.  In the equivalent of our calendar year, October, 13th, 4772, (two thousand seven hundred and sixty years from now) 20 B’ak’tun’s will have passed, and the Mayan calendar will go to the next Piktun.  Hopefully we will have reset our own calendar by then, and will have based our new calendar’s start date on something more hopeful than the supposed birth of a nice young man who got crucified for nothing more than speaking his mind.  Either way, you can discern, from these few simple facts, that the Mayans did not plan for the world to end this Friday.   This is not the end of the Mayan calendar, it is the end of one particular measurement tool within the Mayan calendar, and the beginning of another.  

       We have taken a tiny sliver of out-of-context information about an ancient Mesoamerican belief system and filtered it through our conditioned western lens.  As Sandra Noble, director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, stated: “For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle.”  That Dec., 21st, 2012, heralds a doomsday scenario or a cosmic shift, she calls, “a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.”  Unfortunately ideas have power, and our psychology as humans is not so impermeable as to be unaffected by these types of false beliefs.  

         These beliefs, which continue to bombard our consciousness with the idea that a deity is counting the days till “He” comes down and ends everything around us, and either punishes or rewards us individually, for eternity, depending (like Santa Clause) upon whether we’ve been naughty or nice, are not helping us create a better world.  Since our minds have been conditioned for centuries with this idea about the coming apocalypse, about the end times and a judgment day, the collective consciousness of the so called “civilized world” is littered with this thinking.  When another story comes along that fits nicely into this widespread narrative, it is very difficult for even “free thinkers” to tell the true from the false.   

           Every time one of us talks about the coming “cosmic shift,” or the “transformation,” or “the End of the World,” we are actually reinforcing a narrative, which paradoxically serves to prohibit the very “cosmic shift” or “transformation” that we are hoping for.  When we are dealing with an unsustainable economic system, climate change, deforestation, nuclear weapons, nationalism, religious divisions, and other perpetuated ways of thinking that create violence and oppression, it seems normal that humans would hope for a transformation of their thinking that would liberate them from this problematic reality.  But the belief in some external change-maker keeps us psychologically limited, whether consciously or unconsciously, from actually creating the change we hope for.  Will belief in an externally created utopia help motivate us to make real changes which might create a more utopian world?  Or if the end is coming, then what is the point in making the changes we see as necessary around us?  Beliefs in a coming end, or transformation, create a paralyzing layer in our consciousness hindering us from making changes that might help us begin to build a better world.  Next time somebody tells you the end is coming, try telling them that, no, it’s not.  Have a very Merry It’s Not the End of the World Party.