Image by Chris Duglosz on Flickr

Father Christmas has built his reputation on geniality. He is seen as a sage old man who is quite magical and extremely generous. But there’s a darker side to Santa Claus. He can also be vindictive, because he keeps a naughty list as well as a nice list. This is insidiously divisive – it is segregation based on behaviour. Imagine if teachers did this in schools? (er…. – Editor)

If you’re on the naughty list – and I suspect you are, if you read this blog regularly – then your goose is cooked. You have already been excluded from the right to have fun by an ageing white male oligarch who feels entitled to discriminate against people based on illicit surveillance of their behaviour across an entire calendar year. Then he ‘punishes’ that behaviour at the end of each year by deliberately failing to deliver on his contractual obligation. Clearly his behaviour is both paternalistic and oppressive (You’re joking, right? – Editor). But it gets worse. Creepily, he knows when children are sleeping and when they are awake, and can break into people’s homes with alacrity. He’s been getting away with it for years.

Santa’s track record on the biased treatment of clientele extends to those who are less able to defend themselves, including quadrupeds such as the Boreal Woodland Caribou known as rangifer tarandus. Rudolf, the reindeer who was slightly different to all the other reindeer, was excluded from Santa’s A-team. His omission, based solely on his facial appearance, caused all the other reindeer to despise and victimise Rudolf. They indulged in verbal abuse and ridicule, and Rudolf was consistently excluded from their leisure activities. It’s a testament to the character of the young reindeer that he didn’t take legal action (This is satire, yes? – Editor).

Such systematic abuse goes to show that if an influential leader publicly expresses dislike of minority groupings, the general population believes it has a licence to also do some hating. It was only one Christmas Eve, when Santa was about to embark on a transglobal flight, and was informed by air traffic control of deteriorating atmospheric visibility, that he decided, purely for health and safety reasons to press the ethnic minority member of his team into service. But some might argue this was merely a cynical, tokenistic compliance with diversity and inclusion policies (Good grief, you’re serious about this, aren’t you? – Editor).

This is why I’m calling for a universal boycott of laying out mince pies and brandy on Christmas Eve (What?? – Editor). Santa has done nothing to deserve them, and should be sanctioned by his clients. Continuing to leave treats out for him simply serves to legitimise his bigoted treatment of children and systematic abuse of animals. But please, do continue to leave a carrot or two out for the reindeer. Such exploited animals deserve some recompense for all their hard work especially as they’re engaged in forced labour with no remuneration in (Stop there. This is like standing in front of a blast furnace. Your anger is incandescent. Any chance you might lighten up a little for Christmas? You know – peace and goodwill to all….? – Editor).

Hmm. OK. Merry Christmas everyone – remember the reason for the season, and try to treat each other kindly.

Next time: 30: Custer’s penultimate stand

Previous posts in the #TwistedTropes series
1. Pavlov’s drooling dog
2. Chekhov’s smoking gun
3. Occam’s bloody razor
4. Schrödinger’s undead cat
5. Pandora’s closed box
6. Frankenstein’s well-meaning monster
7. Thor’s lost hammer
8. Noah’s character ark
9. Hobson’s multiple choice
10. Fibonacci’s annoying sequence
11. Plato’s empty cave
12. Dante’s lukewarm inferno
13. Sod’s unlucky law
14. Aladdin’s miserly lamp
15. Batman’s tangled cape
16. Cupid’s bent arrow
17. Fermat’s dodgy last theorem
18. Moore’s obsolete law
19. Lucifer’s idiotic fall
20. Adam’s poisoned apple
21. Hadrian’s busted wall
22. Montezuma’s terrible revenge
23. Dale’s shameful cone
24. Maslow’s awkward hierarchy
25. Schindler’s shopping list
26. Whistler’s angry mother
27. Washington’s wooden teeth
28. Noah’s necessary whale

Santa’s marginalised reindeer by Steve Wheeler was written at the North Pole and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.