The big news at Wal-Mart as the year ends is that Christmas
sales aren’t so hot. In contrast, things aren’t so bad at the more
ritzy stores where those who got the biggest tax cuts go to shop.
Here’s how it looked at the top of the shopping scene in a recent
business article in the New York Times: “As the
silver-lined elevator at Bergdorf Goodman lifted the woman with the
carefully manicured hair to the couture level on Thursday
afternoon, she spoke into her cellphone: ‘I’ve finished shopping —
almost,’ she said, looking down at her bags. ‘No, not a van. I
think a Town Car will be quite big enough, thank you.’”
That’s a different picture from someone with a truck outside of
Wal-Mart. To get things moving at the world’s largest retailer,
Wal-Mart’s execs have announced that there’ll be even bigger
discounts on those Chinese reindeer, the yard ones made out of wire
with the white lights.
My lights didn’t work this year, and the reindeer are only a
year old. That’s the trade deficit. They make junk, cheaper than
American products, and we send them the money. Then the stuff
doesn’t work and we send them more money. In 2002, Wal-Mart sent
some $12 billion to China for imported merchandise, the same year
Beijing was working overtime to beef up its weapons of mass
destruction program and export the technology to Iran, Pakistan,
and Libya.
Anyway, back to my reindeer. On one, only the head and antlers
would light up, and only three legs and a tail on another. Not one
of the five lit up from head to toe. So after cursing out the
commies and saying a string of words inappropriate to a religious
holiday, I kicked the whole damn bunch up to the end of the
driveway, so some lucky soul could light up his whole front yard
for just the price of some re-stringing.
The funny thing about deer this time of year is the 1984 Supreme
Court ruling known as the “plastic reindeer rule,” which said that
religious displays on public property might be okay if enough
secular stuff is tossed in, like a blinking Frosty or a plastic
Santa or Rudolph. The goofy thing about that ruling is that Santa
and Rudolph are up to their necks in religion. Rudolph is pulling
Santa who’s really the fourth century bishop of Myra, Nicholas, a
Christian saint, and, more explicitly, the patron saint of Russia,
wolves, shopkeepers, sailors, bakers, and pawnbrokers.
A young Nicholas, according to legend, traveled to Palestine and
Egypt and was imprisoned by Emperor Diocletian. Later released by
Emperor Constantine, Nicholas showed his devotion and appreciation
to God through extraordinary generosity, giving anonymous donations
of gold coins to the poor. In one story, a father is too poor to
provide a dowry for his three daughters. In the morning, each of
the daughters finds a bag of gold that had been dropped down the
chimney into their stockings which had been hung to dry.
The chubby figure in white fur and a red suit came much later,
some three centuries after Columbus named a Haitian port after St.
Nicholas, by way of a poem written in 1823, “A Visit from St.
Nicholas,” now better know as “The Night Before Christmas.” He was
“dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot, and his clothes
were all tarnished with ashes and soot; a bundle of toys he had
flung on his back.” The “beard of his chin was as white as the
snow” and he had “a broad face and a little round belly, that
shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.”
Supreme Court or not, it was never easy sledding for Santa
Claus. During the Reformation, the magistrates in Amsterdam
attempted to stamp out St. Nicholas and take the “fables of the
papacy out of the youth’s heads.” Seeing too much action on the
street, they declared that “on Saint Nicholas Eve no persons,
whoever they may be, are to be allowed on the Dam or any other
places or streets within this town with any kind of candy,
eatables, or other merchandise.”
Well, now he’s allowed back, even judicially encouraged, but
only in plastic, and only if we forget the real story and stick him
in the same bag as Frosty.
