During the past month, people across the western world have banded together to build and sustain a powerful mythical structure. If you could peer down on humanity and see highlighted, like you had infrared glasses, markers of the beliefs that connect us, that are intangible yet exist strongly in our communications and ideas, this time of year you would note a glowing red haze of lore maintained by a sea of good will and snowy pile of white lies. Since I too am a participant in the proliferation of this myth and would be crushed if a young believer who stumbled across this article (despite the opaque title) bit into the Christmas cookie of knowledge because of me, I’ll veil my language: Let’s say I’m speaking of Kringleism.
Kringleism’s structure is constructed of an elaborate, far-reaching, yet shockingly fragile apparatus, because it is built just of words and beliefs. One poorly hidden letter, one stray comment, and all could come crashing down.
Indeed, there can be no slip-ups. Adults, collectively, build Kringleism with incredible elaborateness and downright cunning. Architects, drug dealers, teachers, embezzlers, clerks — adults with all types of belief systems — including that most powerful one, contraryism — work together to avoid disrupting the myth. People you meet on the street have heard sleigh bells. Strangers talk of reindeer prints. Anonymoids describe a pleasant aroma of pipe. They all work together in an unspoken adult pact not to spoil Kringleism.
The media is in on it (and has been for years [1]). When not overtly supporting Kringleism, movies tip-toe around the subject. You have to be watching A Christmas Story [2]with the cold eye of a critic to realize what the dad means when he says on Christmas Eve after the kids go to bed, “Let’s get ‘em.” In Christmas Vacation [3], the bumbling dad vows that presents will be bought (I’m introducing passive voice here on purpose, co-conspirators) for an unfortunate niece, but the topic is dealt with indirectly. Miracle on 34th Street [4] brushes with reality, until we see that cane at the end.
I wondered if that real engine of truth and righteousness, the Web, could be a mounting threat to Kringleism, since our digital natives are only a keystroke away from all truths, but the opposite seems to be happening. For instance, children can now track the grand elf’s journey via the Website of NORAD [5] (and high-achieving parents can throw in some geography lessons).
At some point each child will strive to see through the red haze, usually around nine or ten but a bit earlier for cynics, budding private investigators, or womb-formed pragmatists and somewhat later for the dreamers and idealists. Some day they all will face the inherent flaws in the Kringleistic superstructure, knowing something is amiss. (I myself stubbornly clung to Kringleism, only facing the truth when I found a long-forgotten letter. I was crushed. I may have been 18.)
But as the myth dissipates, kids are willing partners in sustaining it. While they suspect something doesn’t fit, they still act with both an amazing group will and an astonishing individual self-control not to raise the wrong topic, not to ask the question that might bring it all tumbling down. Kringleism lies in the unsaid. Friends tell of children who haven’t mentioned the sacred name in years, as if uttering it would invite dreaded parental honesty. Even when faced with that rotten kid who tries to ruin it all by bursting Kringleism open with the shocking revelation, seen first hand, no doubt, of parental involvement, even then, faced with the words of the meanest kid in the third grade, Kringleism will still linger between children for years.
Of course, some of this willful silence is just street smarts: All things being equal, why challenge Kringleism if it means those presents might disappear too?
Parents will eventually confront the Kringleistic mythos with their children — but never with anyone else’s! — often in the form of a convoluted, stammering speech/performance about how belief itself creates the reality. It’s a strangely comforting idea even as we utter it.
Why do we do all this? Oh, it’s so much fun. It’s so enjoyable to see kids under the influence of Kringleism. And, really, we might not be flying around in a railed winter vehicle, but if the magic is the creation, dissemination, and sustaining of this elaborate myth, then we’re not just play-acting. We, working together, are the transmission of that good will.
The motivation of so many different people to maintain Kringleism shows that despite our clannishness and suspicions that our children can engender a tremendous amount of collective good will. Some of us will never mark the moment when our children challenge Kringleism. One day it will have disappeared, we’ll realize. Others will face an overt question about Kringleism. Some will see this as the opportunity for a reality lesson, but many others will try to articulate that the concept is as real as anything we know, a powerful idea hanging between people in the ether (a la that old affirmation to Virginia [6]), and we’ll explain that that is what supports and sustains Kringleism. We won’t be lying, and we will see that because when they know the truth, these children will believe our explanation so fully that they too will do their part in years to come to build Kringleism.
- Author Bio [7]
- Latest Posts [8]
[9]Scott Warnock [10]
[9]Latest posts by Scott Warnock (Posts [11])
- An Eagle’s farewell: Nothing artificial about it [12] - March 29, 2024
- Friends of all ages [13] - March 6, 2024
- AI overlord inevitability?: My fantasy team says no [14] - January 19, 2024
- Three-volley salute–and fathers and sons [15] - December 18, 2023
- Trains do not keep a rollin’ [16] - October 21, 2023