Santaland Challenge!
Dec. 19th, 2007 09:34 amSo this morning, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shaenie emailed me a long series of photos of small children wailing and screaming on the laps of mall Santas. Now, I'm not a particularly grinchy person, but Christmas isn't part of my cultural heritage, so a lot of the secular commercial traditions around it look kind of bizarre to me. Around the time I was sending her this --
So whether you're roadblocked on your holiday challenge fics, or regretting a little that you didn't join any fests, or just bored and in need of something to write today, consider this your chance to have a good laugh off the current cultural marketing frenzy. I will probably never again issue any kind of holiday-related challenge, and if you're in the U.S., or anywhere where the commercial traditions are similar, then we all have approximately 234,529 retail store and airport terminal renditions of Christmas classics to weather between now and next Wednesday.
So, love it or hate it, let's get some grins going at Santa's expense.
shaenie emailed me a long series of photos of small children wailing and screaming on the laps of mall Santas. Now, I'm not a particularly grinchy person, but Christmas isn't part of my cultural heritage, so a lot of the secular commercial traditions around it look kind of bizarre to me. Around the time I was sending her this --I wonder if ex-Santas get together and swap war stories. "Christmas of '87, god, there was this cold going around -- end of every shift, I swear, the beard was just glued stiff with snot." "My first day on the job, a two-year-old clocked me one right in the eye. I had to borrow the elf helper chick's coverup so the bruises wouldn't show in the pictures." "This year four kids peed on me in one day. FOUR." "... Okay. You win."-- I realized something. You know what I would love to see? The Santaland Diaries, by way of everyone's favorite fandoms. Because as someone who has never been to meet mall Santa, and whose strange fascination with the phenomenon cannot overcome her intense aversion to malls, I would love to see the characters of your choosing getting paid to enact the public Christmas myth of your choice. And my interpretation is pretty broad here -- bring on your actors in mangers, your Sinterklaases and Zwarte Piets, your poor costumed stiffs in the Walt Disney World Christmas Day Parade ... hell, if there are big commercial Hanukkah or Kwanzaa events I don't know about, or other timely cultural holidays I'm too much of an ignorant Philistine to be familiar with? Bring those on too. Original characters and true stories are also welcome.
So whether you're roadblocked on your holiday challenge fics, or regretting a little that you didn't join any fests, or just bored and in need of something to write today, consider this your chance to have a good laugh off the current cultural marketing frenzy. I will probably never again issue any kind of holiday-related challenge, and if you're in the U.S., or anywhere where the commercial traditions are similar, then we all have approximately 234,529 retail store and airport terminal renditions of Christmas classics to weather between now and next Wednesday.
So, love it or hate it, let's get some grins going at Santa's expense.
