My ideal "Santa-at-Work" genre story (AKA: "Oh, no! Christmas Itself is endangered!)

Yesterday I wrote about how I kinda want to write a "Santa Claus"/Christmas story, because "The Big Winter-Gift-Giver" is one of my all time favorite para-mythical beings, but how I am put off by some of the fundamental tropes of the genre:

1) Naughty / Nice dichotomy. That's comforting, perhaps, to children who are privileged enough that they can expect to receive fun presents on a yearly basis. But if you're not privileged enough to have that expectation, it carries the subtext that both wealth and poverty are morally deserved.

2) The "You've got to Believe in "Santa" before he'll bring you any presents: I.E. skepticism/disbelief is "naughty."

So that's where I left off. There's a third peeve that I didn't get to before falling asleep at my keyboard:

3) That a Happy Ending = "Big Shiny (fancy-complex) Thing to own"

So, I got to thinking about how I would/could subvert some, or all, of those (at least one would be dandy:

1) Redefine the boundaries of "Naughty" vs. "Nice": Has nothing to do with whether you get good or bad grades in school, do or don't talk back to your parents, Shout, or cry, or pout, or scribble on the walls in purple crayon. Has everything to do with whether you bully others, or deliberately try to squelch their spirit and sense of fun.

2) Easy enough to have the skeptical kid get a present, anyway. Doesn't even matter if the kid comes to believe in Santa (elves) at the end. The Winter-Gift-Giver doesn't need to make that kind of demand.

3) This one is harder -- but what if the "Gift" that the underprivileged kid gets is a 'gift' in the sense of 'newly discovered talent or strength'?

My musical "Winter Holiday/New Year's" Card for my circles of friends

I haven't gotten around to writing a new holiday song, yet... but I did, just now, finish making a video of a song I wrote a while back, and recently tweaked.

Yes, I know that for the southern half of the planet New Year comes in the summer. I'm a northerner, and I originally wrote this as a Secret Santa present for another northerner back in '06. My antipodean friends are welcome to change those lines around to suit the circs.

Anyway, the image at 2:55 is of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm listening to a story from Dorothea Viehmann -- who was the actual source for a great many of the stories in their collection, and incidentally, the woman Wilhelm would eventually marry (he's the one leaning forward in his seat, hanging on her every word). ...I love the chickens wandering in and out... Anyway, I included that illustration specifically because this December is the 200th anniversary of the first edition of their first volume of "Children's and Household Tales," and figured they deserved a tip of the hat.

Here's a link to the Wikisource page that has the illustration and text of the article that went with it: http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Die_Br%C3%BCder_Grimm_bei_der_M%C3%A4rchenerz%C3%A4hlerin

Also: Achievement unlocked! I managed to get the closed captioning track done right in the first try. \o/ (It really is a lot easier if you don't bother counting the fractions of seconds).