Hello fellow workers and a frozen seasons greetings to you from the great white north. I’m sitting watching the fat flakes fall from the sky and dulling my doom and dread with copious helpings of eggnog and Harry Belafonte. This time of year anarchists and leftists like to use the holidays opportunistically to reframe the popular symbols in ways that benefit our causes. You know, like “Santa is actually the boss and the elves should organize a union!” or “Yule was actually about poor people going door to door demanding presents from their rich neighbors.” So in the spirit of the season, I will now reframe Christmas for my own cause. The cause of CLAUSMAS.
Santa Claus is real.
Wait, ok, I know what you’re thinking. “Gonzo Wobbly is just going to give us his drug-addled version of ‘Santa Claus is an amanita mushroom and trippy trippy trip blah blah blah.’” No I’m not. This is the only place you are going to get this deep knowledge about Christmas.
First of all this holiday has nothing to do with Jesus Christ, who is a whole nother subject, suffice to say he’s just another leftist trying to reframe the holiday for his cause (read: birthday), no this is why I have decided to rename the holiday Clausmas, because this is the time of year when the real fucking entity known as Santa Claus comes out of the north pole and does his fucking thing.
So I’m guessing, fellow worker, that you don’t believe in Santa Claus. That’s okay. Most workers don’t. It’s a thing. Let me ask you to remember that time in your childhood when you found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real. (Fellow worker, if your childhood never involved a heartfelt belief in the existence of the immortal being known as Santa Claus please indulge me in this thought experiment as I’m sure you have some sort of prior knowledge of the phenomenon and will be able to get the joke.)
Back in the day before you were a worker, before you joined the IWW, you were a child and you believed in Santa. How did you do this? I don’t fucking know, but you did. You believed and you got presents. Then you began to wonder, maybe you heard dark rumors that it was all a hoax, a conspiracy of adults. But really? Could they all be in on it? Maybe you denounced the rumors and stood up for Santa. Maybe not. But sooner or later your world had to come crashing down, like everybody else’s. There was a fucking conspiracy of adults. They were all involved in an elaborate deception and you TRUSTED those motherfuckers with your whole heart. This is a high caliber betrayal that is encoded into our culture as a sort of rite of passage. An informal and yet near ubiquitous cultural ritual of leaving childhood behind. “No, there is no Santa,” your parents finally told you after you confronted them. Which of course sends shockwaves through your psyche altering all your beliefs. I mean a moment ago magic was real, immortals existed and adults never engaged in enormous conspiracies to make sure you lived in a false reality. Now what? I mean, the first question on my lips (and I’m sure a lot of other kids’) was “What about Jesus and the Easter Bunny?” To which the adults reply: “Jesus yes (or maybe), Easter Bunny no.” I mean, fuck! What a raw deal! Of the three, every kid would much rather have Jesus be the fake one. I know I’m generalizing a lot of experiences based on my own, but bear with me. I promise this is for fun.
What can we learn from this initial core of the biggest holiday of the year? The core is one of lies and cynicism. I think it explains a lot about our society without having to invoke images of Santa the slave driver versus the elf union, or scoffing at Santa as a cola mascot of capitalism. We can see these evil portrayals of Santa are manifestations of a deep sense of hurt caused by this early betrayal of our developing psyches. I believe this pain lives on in a huge amount of people and influences them in multiple unseen ways besides a general lack of trust, propensity for belief in conspiracy theories, and hostility towards the existence of magic.
I mean for fuck’s sake, are we collectively destroying the north pole because we subconsciously crave revenge on its non-existent inhabitant?
Ok that was the punch line of act one. Act two is about to dive into the distant past and see where this ancient tradition actually comes from according to yours truly.
Human beings are a fucking remarkable species despite whatever vain misanthropic nihilism is in vogue. I mean how self-centered does one have to be to think that just because one’s own self is a piece of shit then the whole species is worthless? Humanity has survived so many fucking ice ages. And you know what’s crazy about ice ages is they last for fucking ever. And the luxurious times? Like right now? They’re fucking short.
You drill down in the ice cores and you see these long stretches of ice with tiny little warm times. You know, warm times, good times, where you can get drunk on a beach and go surfing or whatever. But you know what else is a luxury? War.
I mean let’s face it fellow worker, war is one of the most popular activities on the planet right now. Don’t get me wrong I know that the bourgeoisie likes to use it as a way to divide the international working class against itself, but I mean, I bet sometimes you fantasize about going off to fight with the YPG or something like that. I mean if not, that’s pretty fucking sane of you, but you gotta admit, war is popular.
But in an ice age you can’t have war. You can’t have anything other than one thing. That thing is Christmas-- I mean Clausmas-- every fucking day.
Let’s boil it down. What is Christmas? If we just look at behaviour it is a time of year where people gather together with their loved ones, people are generally more forgiving and understanding. There is a desire to start a new year with a clean slate. People gather around fires to tell stories. People make the best of the shittiest part of the year. They eat together (traditionally meat). They hold a special reverence for light and warmth, both literally and metaphorically. And they share. They give gifts.
These are the things that are the foundation of human society in an ice age. In two words: instinctual communism. During the ice ages every day had to be Clausmas because if it wasn’t, you died. This constellation of emotions, thoughts, actions and myth has been preserved, more or less, through the ages and coated with the paint of every new era. No new order can destroy this species-memory, they can only hope to twist it to their end, be it christian or capitalist. But the instinct remains. I mean, a story-based species doesn’t live through multiple grueling ice ages just to forget the tradition so easily.
Think about it. The world is covered in ice. What’s your daily life gonna look like? You’re gonna eat meat with the people you love. You’re gonna share everything you’ve got. And if you’ve got beef with someone you’re going to find a way to work it out because no one has the luxury of shitty little cliques and drama because in an ice age shit is REAL.
These are our relatives that lived through these times. All our greatest great grandparents. They did crazy shit. They lived epic forgotten sagas. But they live on in us. They are a fact and we are the living proof. They worked together to take down mammoths, and they were fucking good at it. Maybe in some fucked up sci-fi way our ancestors were so good at hunting these giant beasts that on some deep shamanistic level we craved a greater challenge so we invented the motherfucking State so we could really test our skill as giant slayers. But I digress.
In the ice ages every day was xmas and during xmas the spirit of Santa Claus animates all those who partake of the spirit. What is this spirit? Cooperation. The old human way of life and the most cutting edge of contemporary human thought.
The year is a cycle, like the cycle of the moon or of a day. There are wheels within wheels. The cycles line up at different scales. Day is summer is a full moon. Night is winter is a new moon. A human life could have seasons like a year. Youth is spring; old age is winter. Clausmas is the promise that old age, death perhaps, contains a secret gift, a revelation, something to look forward to besides sickness and injury. As Clausmas is to the year, this secret gift is to the human life. A special time reserved for the worst time. This also scales up to millennia, the enormous wheel that all our lives are only a fraction of. Perhaps Clausmas in this way prefigures a millenarian moment, a time when history or the cosmos or the forces of nature rotate towards cooperation. Or just another ice age. Who knows?
Well you made it this far fellow worker. So I’ll tell you the story of the time I actually met Santa Claus himself. The encounter that sparked all these wingnut theories.
It was back in the winter of 2016. Those heady days when Standing Rock was still standing and Trump was not yet inaugurated. I had returned from the front line to rest at my parents’ house and to celebrate the holiday. Now this year I had decided that I was going to believe in Santa Claus again. I had seen enough magic at Standing Rock to think that anything could be possible, and I had the seed of the thoughts that have flowered for you in this essay.
While sitting at my parents’ house using their computer, I was scrolling through my social media feed. ‘Liking,’ tagging, hashtagging, commenting, I don’t give a fuck! So along comes this “suggested post” it seems that megacorp thinks I need to see something. Well, let’s see it! It is a post from a local electronics store explaining the rules for their drone giveaway. ‘Like’ and comment with where you’d use the drone. Well I like and comment, with a picture of a pipeline.
New Years Day I get notified of a post telling me to come down to the store and claim my motherfucking drone! Ok. At this point, a little back story. I don’t own a computer, car or even a fucking phone. I was and remain a kind of luddite, so for me to receive this piece of cutting edge technology was pretty mind-fucking. But I’m an open minded barbarian, so to the store I went.
I walk into this little store and there’s nobody in there. I walk to what looks like some kind of futuristic bar with stools and sitting at the bar is this fat old white dude with a beard. I don’t say anything at all but he just comes right up to me and starts talking to me. Starts telling me all the details of the federal government’s historical treachery and genocide against the Native Americans in Minnesota. He’s got all the facts, all the dates, the names of the acts. He goes on and I just nod along, thinking, yeah, this is just how people talk, nothing out of the ordinary here.
Well he finishes his rap and goes away and some employees emerge from behind the bar and I tell them I won some kinda drone. They just give it to me and I take it back to my parents’. This fucking thing costs a grand and fucking flies itself. It shoots 4K video. I didn’t even know what 4K was! I get stoned and borrow my sisters smartphone because one needs a phone to fly this thing. I’m sitting on the floor unboxing this incomprehensible quadcopter, when I remember asking Santa Claus for something just like this when I was nine years old. I basically invented the drone, telling the Santa at the mall I wanted a remote controlled dragonfly that would show me everything it saw. Santa told me at the time that it would be tough, but he’d see what he could do.
Then it fucking hits me like a ton of ice. Who the fuck was that fat old white dude with the beard at the device store? That wasn’t a coincidence, that he was the only one there, that he was as down for the cause as me, that I, out of all people won. I realize the contest was rigged by this man. And that this man must be none other than Santa Claus. After all I had started believing again, making me eligible for the nice list. And then what happened? I magically receive a crazy freaking toy that my childhood self pined for in a forgotten time, all arranged by a mysterious man who fits the description of Santa himself.
Well there you have it fellow worker. To read about some of my drone exploits check out the Black Hills Special Reportback. I hope you found this entertaining, maybe even inspirational. I hope your holidays are filled with that special solidarity that only emerges this time of year and your new year is filled with the spirit of Claus.