Member-only story
For God’s Sake, Don’t Look in Your Stocking
Twenty-twenty has been just one great, big lump of coal.
Remember when you were a kid, you used to get The Christmas Talk? Be a good girl, a nice boy, or Santa will put a lump of coal in your stocking.
And you just rolled your eyes.
A lump of coal! What kind of child-abusing scumbag would do a thing like that? As it turned out, Santa was a fake. Your mom bought the presents and your dad put up the tree. Your mom and dad were an undercover crime duo, like Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers, and somewhere a cute dog.
It’s never, you’ll notice, a cat.
You found out that Santa was a fake at school, during recess. It was like the last moments in the final scene of Wozzeck, the German expressionist opera by Alban Berg. Marie, the slut, has been murdered by Wozzeck, the pitiful put-upon Everyman antihero. In the final scene, Marie’s child is rocking on a hobby horse, and a bunch of older children go running past him.
“Hey! Your mother’s dead!” shouts the spokeschild for the group, a vicious little twerp who should probably not apply for a job as singing telegram delivery boy.
Hop! hop! replies Marie’s child. Hop! hop! It’s one of the most pathetic, heart-rending scenes you’ll ever witness…
