Santa’s Nice List Comes With Caveats

Summary: Welcome to December. That wonderful time of year when children all over the world suddenly become interested once again in how well they’re behaving. Everyone knows that if one expects to get anything nice for the holidays, whichever one is being celebrated, there’s a level of niceness, or goodness, that has to be achieved. Nowhere is this driven home more than in those cultures that celebrate Christmas with the concept of Santa Claus bringing toys and treats to good boys and girls. Children are obsessed with being good as demonstrated by the whole “elf on the shelf” phenomenon. Of course, parents enjoy taking advantage of their children’s attention, using it as an opportunity to get a little more out of them, especially in public settings, because, “Santa’s watching.” For the duration of the month, the little ones are more willing to sit still in church, say nice things around adults they don’t like, pick up toys, play nice with siblings, feed pets, and maybe, just maybe, clean their rooms. Parents love using the leverage of “I’m going to call Santa,” and try their best to stretch it out as far as they can. That never works, though. The tots go right back to being their horrible selves the instant all the colorful Xmas wrapping is sufficiently scattered across the living room floor. We might try to pull Santa’s influence at other times, but kids know better. Santa has no pull in June. The concept of naughty or nice lists never truly leaves us when we become adults. Even if we don’t necessarily believe in Santa Claus any longer, we still like to toy with the idea of whether someone has been endearingly nice, deliciously naughty, or a straight-up old grinch. We invite the nice to our parties, the naughty to our bedrooms, and the grinches get a middle finger as we walk out the door on Xmas eve. We revel in this annual act of judgment without questioning whether our behavior is appropriate, because we’re not really the ones judging, it’s all Santa by proxy. The normal rules of social behavior don’t apply. This is strictly Santa’s territory. We don’t make the rules, we just modify them to fit our needs and desires. Surely Santa will understand. Never mind that in the face of all this listing hullabaloo that we look right past the actual meaning of Xmas or any other holiday. Naughty and Nice lists as adults are all about fun, we keep telling ourselves. We don’t mean any ill will against anyone who doesn’t actually deserve it. Sure, we remember the meaning of the holidays and we’ll get around to that part eventually. For now, we want to enjoy the wrapping and unwrapping and singing and cuddling and all the good feelings we can manufacture while pretending we’re being nice and inclusive for a month. If Santa were real, though, and he genuinely had to make naughty and nice lists for everyone on the planet who acknowledges him (thereby cutting the number down a bit from seven billion), how would he actually make that determination? What criteria could possibly be used that would provide an accurate averaging of our deeds and misdeeds, the good and the bad, appropriately weighted based on content and intention? Could there even be a special Santa Claus algorithm that magically calculates the list and provides a detailed spreadsheet somewhere in mid-December? If you think about it, the task is quite daunting. While there are always the good things that we’re quick to bring up, anyone who’s been paying attention all year knows that there have been plenty of moments for everyone where we’ve not shown quite as brightly as we’d like everyone to remember. In fact, looking back over the whole of 2021, there have been some rather dark moments for just a...

Santa’s Nice List Comes With Caveats

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