The Yuletide Factor. Tim Huff
all return to the true Christmas story in one way or another. Not simply a stagnant snow globe scene capturing but a moment; rather, an astounding and supernatural story meant to impact lives every second of the day, every day of the year. A story meant to free all people from living in fear and hiding. A story meant to set all people down a pathway guided by the signposts of comfort and joy. A story that ultimately exposes life’s broken snow globes and facedown villagers in the light of understanding, deep compassion and extraordinary hope. Transcendent far beyond the warmth of the Christmas spirit, the story of infinite and eternal blessing. Where there are no cover-ups to tend to or messes to hide.
All of it validating my heartfelt welcome to readers and, regardless of the date on the calendar when these pages find you, wishing one and all, with deep sincerity,
Merry Christmas.
Chapter 1: Bedrock and Bethlehem
It’s an interesting exercise to reflect on the influential personalities and icons of one’s youth, and bizarre, if not a bit sad, to realize that there might have been as many, or more, fictional characters as real ones. Truth be told, for many of us a number of those same fictional characters still weigh in considerably through adulthood. Such is the case for me.
Perhaps I would feel some better about it if those written-into-being characters near and dear to my own heart and mind were notably revered by scholars and well-read thinkers, fictional dignitaries the likes of Sir Lancelot and Hamlet or folksy VIPs such as Anne of Green Gables and Tom Sawyer.
But in reality, it is more than just a turn of phrase to say mine are very Mickey Mouse. In my case, the personalities and characters I held dear, and hold dear, are a merry mishmash of cartoon characters. A strange truth that no doubt helped, at least in part, land me in one of the world’s most renowned classic animation college courses upon graduation from high school.
To this day, the image of Fred Flintstone gives me a jolt of happy, warm familiarity, taking me back to the glee I knew rushing home from elementary school at the first ding of the lunch bell to spend half an hour in Bedrock and then sadly rushing back just moments after Fred’d shout “Wilmaaaaaaaaa” in the closing credits.
In fact, later in life, the very first time I felt any kind of crisis about my age, or aging in general, was in context to Fred Flintstone. Years ago, I was at home tending to my baby daughter Sarah Jane and stumbled across an episode of the Flintstones on TV. I happily left it on in the background as I played with my daughter on the floor. She was just starting to walk, wobbling and balancing her way from one piece of furniture to the next. At one point she ventured from the couch all the way to the TV stand and stood in front of it proudly, while on the screen behind her Fred’s daughter, Pebbles, crawled by, not yet at the walking stage. I gasped with extraordinary self-awareness. For the very first time in my life, just prior to my thirtieth birthday, I was completely taken aback that I must now actually be the same age as, or older than, Fred Flintstone! And not only was I now old enough to be fully understanding the adult plot lines about complex matters such as identity crisis, ageism, and relationship tribulation—but I was supposed to be relating to them.
It’s likely we all have Fred Flintstones in our lives. Time-stands-still characters that somehow find their way into psyches and stay there, no matter how silly they are. Or, perhaps more apropos, no matter how silly we are.
I might guess that one of the reasons cartoon characters sustain our interests and affection, generation after generation, is that while we age and move through all the crises, changes and challenges that come with growing up and aging, they never do. You can count on them not to. And there is some kind of inexplicable comfort in their impractical sameness and how it makes us feel.
And if that nutty sensibility is so for any of us, over any number of would-be fictional friends and heroes, it helps shed a great contextual light on the superstar status of the unstoppable, unaging beyond aged, one and only Santa Claus.
In fact, Fred Flintstone and Santa Claus do have something very poignant in common. For both, at the grassroots of their fiction is great reality.
The co-creator of the 1960s era The Flintstones, William Hanna, candidly admitted that Fred and company were an animated copycat of the 1950s classic television show The Honeymooners, which was borne out of a stark reality-check look at the challenging working class lifestyle and hardships faced by many young married couples living in Brooklyn, New York, apartment complexes at the time.
A grander jaunt, by far, the long and convoluted evolution of the Western world’s make-believe 20th and 21st centuries’ Santa Claus springs from loosely chronicled truths about an unconventional Christian saint thriving in (modern-day) southwest Turkey in the 4th century, living out a penchant for bringing cheer by way of great generosity to children out of his substantial wealth. Known as the saintly “protector of children and sailors,” by the time the 14th century Renaissance began unfolding, Nicholas’s popularity and lore had spread all across Europe. Ultimately, it was 18th century Dutch settlers that brought Sinter Klaas—an abbreviation of Sint Nikolaas (Dutch for Saint Nicholas)—across the ocean, tweaking a New York newspaper reporter’s interest in the settlers’ December celebrations commemorating the anniversary of the great saint’s death.
The evolution of Santa Claus as a “character” was spurred considerably when, on a wintery day in 1822, an American Episcopal minister penned a lengthy poem to entertain his three daughters on a sleigh ride, mashing together portions of the Claus story thus far with his own imaginative twists. Clement Clarke Moore’s “An Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas”—best known as “The Night Before Christmas”—was eventually, and anonymously at first, published in the New York Sentinel, conjuring up new images of the saint-turned-jolly-old-elf that persist to this day.
In fairly short order, Santa’s mythical arrival on North American shores helped prompt a number of previously unimagined notions, such as large-scale gift giving to children and, as a growing capitalism would have it, subsequent advertising focused solely on Christmas shopping.
By the end of the 19th century, Santa Claus was such a goodwill icon that the Salvation Army began dressing up unemployed men in his likeness, sending them into the streets to solicit donations to fund Christmas meals for “needy” families.
The tales of other Clauses, their history and antics, are both literally and figuratively all over the map. From Britain’s Father Christmas to Italy’s Babbo Natale to Brazil’s Papai Noel, each one is nuanced with cultural charisma and social mythology. Even grander twists in his likeness can be found in Russia’s Ded Moraz (“Grandfather Frost”), accompanied by his granddaughter (“Snow Maiden”), Japan’s Buddhist monk Hotei-osho, and the Julenissen of Norway (“The Christmas Gnome”). Some countries’ Clauses even include unsettling accounts of his livelihood, such as an ancient Romanian fable of three unruly Santa brothers shockingly causing mischief and pain all the way into the nativity story.
But none has risen to the heights of mainstream welcome more than Clement Clarke Moore’s jolly sleigh-ride Santa. For by the time Norman Rockwell and Coca Cola had their way with that same Santa, immortalizing his image with compelling paintings in the early 20th century, there was no turning back. The ensuing decades have left little wiggle room for change. Thus, today’s uber-popular cartoonish Santa Claus is as far removed from 4th century sainthood as stone-aged Bedrock is from 1950s Brooklyn.
But I say, “No harm, no foul.” The soda pop Santa of my youth, while admittedly robbed of his profound social justice backstory, is simply kind and fun and generous and harmless, and that seems like more than enough goodness to play make-believe with. For myself, as a Christian, it totally negates any crusty debate that there might be a significant or disconcerting competition going on with the birth of a Messiah, as I have yet to meet an adult who has become a disciple of a pretend Claus.
As watered down as his cartoonish story has become, this is the Santa that I banked on as a little boy and cheered on as a dad. The one that’s been scrubbed clean from controversy, and worlds away from any of the dark, disturbing or complex mythological lore found in various would-be Claus chronicles.
In fact, some of Norman