For all it’s Islamic Shariah-compliant ways, Dubai still manages to get quite Christmas-y this time of year. It always has. Holiday cheer and all that. Wonderful discounts, mall Santas, Christmas trees, splashes of green and red all over and a lot more mistletoe than this “if-you-kiss-you-go-to-jail” society should allow. All in the name of the Christmas spirit, or rather, Xmas spirit, as it is so often butchered down to (and aptly demonstrated by my good friend in his Facebook status).
Growing up, I used to see the whole Christmas thing come alive around me. It left me bitter, because growing up in a Muslim household, we never really got to enjoy the whole thing. I said to my dad “Hey, how come we’re not part of this?” and he said “We don’t need to be, we’re better than this, we have Eids. Two of them.” and I said “But there’s no red and green colors on Eid” and he said “Yeah, but you get to pray as soon as you wake up at 5am in the morning.” and I said “And there aren’t any presents either” and he said “You get Eidi, don’t you?” and I said “But there’s no Santa” and he said “Exactly, there is no Santa” and I went silent.
“What?”
“Yup,” he said, relieved that I had taken a break from my incessant monologue, “Santa isn’t real.”
“But, he comes to all the good kids and gives them presents… may be I’m not a good kid.”
“You’re a good kid, because you are a Muslim kid. Those Christians have been telling their children about an imaginary fat man all these years. Lying to their children. Lying is Haraam. Santa is a Christian fallacy.”
“So,” I thought to myself, with a demonic grin, “my Christian friends who have been talking all week about upcoming presents, hanging stockings, and the impending arrival of a certain Saint Nicholas are under the impression it’s actually true. Like I was a moment ago. And they’ve been screwing me over with their Christmas spirit, and they will show me photos (in an actual photo album, because this is the 80s) of family Christmas and all the gifts they got, and I now have the power to kill the innocence that their childhood is.”
At recess the next day, I collected my 3 Christian friends – Marcus, Frankie and Mathew (with a single T??!!!!) – and I let it out. I told them it had been their parents all along, placing presents under the lame plastic tree, and inside the stockings and there was no Santa coming in on Christmas Eve, and to add my own two bits (so that it sounds like I figured it all out by myself), I even told them that they lived in apartment buildings and we had no chimneys and no fireplace, so there was no way Santa could enter, since he never uses the front door, that dodgy bastard. All the spite, all the bitterness that I had collected inside of me was let go of in this one instance as I thrashed their dreams, their festive season, and in general their spirit of Christmas forever. I had just killed Santa, that jolly old fart.
“Yeah, we know,” they said, “how fucking stupid do you think we are?”
I went home that day with my foot shoved irreparably into my mouth, much saddened. All the Christian kids knew about the non-existent man in red. Me, Muslim kid, had believed in him all my life and had wanted to meet him one day, or at least see him. I had even planned on not telling him my real name. I would have said something obvious, like David, because he’s Santa, not God, so what does he know. Free gifts for me. But my dad had ruined it and I couldn’t pass the buck. So, I wanted to do something else, something worse. Something more than just ruin their fantasies. I wanted to ruin their lives. I wanted to go tell every Christian kid in the world that Santa was fake. And if he/she already knew, then I would ruin their lives.
I collected all my Muslim friends together and told them the truth. Their horror was indescribable. We promised to ruin it for all the Christians all over the world. And at that very same time, other Muslim kids were getting together, in different parts of the world, and coming to the same realization. That Santa was fake; that he didn’t exist. And they were promising to ruin Christianity for everyone. They were promising to destroy the Christian world. They wanted revenge, an outlet for their spite. They felt betrayed by Western media telling them Santa was real. I’m passive-aggressive, so I just write a blog. I wonder what those guys are up to today…
Very very funny!