Basket of Kisses

I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus
Underneath the mistletoe last night.
She didn’t see me creep
Down the stairs to have a peep;
She thought that I was tucked up
in my bedroom fast asleep.

Then, I saw Mommy tickle Santa Claus
Underneath his beard so snowy white;
Oh, what a laugh it would have been
If Daddy had only seen
Mommy kissing Santa Claus last night.
~Music and lyrics by Tommie Connor.

Dawn: Umm, guys, hello? Puberty? Sort of figured out the whole “no Santa” thing.
Anya: That’s a myth.
Dawn: Yeah.
Anya: No, I mean it’s a myth that it’s a myth. There is a Santa Claus.
Xander: The advantage of having a thousand year old girlfriend. Inside scoop.
Tara: There’s a Santa Claus?
Anya: Mm-hmm. Been around since like the 1500′s, but he wasn’t always called Santa… but you know, Christmas night, flying, coming down the chimney, all true.
Dawn: (Starting to smile with childlike wonder) All true?
Anya: Well he doesn’t traditionally bring presents so much as you know, disembowel children, but otherwise…
Tara: The reindeer part was nice.
~Buffy, Episode The Body.

When a child first catches adults out — when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always true, their sentences just — his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
~John Steinbeck, East of Eden.

I find the choice of closing song to be brilliant on too many levels to count. Christmas songs ARE nostalgic by nature. For every new Christmas song your favorite American Idol puts out on his or her new CD, three at the very least will be standards that all of American Christendom has heard every holiday season in memory. All these songs by default carry with them the Ghost of Christmas Past. I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus is about a simpler time when people could chuckle at the child thinking mommy would kiss anyone under the mistletoe other than daddy. It carries with it the ideal of a together family unit with the parents happily conspiring to give the children a perfect Christmas. And, it provides an image of parents so in love that they share an embrace when no one is watching. The gentle punch line of the song is that this child really has no worries when it  comes to daddy finding out about, ahem, where mommy kisses Santa.

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for I have sinned. It’s been two weeks since my last confession.

This is how Peggy’s sister, Anita, begins her confession. She then admits to taking money at the laundromat and also taking the Lord’s name in vain. Anita then pauses, seems to ponder what she wants to say next, and then speaks again, hesitantly at first:

And I’m … I’m so angry, father … I’m so angry at my little sister. She’s causing my mother so much pain … She had a child out of wedlock. She seduced a married man. It’s a terrible sin, and she acts like it didn’t even happen. And I hate her for it. I feel so guilty about it … but everybody keeps falling all over themselves, trying to help her, and she goes on like nothing happened. Nothing at all.

So much there. In very few words a volume of subtext, pain, accusation, revenge, jealousy, and denial.

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