Many apartments in New York City don’t have shades, curtains, or blinds on their windows, particularly above the third floor.
My mother believes that this is a sign of mass insanity.
“People can see right into their house!” she’ll say.
“No one’s looking into their house, Mom.”
“But if they wanted to they could! Don’t they care about their privacy?’
‘I don’t think they think anybody cares about them enough to spy on them with binoculars from a highway at night going 65 miles per hour. I’d be more suspicious if they had curtains up, actually.”
“Hmn.” she says. That means a lot of things. It means she’s thinking about it, it means she isn’t really convinced, and it means she is a bit confused because we have curtains on all our windows. Blackout ones, to boot.
The curtains are mostly to keep out the sun, not prying eyes. I don’t suppose I’m that concerned about privacy, I was raised to understand that I was being watched 24 hours a day by ethereal beings with whose alignment I could steer my very destiny.
God, of course, but the Devil was also right there, one on each shoulder, if one was to believe the green screen special effects on TV shows. They were tugging and warring with you all the time, but you were never alone… there were no secrets that could be kept, no word spoken low enough to evade their hearing, no thought too small to pass inspection.
But believe it or not, they weren’t my main concern; my true privacy invader was absolutely welcome to spy on me 24/7, anytime, could look at me whenever he wanted, didn’t bother me a bit if he knew when I was sleeping, and when I was awake.
Santa is the king of toys.
Santa rolls deep.
He does the research, he goes the extra mile, always has the hook up.
Sure, Amazon delivers, but their brand is diluted with books and appliances and cleaning supplies.
Santa is artisanal, focused: no olive oil or leisure wear or school supplies.
He manufactures, sources, and custom delivers toys.
Which you don’t have to pay for, by the way… well, not in money.
Currency, is not his currency.
He deals in behavior, which to kids seems a pretty volatile market with little security, but then again he INFLUENCES the market in such a way as to cultivate the highest yield possible.
And how does he do it?
Espionage.
It’s not blackmail. Rarely has a child received a letter from the North Pole warning them to “cut it out”. No, it’s much more insidious… silent, invisible, like auditioning for a Broadway play where you’re standing on an empty stage squinting through spotlights, no sign of whether its “going well” or not, so you plod on, stretching yourself to the limit, trying to leave it all on the stage, not sure they’re even watching.
But, of course, they see everything.
And only when the time is up is there any indication, any word of whether or not you made it, whether they ignored the inevitable little mistakes and marveled at your string of genius moments.
And that’s Christmas Morning, a grade card for your very existence, pass or fail, where the material evidence of your exhausting effort is in the form of the most innocent of objects.
A toy.
Christmas toys feel different. They mean something different. They are not just something you wanted that someone gives you as a gift, they are evidence of a calendar year that went very very well for you.
It’s not luck, it’s skill, discipline - conditional validation from a superior expert on human behavior. Christmas toys are badges of honor that often require batteries and light assembly. And it’s strangely not about the size of the toy - some middling kid gets a bicycle and a perfect angel gets a mini air hockey table, neither of which is a real toy (as one is a vehicle and the other a game strictly speaking) but all of this still qualifies on Christmas morning, a golden hour of too-close-to-sunrise glee for parents and an annual exhale of relief for children around the world.
There is no restaurant, car dealership or nail salon you can go into and say “I’ve been a very good person this year” and have them comp you a meal, or car, or gel manicure. You can’t even go in a toy store and get a toy that way.
But I still breathe a little easier on Christmas morning, and reflect on, if not how well I did, at least how hard I tried. In an age when the naughty list seems unexplainably popular, we’re all still quietly proud to be counted among the nice.
But you know what? You still deserve a toy for that.
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