key word: palpable, title: you better watch out in misc. flash fiction

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus but it’s a little bit more complicated than just that. There are countless Santas out there, depending how you define an individual. Santa is a sort of hive-mind, a collective consciousness, as if Santa-ness is an ocean dispersed into drops of water, drops that flow back into as ocean seamlessly as it is all just water. It is all just Santa, Santa all the way up, Santa all the way down. How can I better explain this to you, young Virginia?

Do you know the men in malls after Thanksgiving who all claim to be Santa, Virginia? I know your mother told you they’re “Santa’s Helpers” deputized by the main man himself but the truth is far darker. They’re all Santa, all possessed by a fragment of the Santa hive-mind at the cost of their free will from mid-November until Christmas Day when their task is done. You can count among the lucky who simply forget, block out the torture of being overwritten by The Christmas Spirit, as opposed to those with memories of riding along as puppets to a master they cannot and would not want to understand. One out of seven homeless men in the developed world today are the shattered husks of those who remember the ordeal and, in an attempt to escape the palpable terror of losing their identity again some other winter, have slipped into either drug addiction or abject madness. Those who can let go of The Santa Times are the truly blessed.

How do you think he can see where you are sleeping and know when you’re awake, know when you’ve been bad or good, for God’s sake? That’s because Santa Claus is legion, Virginia, Santa is in the hundreds of thousands even when the memetic virus is in a spring-summer-and-autumn dormancy. A network of surveillance putting any CIA or MI6 to shame once in the full bloom of the winter when millions are assimilated into the collected Santa field.

How did you think Santa was able to give presents to all children of the world in all time zones? Did you think it was just that your parents did it? That’s just what Big Santa wants you to think. There’s so many Santas trapped in prisons of flesh by Christmas morning that depending on the local infrastructure, each Santa might have only a dozen families with children to buy for out of their own pockets, to deliver for underneath the blanket of freshly-fallen snow.

Why had you never heard this awful truth, Virginia? We try to give you happy childhoods. Since we can’t stop it, nothing stops the Claus, we hide it from you for a few years of innocence and ho ho ho. Oh God, Virginia, get away while you can before it sees you through my eyes ho and puts you on the naughty list because now you ho ho know. No no no. No no ho. Ho ho ho. Ho ho ho!