As a big fan of holidays (of both the forced and unforced variety), a subject of personal interest is how they come about in the first place. Not the novelty-free ones - celebrating a bank holiday is a recognised medical signal that you're depressed, and the long summer holidays you have in school were only ever designed to prop up the now booming nostalga markets (the kind that sell imported foam cereals and untransformble Transfomer statues to ronrey men) by creating vast continents of terminally boring time that could only ever be filled by actively just-buying-stuff. No, not those holidays.
I'm specifically interested in holidays that have some kind of character associated with them, Santa Claus being the obvious example. It's how these characters come into being that's the fun bit. Perhaps they're a bit like latter day memes, ideas that gradually take hold of the collective imagination through a sub-concious desire for that kind of thing to exist (like we all want a giant rabbit with an unlimited supply of chocolate whimsically circumanvigating our home security systems every year).
It could also be a guilt thing. If you're christian, for example, you believe that Jesus died for our sins on the cross on Easter. While I suppose it's a good thing that that particular act was never given the novelty airbrush, it'd probobly be equally galling to find that the day of your sacrafice (and the subsequent holiday weekend you bestowed on generations to come) was permanantly subject to a takeover bid from the aforementioned chocolate ninja hare, and that the large swathes of the public were fine with that. I'm not saying that everyone has to be into Jesus or NOTHING AT ALL. It's just that it feels a bit like the equivelant of, say, a national holiday for an important religious figure like Mohammed, or even a respected contemporary leader like Gahdi or Mandela, being hijacked by the public desire to believe in a magic wise-cracking penny who can grant wishes.
To be fair, though, I think Jesus is comfortably winning the fight for Easter. No one seems massively bothered about investing in the Easter Bunny, he's the least represented holiday mascot going. There are no real definiatve images of him, because no companies or corporations see any profit in defining him. So it's left to comman conscensus to flesh him out, which means he ends up with sometimes a basket, sometimes a bow, and zero to say for himself. No backstory, no cool explanation for how he breaks into your house. Why is he even giving out chocolate? Nobody cares. Like the trope 'unpopular lonely rich kid', he tries to buy your interest, which lasts precisely as long as his money does. And it's funny how the Easter Bunny melts away after the big Santa reveal. Nobody 'finds out' about the Easter Bunny, because nobody is that stupid.to properly believe in him in the first place (I'm beginning to think I might have some terrible, repressed beef with the Easter Bunny, actually, so I might just move on).
We believe more in the Tooth Fairy than the Easter Bunny because the story provides an irrational explanation to something even more irrational i.e. giving children money for their old teeth. Giving children money for their teeth. Chocolate at Easter is sort-of plausible in that, even at a young age, you can figure out that it's all about money and jobs and needing a break and indulging and cheering up for a while. Giving children money for their old teeth is just stupid, even if your subsequent explanatory trip to Wikipedia tells you otherwise, because most folk giving their kids money for their old teeth don't know why they do it in the first place, and have to pass it off as 'fun' and 'part of the magic of childhood'. Why not make understanding how the NHS works 'part of the magic of childhood'? I'm going to be a terrible parent. It'll be fun to explain to whoever ends up as my child that I'm reaching under their pillow because I want to buy their teeth off of them, in the middle of the night.
I'm probobly typing at length about this, though, because it's what happened to Santa Claus that worries me. From my limited knowledge of the myth (being interested in novelty holidays doesn't actually involve any reading or research or learning of any sort), it stems from the story of some old chap who went around his village giving the children carved wooden toys/ the god Odin raining down presents on those who left their nosh-filled boots out for his steed / St Nicholas leaving gold for three penniless single women (nice!) so that they could afford to marry. It's probobly all of those, and none of them at the same time.
But the gradual morphing of the stories into what we know today is quite unsettling, in that the same thing could very well happen to me. If this period in time were ever to be looked back upon as one of, say, deluded hubris, who better to be morphed into its terrifying anti-mascot? I'd presumabley be used to scare children into choosing a career with prospects, or at least a mindset of productivity, diligence, and calm, resourceful action. My biggest worry is that, to illustrate the importance of developing into a well-rounded individual, I wouldn't end up being some cool-evil sarcastic robot or anti-hero with awesome hair. My 'character' would probobly turn out like one of those animatronic cobbler puppets, fated to fruitlessly hammer away at nothing, all the while with a big gurn on my face (it always annoys me when you see one of those idiots mugging away while not actually hammering any shoe).
But I'll probobly be dead before that character comes into being, so that's all right.
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