It was a cold day in December. Cold all over the country, but especially in Washington, D.C. Cold enough for some idiot to rub his hands together and say, "Boy, whatever happened to global warming, huh?" Because some idiot always says something like that on cold December days.
Congress was debating some bill. What the bill was and what the debate entailed is not important to this story, since it meant only that some old Senator was standing in front of the CSPAN cameras and talking while everyone else in the chamber was… well, they we’re doing much of anything since the chamber was nearly empty. No one cared to listen to speeches. They’d reappear when they needed to vote. It was politics, and politics was a brutal game of trying to pretend that you cared about other people while working very hard for only yourself.
The door to the Senate chamber burst open.
In general, the door to the Senate chamber did not burst open. It did not burst closed. It did not burst at all. The door to the Senate chamber was closely monitored, guarded, and surrounded by high levels of security. No one ever entered the Senate chamber unless they were a Senator, and they would never, ever “burst” into the room. Something like that was unheard of.
It would not be the last unheard of thing to happen that day. The man who entered towered above the Senators, standing at least six foot six. He was immense, bulky, though certainly not what any reasonable person would call “fat.” He was dressed in perfectly tailored suit, entirely red, with an immaculate white shirt and bright fire-engine red tie. The remarkable suit almost distracted from the man’s equally remarkable beard, which was bright white and flowed down from his chin, obscuring his neck entirely. He was perfectly bald on the top of his head, though he was so tall and held himself so erect that no one could see the top of his head.
This man was a complete stranger to all of them. He was no Senator, no politician, not even a citizen of the United States. No one in that chamber had even see or spoken to this man before. And yet, they all knew him. And they let him approach the center of the chamber. He was, they all knew, Santa Claus.
Santa strode to the front of the Senate chamber. The CSPAN cameras were following him, broadcasting his every move live over the air. The chamber hung in breathless silence. The big man in the red suit intoned, “I need your help.”
No one moved. No even dared to blink. He continued, “For many centuries, I have made a home at the North Pole, building a place to allow me to work year round in relative isolation, with Mrs. Claus and my team of elves, of course, to fulfill our mission to spread Christmas joy to every child on the planet. Now, we find that our home is in extreme danger. The climate is changing, warming. The ocean waters are thinning the ice upon which my home has been built. Soon, perhaps this year, perhaps next, it will break. My home, the place where I work, the place where Christmas wishes come true, will sink into the ocean. You have done this. The human race has done this. And you must fix this. I cannot do it, not by myself. So, I have come here, to ask you to help me. Help me save the environment, and Christmas.”
And with that, for once, the world responded. Perhaps it was the direct appeal from Santa Claus himself, showing himself fully to all the world for the first time in many centuries. Perhaps it was simply another miracle of the holiday season. Within days, the U.N. was packed to bursting, humming with excitement, as every nation on the planet came together and signed the greatest document in human history. Not only would they work together, not only would they reduce their carbon dioxide and work to protect the environment, but they would even fund massive new technologies to help remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. New scientific discoveries would be funded, new industries create, trillions of dollars spent to create tens of trillions of dollars in economic activity, millions and millions of jobs, all around altering the Earth’s climate. Yes, they would continue to change the climate, as human beings had been doing since the beginning of the industrial revolution, but now they would do with the specific goal of fixing what they had nearly broken beyond repair.
And they celebrated, as one, the entire world together.
Or, almost the entire world.
In an office building, on the fifty-seventh floor, overlooking a polluted harbor, two men sat.
“Senator,” the older man began. The other man, who was a Senator, cut him off. He was one of the few people in all the world who could cut the older man off and not pay dearly for it.
The Senator said, “You’re not happy. I know you’re not happy because you never call me up here when you are happy. I imagine you’re unhappy about this new focus on fixing the world. You’re in the wrong business for that sort of thing, and this is likely to cut into your billions of dollars in profits. And now you want me to do something about it.” He took a sip of whiskey from the glass tumbler in his hand. “Is that about right?”
“Just about. Can you help?”
“I think I can do something. You see, this all hinges of everyone loving Santa Claus.”
“Of course. Who doesn’t? He is the symbol of Christmas, after all.”
“Exactly.” And with that, he finished his whiskey and departed. The Senator had an enormous amount of work ahead of him.
Within hours, the Senator appeared on the largest cable news network. He cried, “This Santa Claus is no Christian! He is destroying Christmas.” He held up a Christmas wreath. “What does this have to do with the holy and sacred birth of Christ? Nothing! Get rid of it!” His face was beet red. But he was nowhere near as angry as he appeared to be.
He’d been planning this for a long time, bothered at how many people embraced the commercialism of Christmas, while waging legal battles against the sacred religious meaning. But he had to choose his moment. This was it.
“And this!” he shouted, holding up an iconic picture of Santa Claus in his big red-and-white suit. “This is NOT the meaning of Christmas! Do not listen to this man! He is destroying the most holy day of the year.”
His rants were soon all over all the cable news networks. All over the Internet. All over the world. They had nothing to do with climate change, but Santa Claus now had everything to do with climate change. And the Senator’s attacks had their desired effect. Support for fixing the climate evaporated, like water vapor rising off a rapidly warming ocean.
The Christmas decorations came down. Christmas lights disappeared from houses. Christmas trees were left on the sides of roads or burned in massive bonfires. Christmas presents were unwrapped and returned, ungiven. Store that once were willing to stay open late suddenly announced that they were closing early. Major companies began announcing layoffs. And the image of jolly Santa Claus was wiped away.
And so it was that on the night before Christmas, no one anywhere could be found reading their children “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”
The Senator stayed late in his office that night, looking out his window, which looked eastward, toward Stanton Park. He held a glass of Scotch in his hand and stood at the window, enjoying the site of urban darkness. No Christmas lights. No Christmas carols. No Santa Claus.
Around midnight, he heard a cough behind him. Startled, the Senator spun to see a man with a long white beard in a perfectly tailored red suit sitting at his desk, in his chair.
“You think you’ve done something good,” Santa said.
The Senator replied, “I have. I’ve stopped you from stealing the meaning of Christmas.”
Santa seemed to consider this for a moment. “And what is, in your opinion, the meaning of Christmas?”
The Senator scoffed. “The birth of the Savior, of course! What do you think it is?”
The man in the beard and red suit shrugged. “So, on December 25th, you celebrate the birth of Jesus. And where did you find out that he was born then?”
“It’s in the Bible!”
“Is it? Where does it say, ‘On the 25th day of the twelfth month,’ or something like that?”
“It doesn’t. The date was passed down by tradition.”
Santa nodded. “Tradition. Not exactly the best thing to go by.” Here, he reached into his suit jacket and somehow extracted a massive book from inside the perfectly tailored suit. “I have a record of every birthday of every child ever born. It, uh, helps me keep track. And I know exactly when your Savior was born. It was not on December 25th.”
“So we shouldn’t celebrate? Because of what? A clerical error?”
“Oh,” Santa
said, putting down the book and standing up, “quite the contrary. The
point is not about who was born this day, but rather what
we celebrate this day. Look.” And
he pointed back to the window.
The Senator turned and stared off into the darkness beyond. Something, far distant, seemed to twinkle. What was that? A fire? No, too steady. He saw more, now, and saw that they were all different colors: white and yellow and red and green and blue.
All over the city, Christmas lights were coming on.
“When we celebrate the birth of Christ, we celebrate what humans have always celebrated at this time of year,” Santa Claus said patiently, as though explaining something to a child. “Light, in a time of darkness.”
More lights came on now. It seemed as though, with Christmas day finally here, everyone who had been rejecting decorations of Christmas had decided that now was the time to bring them back, to turn the lights back on.
“Does it matter if Jesus was not born on Christmas Day?” Santa went on. “Does it matter if he wasn't born in Bethlehem, he didn't sleep in a manger, if there were no shepherds, no wisemen, no gifts, no star? Of course not! That misses the point entirely! You are not celebrating the birth of a person. No, you are celebrating the birth of Light! Christmas is about celebrating what people have always celebrated in this dark, cold month: light in darkness! Humans have a most peculiar tendency to turn things upside down. So during the darkest, coldest, most depressing time of the year, when it seems like the days will never get any longer, and the nights just drag on and on, and the only sign of green are evergreen trees with needles that at are as painful as a cactus, you all decided to throw a bunch of lights on the trees, wrap everything in bows, and sing joyful songs at the top of your lungs! You give gifts to people for no reason! It’s completely nonsensical, and that makes it magnificent! Because where there is darkness, you celebrate light! And knowing there is light in this world, and in our lives, no matter how dark things may be, I daresay that is the true meaning of Christmas.”
Outside, the world seemed completely aglow in sparking multi-colored Christmas lights. They stood in silence and watched, as the world awoke from its darkness, like the Sun rising, but the Sun stayed well below the horizon for some hours more. And yet, there was light.
I’d like to say that the Senator’s heart grew three sizes that day, but that didn’t happen. Instead, he lost his next bid for re-election, had difficulty finding work, and ended up as a used car salesman in Perth Amboy.
Santa, meanwhile, moved his workshop to the South Pole, where there was solid ground under the ice instead of warming ocean, and he continued to work to fight climate change alongside bringing joy to children everywhere. And every December, he looked up at the southern sky, which was full of light and sunshine, and got his reindeers ready to bring light to darkness, joy in the face of despair, hope in times of hopelessness. He knew it didn’t always work. But it was always worth trying.
Because even in the darkest places in the world, the light was always somewhere.
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