FROMONLINE | 2011-12-04

  • By Tami Lange
  • December 4, 2011
  • 277
                        
In the new movie “Arthur Christmas,” a little British girl writes to Santa, wondering how he can keep up with the boom in worldwide population, what with just a sleigh and eight reindeer and one night to get the job done. In the movie, the answer is: Santa doesn’t do it all by himself. He is the head of a million-elf corporation with a head of logistics that has turned gift giving into a well-oiled holiday machine. Until one child got missed. Then, it’s back to more traditional customer service. But it brings an important question: how can Christmas come to a planet of several billion people – all in one night. The obvious answer is that, even as the world gotten “bigger” in terms of population, it actually is much smaller. Thanks to technology, you can text a friend in Norway, Skype with your uncle in Argentina or watch the latest mission on the NASA website. There’s not much mystery to the world anymore; it’s all on CNN and Fox News, 24 hours a day. Given that, it seems easy to believe Christmas has lost a bit of its magic. When I was a kid, my parents used to take me to a big Christmas display after church services on Christmas Eve. After seeing Santa, we’d head off to a party with some old family friends. One year, Santa told me to get home to bed soon. Otherwise, he’d fly right over my house. I was mortified. I begged my folks to skip the party and head home. What would happen if I disobeyed Santa, of all people? I look back on that, cynical adult that I turned out to be, and wonder how I could have believed. I wouldn’t have a chance in 2011, since I’d probably end up searching Wikipedia and Yahoo News for evidence that such a Santa existed. It’s true, it is a smaller world than it used to be. Faraway places are just a click away. Now we don’t write letters to Santa … we just give him a shout-out on Twitter. Gifts don’t arrive by a sleigh in the night … they come UPS, FedEx and Express Mail. But in a way, Christmas makes the world a smaller place, even without the cyberspace elves. At Christmas, we all join as one planet – regardless of our location, our race, our circumstances and even our religion. On this most Christian of holidays, do we not all wish for the same thing? I don’t mean for the material stuff – the computers, the jewelry, the Lexus with the big red bow. Is it not the wish of every person – every human being – that the world will just be a better place, if even only for 24 hours? Do we not wish for health, for happiness, for security, for peace on earth for our family and for the families of all God’s children. Aren’t all the other requests just stocking stuffers? Christmas is perhaps the one day we wish happiness not only for our families but for families all across the ever-shrinking globe. It’s about hope – that one mysterious, too-often-elusive thing we can’t find on Google Earth or on Facebook. In that case, this Christmas it will be a very small world, indeed. Wooster Weekly News columnist Tami Mosser wishes all the readers a most Merry Christmas. She can be reached via e-mail at tam108@hotmail.com.


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