Merry Santamas

I feel a bit international these days, so using an international language is only in accordance with this feeling I have. There was a time, pretty recently, when I could not imagine how the air in a foreign space, un espace etranger, feels like. I used to belive that if I were in another country my skin would be assaulted with a million of previously unknown sensations, my brain with thousands of millions of previously unthought thoughts. Of course, when I found myslelf in a foreign country for the first time, for a second or two everything seemed pretty alien to me. There was a sense of beauty (a social, artificial beauty, I am not, of course, reffering to the natural beauty, of which Romania lacks none) and order that was very new for someone coming from Romania.
Sure, I had seen foreign countries in movies, but in a movie you only have an indirect contact with reality, a contact that is always mediated by a story, be it news or a movie, so because of this very reason filtrated and altered, not to mention that is a contact which is limited only to one of the five senses. But after a short while you realize what you have always known: all places ar the same, the air is the same, the sun is the same, the dust or pavement you step on is the same, space has still three dimensions, people ar still human beings taking part in a universal human nature. Soon it comes as a dissapoiment and a relief at the same time that that radical difference you imagined before actual contact was only an illusion, like so many other ungrounded illusions you make.

But this is only an introduction, though I am wrong to call it an introduction, since it doesn't introduce anything, for this small thing I want to point out on this Christmas day. As it is, of course, obvious for everybody, Christmas is a name given to a holyday derived from the name of Jesus Christ, hence the name CHRISTmas. You would expect, given name, for Christ to be a more central figure in this holyday, of whom some claim has become nothing more but a comercial orgy, but I leave Christmas critique to others, for now, and I will only say something about the name Christmas. Of course, there is no need for me to say that the central figure of Christmas is not, paradoxically, Christ, but Santa. The movies, the comercials, the mainstream songs, the stories and the public cosmetics of the cities they all have as main motif the old man with white beard and red suit. And let us not forget that for Christmas absolutely no one is waitting for Christ to arrive in a cloud or in some other means of transportantion, but everybody is waitting for Santa to appear and spread his gifts, which, of course, makes Jesus Christ look very bad, because on this holyday, the aniversary of his birth, the day that bears His name, he is not spreading any gifts to all the children of the world, not does he do any other thing worthy of our attention, and admiration and love. Shortly put, Santa is the nice guy and has the leading role while Christ is not even reported missing. It is then a mere formality to state that the soul of Christmas, its actual essence, is Santa Claus, not Jesus Christ. Given this fact, it is only just, and again a mere formality, to suggest the changing of the name from Christmas to Santamas. The name Christmas no longer reflects the substance and the meaning of the holyday, if it ever did, and consequently is no longer valid as a name, because it is, simply put, a lie! Of course, the opposite is true for Santamas, using the same argumentation it is clear as daylight that this name should be the name of the day that is being celebrated today!

Therefore, I think that not other imaginable closing is better than this one: Ho, ho, ho and merry Santamas to all!