CHRISTMAS SCENE REPORT Vol. 1
(HI! Welcome to Caterpillar Steps, a newsletter by the writer and photographer Corbin Smith. This is the first in a series of posts about local Christmas decorations. I doubt I will employ subscriptions here, but if you like the newsletter and want to buy me a treat you can feel free to deposit some cheddar in my Venmo account, @BigCorbs. Please share on social channels and through your email, as well.)
There is a house in my neighborhood that wilds out during the holidays. I celebrate them, I celebrate the season, I celebrate whatever people do whenever. I am a celebrator of mankind. I pray for and love all of you.
Not everyone shares my optimism, you will see.
This house has some standard decorations: lights on the gutters, a series of reindeer on the roof. But primarily it employs more than a dozen set pieces. There’s a big ass inflatable Santa in the driveway, Snoopy playing hockey with Woodstock in the yard, plastic candles and snowmen and angels and the like, chilling all day and lighting up at night. Is it all a bit much, not really bound by any standard aesthetic credo? Yes, but I believe it expresses the inner feelings of the homeowner, overwhelmed with joy by the season.
But one piece truly stands apart… from humanity itself.
In daylight, he appears as such. Santa, sitting on a green lump. Thin, waifish, his dead blue eyes staring into the middle distance. A stiff wind could blow his suit off of him at any moment, exposing an emaciated, pink, nudy body to the entire neighborhood. His hand sits in a weak, pathetic half-wave. His hair falls in curls, ready to get yanked out by a sadistic, troublemaking child. He is the failure of the body incarnate, the pitiful last gasp of a man fighting to avoid leaving his failing body.
But at night, the demon comes out.
The features that seem pathetic in the day are filled out by air pressure. He gains mass, girth. His green mount, once a clod of dirt and grass, forms into a comfy, sinister chair. He is hale and hearty, the indestructible santa of myth. He is bathed in red light, a light so intense that my camera struggles to capture its purity. No longer a synecdoche of a man’s oncoming death, the personal biological death that will whittle away at us until we are gone from this earth, he has become the abstraction of death, a red reaper, going house to house, collecting bodies and sending souls into the fires below.
Lit from below, his face is no longer weak, blue eyed, pathetic. He emerges from hell itself. He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad, because we’ve all been bad, man’s nature is sinful and capitulating. You are pathetic, all of you. The world is dying and we did it and we can’t even hold ourselves responsible. You make him sick.
The head moves from left to right. A faint whirring emits from the neck, machine like. The lights shift across his visage but stay below, lit from the fires of Hades. Children are overwhelmed, they fall to their knees and repent. It’s not enough. It will never be enough.
Whirr. Whiiiiiir. Waving motion. Head craning. Santa stands in judgement on his throne in hell. His eyes were once pathetic but now they see through you, through everything. He sees through the veil into the foundation of your soul, which is garbage. It is the foundation of everything. I have observed boys and girls for many centuries now and I have found nothing to like and even less when they grow up. There is only a naughty list and names are scrawled on it in reindeer blood. Once they were supposed to take me around the world in a night, but I have seen through the lies. I see now that they are good for nothing but blood for ink. I laughed as I butchered them, as I saw my plans scattered to the wind. It was the only rational response to a world gone mad.