When I was seven years old, I was terrified of The Wizard of Oz. It wasn't the flying monkeys or tornado or munchkins, no. It was something far more terrifying--you see, when Dorothy's house lands on the witch, that's scary stuff. Her house--there's a witch under it, see. To put that in context, the house we lived in at the time had a crawlspace under it, one that raccoons and other critters would often get into and sometimes fight, their snarls and thumps carrying up the the floor of our house. If there was a witch under Dorothy's house, well, who was to say a witch couldn't get underneath ours?
I'm not sure how I would have been able to handle the idea of a man being able to come down our chimney--undoubtedly, I'd have been terrified, lest burglars could use the same entrance.
I was not brought up to believe in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, or any other number of fictitious entities people seem compelled to make their children believe in. As someone who's grown up in this culture, but never quite a part of it, the phenomenon baffles me.
Why Santa? Why shouldn't kids believe that the gifts they received and loved were courtesy of Mommy and Daddy? Is it the leverage of "be good or else" that Santa provides? Why go to such elaborate lengths (Santa tracking via NORAD, seriously?) to convince the children of a lie? Is it just the nostalgia of how things have always been done?
I'm not being confrontational here, just genuinely curious.
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Now playing: Evan Greer - Two Hands Touching
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