The binary that binds

A couple of weeks ago I found myself in the hell that is the pre-Thanksgiving Market Basket. Each aisle assailed me with appalling displays of the latest holiday products. Cookies, coffee creamer, Coca-Cola—each and every product was conscripted into the campaign of Christmas, promoting, propagandizing, and proselytizing under the guise of seasonal cheer.

Besieged by gingerbread and peppermint, I sought refuge in the bread aisle, only to witness a common Christmastime occurrence play out in front of my very eyes. In front of the ciabatta, a six-year-old screamed, ostensibly about a box of hot fudge sundae Poptarts abandoned two aisles over.

His mother was helpless. She begged, pleased, groveled before him, in fact—but the child—a consumer, first and foremost—could not unlearn his learned behavior. Many spectators began leaving the bread aisle due to discomfort at this point, but I lingered. Not just because the ciabatta was the very bread I needed and there was only a single loaf left, but because I had a sneaking suspicion of how this would end, not with a backhand but with something far darker.

“You’re gonna be on the Naughty List,” she shrieked. “Santa’s watching, so you better stop.”

And the child stopped.

It must have felt good. The way the horror swept over his wet, ungrateful cheeks, no doubt inducing in the mother a giddy, forbidden euphoria. Its thrill was unmistakable: that of power. Not just authority but a palpable, Palpatine-like control over her pitiful child as his girlish voice cracked and his fat lip twitched and he snapped back into line, a superpower gifted to her by a story.

In the earliest years of meaning making, the child is indoctrinated within the Naughty-Nice Binary, a social credit rivaled by only China functions mainly as a system of control, inflicted upon the child by a corporatized holiday both practical and existential in its threats.

The child learns early, almost immediately, the rules of the game. Don’t shout. Don’t cry. Don’t pout. And you will be rewarded. Santa Claus comes to town and for a day you are bestowed with gifts and it’s the best day of the year. And that’s what it’s about, too. Not just the material good but the stigma—the not having. So when your father tells you he’s got a direct line to Santa and he’s not still not too happy about how you whipped a contested king-sized Kit Kat at your sister’s face on Halloween—he’s not just threatening you with no Nintendo Gamecube. He’s threatening you with social ostracism and that is actually child abuse.

But if the child is nice, everything is just dandy, right? He is permitted to take part in the ritual, the social rite the customary enumeration of presents amongst his friends on January 2 when they return to school. He’ll be made fun of, of course, for eagerly wearing not one but two new clothing articles on the first day back, but nonetheless his status within the group will be affirmed. But what of the child who returns to school in January with nothing—no fresh Nikes, no EnV touch, and certainly no smile?

Well, they were naughty.

Johnny didn’t get anything but he always gets away with never doing his homework and gets lunch for free and it’s kind of bullshit, so maybe that’s why he didn’t get anything for Christmas.

Or Billy? Who appallingly switched his Pokemon socks to Yu-Gi-Oh ones in the middle of the reading rug mid Strega Nona. Who told the teacher to shut up and would bang his head on the table during lunch well and also didn’t do his homework well, yeah, def naughty.

Oh and you can’t forget Moses, that fucking lunatic, who every couple of weeks would just go off, flip his desk, pummel the whiteboard, tear the pencil sharpener out of the wall and hum it at the teacher’s head. He once took off straight down the hallway and out the door and didn’t reappear until high school. Not exactly nice behavior.

So yeah. It makes sense these kids aren’t coming back from Christmas break with new shoes and shirts. They suck. We did our homework. We did our chores. We deserve these gifts. We played by the rules.

This system clings to us into adulthood, too. We were good. We worked hard, we paid our taxes, we contributed to society. And that’s why we have this car, and this house, and this in-ground swimming pool, and this nanny, and this Cape Cod beach house, and this boat, and this oversized SUV and that mom begging for $15 an hour who can’t make her rent—she was naughty, we were nice.

Good and bad, winners and losers, the haves and the have-nots. The Naughty-Nice Binary stratifies us and insists its judgment is just, leaving one half othered, the other ordained. It is the central, dominating myth of Christmas, and it is with this myth that the Big Man sentences us, flicking his finger left to right as we step off the Polar Express and onto the ice.