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Santa in September, Part II

Alright, so, Santa relaxing in September was where we left off. He’s resting before gearing up for the holidays, and he’s living off his stash of silver and gold, which is precisely what would attract the naughty who would want to steal his treasure.

There are a few things this begs to question. Does Old Saint Nick have a way to defend himself? How wrong could things go? Whom can Santa call on for help? And we’ll answer them in that order.

Santa carries around an umbrella, a tool he can offer others and defend himself with. Of course, it’s a magic umbrella, capable of surprising anyone who uses it or gets hit with it.

No matter how careful Santa tries to be, someone’s bound to notice his uncommon form of payment and want more where it came from. Something he cannot avoid is paying someone on the naughty list for passage somewhere.

Entranced by the precious metals in their hand, the naughty one, with street smarts to boot, takes mental note of Santa’s defining feature, his eyes. They are the eyes of a saint, warm and welcoming, and leaving a lasting impression on anyone who comes in contact, though they don’t know it.

One Saturday, having chosen a different AirB and B in the back country, as he has for the first three Saturdays, Santa settles in for a quiet day inside, Christmas songs on his heart, a Safeway box of sweet and sour chicken stabbed with chopsticks on the table, and a stack of wood in the fireplace ready to catch flame.

The latched door is pried open with a crowbar and kicked in. The naughty figure stands tall in the doorway, cold air blowing in from outside. Santa remains sitting, unfazed. He’s known this man since his first letter, which asked that his dad come home from the war for Christmas.

As Santa purses his lips at the encounter, the imposing figure, wearing leather gloves, grips his crowbar and points it at Santa’s leather stash of silver and gold. Santa slowly shakes his head, unfazed by the razor’s edge upon which the moment hangs.

The figure steps inside and closes the door with a slow creak. Santa sighs. The figure walks over to Santa, his steps measured for instilling terror in his victim. As he looms over the old man sitting in his chair, Santa shakes his head.

That leather grip on the crowbar tightens with silent rage, but the thief sidesteps Santa in his seat and goes for the bag of silver and gold, opening the sack to see the coins glittering from the ceiling light. A shadowy grin appears on the thief’s face as he chokes the bag closed and stands up, only to turn around and see Santa standing before him, making eye contact at his level. He too has a imposing presence, his red suit somehow giving him a transcendent presence.

Where everything changes is in Santa’s eyes. They tell the thief’s entire life’s story in one look. How he’s become this thief, who helped him along, and how Santa feels about it, compassionate but furious. Most powerful though is how he feels in Santa’s eyes: small.

The sack hits the floor with a sharp, metal thud, and the thief raises the crowbar to a striking pose. Santa’s eyes remain locked on his, unchanged.

With time standing still, the thief lowers the crowbar, having lost the upper hand, having felt exposed and disarmed. No one had looked at him before, stared at the monster within, only to show compassion and outrage.

The figure walks passed Santa and heads for the door before he felt a sharp pain against his temple and blacked out, Santa towering over him with his umbrella.

With the man on the floor, out like a light, Santa sits back down to enjoy his now-cold sweet and sour chicken, the fire in full blaze. He’s just not in the mood for Christmas songs anymore. But the rest of the year – and the naughty list – press on him with urgency and empathy.

It’s almost October, and he’s still got plenty of silver and gold to last him the ferry ride home. Iceland will be his last stop.

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Santa in September

Here’s a short story you’ve never read before.

I sipped a hot cup of cocoa, reclined in my chair near a fire, on Christmas Eve. Christmas dinner was in the works with the wife and father-in-law busy around the sink and stove. Between the first sip and last sip of my cocoa, I wrote an idea with only my phone.

Premise: What is Santa Clause up to in September?

Though Santa’s busy hours happen at the North Pole, not much is known in the myth about how he spends the whole year leading up to Christmas Eve. How does he spend his time between January and November? Is there something that occupies his attention?

Well, yes. Santa has to know who’s naughty and nice. To know that, he must be among us. He can’t just know it magically. I don’t buy it. He’s on the ground, in our midst.

And he’s not alone. He’s checking in on the extra naughty and the extra nice, but the elves, his little workers, are covering more ground than he can alone. It’s a special elf division, the elite – Alpha Squad. The rest are at the North Pole, syncing the data collected from Alpha with the gifting department, readying materials for the Gift Wrap department.

So, while Alpha Squad covers the cities, streets, neighborhoods, and farmland across the world in logistical fashion in keeping with thousands of years of experience, Santa moves methodically and carefully to specific areas around the world where the extra naughty and the extra nice live.

Santa and Alpha Squad have done this before, many times, so it’s all mostly routine, with the exception of Santa’s route. Thankfully, Elf Command, located in the North Pole, can anticipate the route for Santa months in advance with the Joy Reader, an advanced scanner that tracks the pulse of the Christmas Spirit. To the untrained eye, the scanner looks like a bunch of colored lines weaving in and out of an intricate thread pattern waving up and down with the day. But the elves, they’ve got the trained eye and the spectacles to prove it, which exaggerate the size of their eyes, as they jot notes on silver wrapping paper, covering it in rigorous notes. They’ve proven the accuracy of their skilled analysis, year over year, century over century.

The only thing that makes their eyes bug out a little is when Santa brings home the data from his trip, a neat, red-leather-bound booklet of finely written notes colored in gold about the many extra naughty and extra nice children he encountered. The elves can only project Santa’s path based on hot spots; they can’t assess each child – the data Santa collected from being up close and personal frustrates the elves only a little, as the numbers require big adjustments in sections where they must zoom in ten times and find the right child to adjust their naughty-nice profile. It’s tedious but necessary. Some elves think if all children could just fall into the Average Naughty Nice metric, it’d make their jobs much easier. But these elves made a club, “The Elves of Analysis.” They take their tasks seriously, no matter the demands. Have faith, Santa! There’s nothing analysis can’t clear up. The annual report that Santa doesn’t just check once but twice will be ready before Christmas Eve, or they’re not pointy-eared and drunk with cocoa.

So, that’s how the year generally looks for Santa, broadly speaking. But what about up close? What if we could see what Santa does in September, specifically?

When Santa leaves the North Pole, having done his mythical Christmas Eve run, he’s kissed Mrs. Clause goodbye and sets off on his journey, which requires a descent from the immortal snowy land of the North Pole to the wet, dry, hot, rainy, and misty lands of the mortals.

It’s not that he doesn’t like to travel. It’s just that he’s naturally a homebody. But he craves adventure nonetheless. He can relate to celebrities wearing sunglasses when on the streets of LA. His slay stays behind. Instead, he boards a special elvish transport bound for one of a dozen remote locations around the globe, each selected on a different year to avoid being followed by locals.

To ease himself into the noise and hyperactivity of man’s busy society, he’s dropped off on the outskirts where it’s slow and quiet, wearing rugged attire and a sack hung over his shoulder. To any onlookers, he’s no different than a white-bearded hitchhiker with a surprisingly warm smile and a stride supported by a humble walking stick.

A red velvet pouch jingles with each step he takes. It contains both gold and silver, minted by the magic of the elves. Each coin has the engraving of the North Pole Christmas Tree symbol, with the initials SC enlarged in the background. Santa initially objected to such an overt hint to his identity when he’s incognito, but the Mint elves thought it’d be funny to put something so obvious onto the coin, confident no human would ever figure it out. Besides, they say, there’s an entire minting industry on Earth that makes different designs all the time. Santa’s minted coins would just blend right in.

Santa doesn’t carry paper money on his travels. The North Pole has always leaned on gold and silver for currency, whether it’s for Santa’s journey to the mortal world or to run the Workshop economy, which spans thousands of elf-sized homes and workshops stretching for hundreds of miles. Santa’s never had to worry about such a large operation being found by humans. Air traffic is rare, almost non-existent, and the magical atmosphere only shows up on their scanners like a red blob. Plains can’t land to investigate, and the human intelligence and military operations apparatus doesn’t have enough intel to justify a multi-billion-dollar operation to investigate. But the Elf Intelligence Center (or EIC) is always one step ahead of human intelligence agencies.

Basically, ever since the US presidents started operating on fiat currency, Santa has been able to enjoy his love of gold and silver by customizing the inventory of his purse based on the changing spot price of the two metals. He likes the sound and feel of the coins. And he likes to share it with those who’d benefit from his generousity, even though the nice list isn’t yet printed. Gold and silver have been the staples of Santa’s legacy since he took over from his predecessor around the planting of the American colonies.

He’s lived a lot of human history, and he’s observed many lifetimes of it, which is why on his travels he’s not out of element. Just the opposite, he knows the streets, the towns, the roads, having seen their previous iterations through time. Some places never change, while other places change radically. Thankfully, the digital age hasn’t taken hold yet; it’s still in its infant stage.

Which means children can still manage. Being nice in an increasingly digital age will only become more difficult, which will mean a disproportionit shift to the naughty list. But that’s not something he can control. He’s here to remind the children why they shouldn’t shout, pout or cry, why treating each week like Christmas is essential to get on the nice list.

Christmas comes but once a year. That’s a long time for a child to be nice.

So, Santa strolls through their neighborhood with a skip in his step and cheeks full of jolly cheer, wearing festive jeans and a shirt, maybe a hat and a jacket. Any time he’s “in need of directions” – any time he might need a hand changing a tire – the nearest kid who is almost naughty has a chance to show Santa they have the good to be a little more nice. Sometimes, he’s so inspired by a spark of Christmas spirit, he tosses them a silver coin as a visual reminder of the brightness they’ve shown him.

He doesn’t just gift silver to children. Sometimes it’s adults, too. The rare ones who have protected the Christmas spirit, despite the transition to adulthood. They are few, but they are out there. For those who have just a shred of Christmas spirit in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and beyond, the ounces of silver and gold remind them that the generosity of a stranger is still alive and beauty shines through this dark world. This combination of the two, by Santa’s estimates, boosts the Christmas spirit in hard-working adults.

Santa needs time to rest after walking, driving, and flying around the world, the weight of this hard world heavy on his Christmas spirit. Binging movies on Netflix isn’t his idea of rest, especially Christmas movies. They never get it right. He doesn’t nap either. His exhaustion needs a deeper remedy. Millions of the naughty weigh on him.

To rest, he sings songs, eats sweet and sour chicken, while sitting by a fire with his sore soles warming up, on four Saturdays in September, made possible by magic.

Depending on how well he covered his tracks, Santa can relax. But not every year is he not visited by an unwelcome guest. Sometimes, the unwanted visitor is a repeat offender on the naughty list with lifetime status and not someone he’d ever give any silver, for their hearts are more than naughty. They’re malicious.

To be continued by Santa in September Part II.

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The Wild Robot Review

Since Hollywood has regressed into wokeism, directors and writers have made cringe a predominant narrative characteristic, a reason for movie-goers to stay home and watch movies from a time not poisoned by woke culture. The “message” has infected entertainment so deeply that fun, it seems, has flat-lined into a coma, except The Wild Robot is a sign of brain activity. Is this animated film enough of a wake-up call for us to smell the coffee, or, more accurately, the popcorn?

On its face, The Wild Robot tickles instant curiosity with an oxymoron for its title. Other, more expensive book adaptations have failed to hook so simply – calling out Disney’s John Carter, which was uninspired and gutted from the original book’s superior title, A Princess of Mars, attached to which was a truly grand story that got stripped of all its best parts to appease creatively bankrupt Disney. DreamWorks Animation wisely avoided repeating Disney’s bone-headed mistake.

Proud of its origin as a children’s book series by Peter Brown, directed and written by Chris Sanders, The Wild Robot rewards admission by supercharging its first ten minutes with a setup for the story that feels brisk without being disorienting and doesn’t try too hard for laughs by honoring the slapstick, cartoonish humor of beloved, timeless Looney Tunes.

The Setup

This story begins on the beach with the washed-up remains of a shipment after a lightning storm – cue Cast Away vibes here. Inside the torn shipment container is an intact, folded-up robot, which curious otters investigate and inadvertently activate. Powered on, the strange being introduces itself in multiple languages as ROZZUM of Universal Dynamics before mimicking the wildlife to escape a massive, oncoming ocean wave.

Having climbed a rock face in a crab-like fashion, the robot faces the tree line of a forest, at which point it taking its first steps into the wild. The robot tries making contact with the animals, offering assistance to every creature along its path, snapping photographs of the shocked creatures as proof of the completed task.

Quickly registering the language barrier as problematic, ROZZUM folds up like a standard-issue Trade Federation droid and enters “processing mode” for several days, absorbing data from the wildlife interactions, foliage gradually covering her up. The squeaks and squabbles of the animals become conversations, revealing the nickname the scared animals have given her, The Monster.

Emerging from the overgrowth, ROZZUM loudly broadcasts to all animals, using a dazzling, Las Vegas-style light show, that she’s there to help. One brave little ambassador bunny asks if ROZZUM wants to kill everyone. ROZZUM unwittingly replies, “Negative…” and, without skipping a beat, a moose knocks her to the ground with his antlers, only for her to recover unharmed. At this, the wildlife scatter in clouds of dust!

Servicing this island has gone beyond what ROZZUM was programmed for. At her wit’s end, or the lack thereof, she activates the homing beckon atop the island’s highest peak underneath storm clouds, expecting her creators to come pick her up. Of course, lightning strikes, and she’s back on the ground, up against the tree, and shortly thereafter, at the mercy of glowing, blue-eyed raccoons in the black of night. They overwhelm her for parts, including the homing beckon, which blinks green right when a raccoon snatches it.

Having recovered the homing beckon through a series of comical tussles, ROZZUM then gets chased through the trees by a ferocious bear until she loses her footing and falls to a ridge near the water where a nest meets her on impact. Sticking out from a pile of branches under pouring rain is a single adult goose wing, and sifting the wreckage reveals one unbroken egg with a living creature inside. ROZZUM doesn’t know what to do with it. A hungry fox comes along and snatches it, but she rescues the egg from the fox’s mouth.

The Emotional Hook

The egg cracks open. ROZZUM repairs it. A foot breaks through, and out from the shell comes a cute gosling who imprints on the robot, thinking its mother is the towering robot with complex subroutines and an inner core.

An Unlikely Pair

Overwhelmed by a closeup of his mother’s circular, robotic face, the gosling screams, but it’s attached at the hip. ROZZUM must raise the helpless little one, as Pink-Tail, a mother possum, followed by her 7-then-6 surviving baby possums, points out… The baby will die without a mother.

ROZZUM has found her task – a daunting one at that.

The Stakes

Making up the difference where the robot’s programming comes up short, Fink (the fox) and Pink Tail help direct on generally how to raise the gosling. The first step is food, followed by learning to swim, and finally, flight. Mother and child get nicknames: “Roz,” and “Brightbill.” Unfortunately for Roz as a first time mom, nurturing her child is not as simple as 1-2-3-done. Roz builds a home for Brightbill to eat and sleep safely as he grows.

Once Brightbill becomes an adult, his unlikely family “launches” him into a nearby lake for swimming lesson, which backfires in a way neither Roz nor Brightbill are ready for. Being a runt, Brightbill faces the pitfalls of integrating with others of his kind. He’s different, behaves as if he’s got modes and a processor, and, generally, has no clue how to be a goose in the wild. The others mock him mercilessly.

Despite the wedge between him and Roz, Brightbill faces a dire imperative. The senior goose leading the Great Migration warns Roz that if Brightbill doesn’t build endurance for the long journey, he will not survive the winter. The laws of nature apply to Brightbill regardless of his disadvantage to other geese, and the Great Migration demands more than wings. Where his wings faulter, his heart must pay the balance.

This is a matter of life and death, not a typical theme for an animated movie. But it’s a welcome one all-the-same in this harrowing struggle. Brightbill’s friends push him to stay in the air even when he gets tired. During the winter, while far away from the island, Brightbill, having trained to reach his full potential, finds that his past struggles prepared him to lead all geese out of a shooting gallery, a testosterone-inducing scene in which he has them form up behind him through a harrowing ground-to-air conflict reminiscent of daring World War 2 planes dodging ground fire.

Takeaways

As subtle as it may be to some, The Wild Robot is a highly sophisticated piece of entertainment, a blend of the story types institutionalized and underdog, promoting the qualities for greatness: Grit, hope, and courage against insurmountable odds. Roz discovers her wild side by breaking away from her programming to give the little one a chance at life in the wild. Brightbill takes on challenges none of his kind were trained to handle, and in doing so, becomes their leader.

Surprisingly, for a movie out of Hollywood, The Wild Robot contains powerful, counter-cultural themes of discipline and bravery, relegating agendas like global warming (glimpses of water-submerged landmarks) and inclusiveness (prey and predator living under one roof on the island during a killer winter storm) to mere aesthetic and humor-masked surface plot. These agendas tastefully take a backseat to the characters we care about, giving The Wild Robot an emotional edge over lesser films.

Such a heartfelt story elevates this Chris Sanders-directed film to on-par status with the likes of Pixar’s Wall-E, while firmly setting it outside the exclusive club consisting predominantly of Pixar’s earlier works, like Toy Story and Monsters Inc, and another film by DreamWorks Animation, The Prince of Egypt.

The Wild Robot earns its screen time at the theater where the smell of popcorn and stories adorn the walls of those sacred halls where imagination goes to fly. No time of death here. Storytelling is still fighting like Brightbill to survive the killer winter of wokism.

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Jesus Revolution Review

Directed by Brent McCorkle and Jon Erwin, “Jesus Revolution” is about the intertwining of the lives of a pastor, a former hippie, and a love-struck teenager, set against the backdrop of the American Christian church of the 1960s. The movie is a sincere, albeit candid, narrative about faith, setting itself apart from other Christian films by depicting believers as fragile, inflexible, self-righteous, egocentric, and troubled by trauma, rather than faultless and devout. It underscores Jesus Christ who ultimately embodies goodness as the true beacon of unity for us flawed, sinful individuals.

The moral cringe and preachiness that Christian films are known for failed to pass the audition phase for this production staring Kelsey Grammer (Frasier) and Jonathan Roumie (The Chosen). Chuck Smith, a modest Southern California church’s pastor, played by Grammer, shepherds a stiff, traditionalist congregation, but he is not the hero. The ex-hippie Lonnie Frisbee (Roumie), who befriends Smith with the goal of opening church doors to hippie converts, is God’s catalyst for breathing new life into Smith’s formal, dry church, and yet, neither he plays the hero.

Young and on a search to find himself, Greg gets led away from military school by the affection of a girl into a life of drugs, the hippie way to connect with the divine. Greg stumbles across Lonnie’s path because of a near-death experience, and they become friends. The charismatic, long-haired evangelist, guided by the Holy Spirit, begins the Jesus Movement, and Greg, clinging to a sense of belonging he gets from his friendship with Lonnie, is very much along for the ride. The only person weighing him down is his despondent, co-dependent mother. Greg here is the film’s protagonist, but true to the established pattern, he’s not the story’s hero.

There is a greater plan at work in America in the 1960s. Headed by Chuck Smith and Lonnie Frisbee, the Jesus Movement made waves across the nation, leading untold thousands to Christ with divine power unseen since in American history. The movement had such a profound impact, it is still felt today by those who lived it and saw their lives changed forever. Led not by charismatic razzle dazzle or an ingenious non-profit outreach strategy, the Jesus Revolution ignited a fire of faith in youth on a powerful and massive scale that only the mysterious whims of the Holy Spirit could accomplish. The movement is depicted as a radically unified gathering that saw miracles of equally radical proportions. No magician’s kits were used in the making of such a movement.

Sadly, to contrast the Holy Spirit, one pesky element had to rear its ugly features, the human condition. The nature of man had something to say about this matter, and it didn’t turn out beautiful like the changed lives of the people converted to a life of following Jesus. This masked spirit of darkness manifested in none other than Lonnie himself as the leader got taken by the publicity and mass appeal of the movement, a false sense of power and importance that drew his attention away from the sight of God.

This layer of Lonnie Frisbee’s story was noticeably absent from the film. While the omission of Lonnie’s less-than-righteous exploits frames the Jesus Movement as rosier than it is remembered by those who experienced it, the film nevertheless is a heartwarming reminder of what a spiritual revolution can look like when God’s jealousy for his beloved manifests in powerful ways that no man-made fabric of culture can hold back, let alone squelch, before God accomplishes his task(s).

Most importantly, “Jesus Revolution” highlights the Christian pursuit of righteousness, bolstered by the love of a relentless God who wants nothing less than the hearts of his people, naked and unashamed to call him LORD. Such a standard of righteousness is not easily cultivated. Humility in the face of pride and eyes fixated on God to turn away the fear of man and self-perception are necessary qualities for Christ to shine through.

Despite the flawed human element in Jesus Revolution, there is certainly a hero. There’s no use looking in conventional places for this hero. Classes on theology can’t promise to reveal the hero in hiding, least of all at the pulpit, in between the pages of the Bible from which the blue and black-suited pastor reads with stoic, crystal clarity. This hero made the first appearance at Pentecost where the Church felt for the first time the pure, unfettered power of God in their longues, which is exactly where Greg met the hero while submerged under water during his baptism with Chuck Smith, an army of teenage onlookers on the beach waiting for their turn to feel the fire of holiness from God in their chests.

“Jesus Revolution” portrays a divine encounter that ignites a lifelong bond with the Savior, who understands our suffering and molds our hearts to resemble his own—more valuable than gold or rubies.