Word: gifts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...been that way. Once there was only one day a year when people exchanged presents as we do. There was only one Santa Claus then, and it was all he could do to prepare presents for everyone and then distribute them all in one frantic night of frenzied, orgiastic gift-giving. It inevitably took a team of psychiatrists several months to rebuild the monomaniacal old man's psyche, and Santa inevitably spent the rest of the year following his recovery doing a slow build-up to that December night when he would once again rush his reindeer through the skies...
After Santa passed into the hereafter, The Santa Corporation's drive built speed. To feed its growing need for expertise, the company created a scholarship fund to train promising young elves in the ways of gift-making. Many a Ph.D. in Gift Wrap or Ribbon Tie owed his education to the corporation. These indebted techno-elves devised new gifts for the corporation to make to keep its volume of business high. They developed useless innovations that nobody needed but hordes wanted anyway. They came out with see-through lighters, scented candles, day-glo animal posters, holly-and-ivy neckties...
...huge profits by denuding evergreen forests and selling the young saplings to full-grown saps, who in turn stand the trees up in their living rooms, spend hours decorating them and throw their beloved tannenbaums out within the month. Parents who normally admonish their children to shy away from gift-bearing strangers now push their progeny to encourage the pedophilic fantasies of unshaven, porcine figures dressed in red jumpsuits and jackboots...
...best deal I've ever come across in my vast experience as a Christmas maven was a local bank that took pictures of kids (any age) with Santa, then sent you packing with a gift, food and a candy cane pen. Although the pen has long since dried up, the food digested and the toy discarded, the family still has the pictures of Santa and the clan. Some things never change...
When Saul Bellow wrote his roman a clef, Humboldt's Gift, even knowledgeable readers had trouble recalling the model for Von Humboldt Fleisher. The difficulty would not have occurred if Bellow's chief character had been based on Robert Lowell or John Berry man or Theodore Roethke. Yet, for these celebrated poets, Delmore Schwartz was once the front runner of their generation...