Santa Clause

“Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/12/should_christma.html links to “Leonard Peikoff”:http://www.capmag.com/articlePrint.asp?ID=2254, suggesting that”a bracing Randian approach is needed” to the commercialization of Christmas. But why settle for an epigone like Peikoff, when you can get the Randite vision of Christmas “straight from the horse’s mouth?”:http://www.nationallampoon.com/nl/08_features/xmasspecials/xmasspecials.asp

*Ayn Rand’s A Selfish Christmas (1951)*

bq. In this hour-long radio drama, Santa struggles with the increasing demands of providing gifts for millions of spoiled, ungrateful brats across the world, until a single elf, in the engineering department of his workshop, convinces Santa to go on strike. The special ends with the entropic collapse of the civilization of takers and the spectacle of children trudging across the bitterly cold, dark tundra to offer Santa cash for his services, acknowledging at last that his genius makes the gifts — and therefore Christmas — possible.

bq. Prior to broadcast, Mutual Broadcast System executives raised objections to the radio play, noting that 56 minutes of the hour-long broadcast went to a philosophical manifesto by the elf and of the four remaining minutes, three went to a love scene between Santa and the cold, practical Mrs. Claus that was rendered into radio through the use of grunts and the shattering of several dozen whiskey tumblers. In later letters, Rand sneeringly described these executives as “anti-life.”

(nb – I “linked”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/12/02/xmas-specials/ to this last year when it lived on its author, John Scalzi’s, “blog”:http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003030.html). As a result of which people promoting Christmas specials like the “The Happy Elf”:http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=334196 seem to have become convinced that I’m a valuable target for their marketing efforts).