Some (not entirely apolitical) holiday poetry

I'm waiting to hear something
from right-wing hate media
about the so-called "war on Christmas"
including all the Santa and Mrs. Claus
actors dying from Covid.

Hannity, Bannon, Beck, Shapiro, Carlson,
have already convinced millions
the pandemic is a Democratic party
ploy to turn the country into the Soviet Union;
blaming the dearth of mall Santas
on it as well seems like a no-brainer.

Maybe we shouldn't be giving them
any ideas, although I'm not all that
concerned. I doubt they're into poetry.

It's nearly midnight,
and I just wrote "From Santa"
in red Sharpie

on the present under the ornament
my son stuck together
with felt and popsicle sticks.

There was a time not long ago
I swore I would never
lie to my children like this,

never invoke the hoary, corpulent
somethinggenerian whenever
they misbehaved,

never sit at the kitchen table
with them hammering out
lists of superfluous toys,

never try to explain
how the big guy makes it around
the world overnight in a sleigh,

or how he finagles
his gelatinous frame into
our house without a fireplace.

Eventually they'll become
little forensic handwriting analysts
and figure out why Santa's penmanship

so closely resembles
their mother's, stop
rising at dawn like chickens,

and sign quote marks in the air
when reading "From Santa"
in red Sharpie

as I train the video camera
on their morphing adolescence.
Maybe they'll mean it

when they now never to lie
to their children,
leaving only shredded wrapping paper
in their wakes.

It's that time again
for bombast and sanctimony,
when the phony get religious
and the religious get phony.

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