“If you grow up with it, religion is real until you realize it is also imagined. And after a period of disenchantment or even depression that associates imagination with lies, you might then sense that the imagined part was also real, but because it’s imagined, you know you can change it.”
Matthew reflects on how Santa becomes more real in the home after the kids know he’s just a story, but a story of unbridled love and causeless generosity they can now participate in telling.
Happy holidays, everyone!
Show Notes
A Christmas Carol: Dedicated to Scrooge, And His Art Collection—McKenzie Wark
Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America — Abraham Josephine Riesman
Welcome to Neokayfabe—Jodie Reisman
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
Today's bonus is called The Blessed Neo-Kfabe of Santa Claus.
So, you might have heard me describe this, but I'll just repeat briefly that when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, I was a student at St. Michael's Choir School, which was founded in the 1930s to provide choral music for St. Michael's Cathedral, which is the flagship church of the Archdiocese of Toronto.
There were two really busy times of year.
One was Easter, but of course the other one was Christmas, starting in Advent and preparing for carol services and the big Christmas concert that the school put on at Massey Hall, and then a flurry of high masses at the regular Sunday times, but then also late into and then a flurry of high masses at the regular Sunday times, but then also late into the evening with the peak solemnities taking place at midnight on That was my reality.
That was the world to me.
My sense of time and daily routine revolved around the ritual year.
And every year told a mythic but also human story that went from a humble birth on the darkest night of the year to a bloody and lonely but somehow redemptive and life-giving sacrifice in the spring.
Summer and fall were the off-season, I guess.
The empty time.
Time to pause and prepare for the next whirlwind cycle.
Baseball was in the summer.
And that, unlike the liturgical drama, seemed timeless and anything could happen in the ninth inning.
You might die and stay dead.
You might rise again.
But setting aside the stories and beliefs, that entire habitus and rhythm and the bodily feelings of time that came along with that church year, they're now gone for me.
I mean, not entirely.
We'll be hosting family on Christmas Day.
But the liturgical seasonality has blurred and blended into an endless scrolling present.
Our sons are 8 and 12, and they have never known this rhythm or its inexorable, inarguable commitments and demands.
The difference is as stark as the difference between my pre-digital life and their digital immersion from birth.
But this is not any point of regret or concern for me, because they find their own liturgies in everything they do.
The 12-year-old waits for the next episode of Arcane to find out whether the revolution will succeed.
The 8-year-old has committed the scriptures of the Clone Wars to memory.
The Advent calendar is marked not by readings, but by a particular sequence of movies that we watch together, starting with Smallfoot.
Is it different from incense-filled spaces ringing with organ music?
Yes, but it's no less real and no more imaginary.
And this is part of why I'm allergic to the reactionary Jonathan Haidt type pearl clutching around technology and modernity, which never seems to truly engage what's happening for kids in their own terms.
Because the tendency is, I think, to stand above and beyond and worry about that difference more than examine it, much less lean into it.
The tendency is to think, my world was the real one, but what is this now?
How can I enter in?
Well, pick up an Xbox controller.
You'll be okay.
It's not so bad.
That childhood I had spent tethered to a cathedral is also dreamlike.
It's a fiction, and we were all meant to buy into it.
And at first, in youth, many people do.
And then, many people will see behind the veil at some point.
And when they do, they know that if they're planning on staying in community, they'll keep quiet about it.
They'll preserve the mirage.
It's like kayfabe in pro wrestling.
You've been listening to a Conspirituality bonus episode sample.
To continue listening, please head over to patreon.com slash conspirituality where you can access all of our main feed episodes ad-free as well as four years of bonus content that we've been producing.
You can also subscribe to our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
