Authors: Penn Jillette
Doctor Richard Dawkins had a Christian education, but he kicked that way before taking his seat in the Darwin Barcalounger at Oxford. The bad guys got the Dawk until he was seven. So what? That race has been run; they fought the truth and the truth won. I went to Sunday school and the reality of the creationist myth stayed as true for me as the certainty that the Greenfield High School football team was going to win the Turkey Day game because we had P . . . E . . . P. . . PEP! PEP! PEP! Jesus Christ, doesn’t anyone but Paul Simon and me remember it was all crap we learned in high school anyway and we children always knew it?
Evolution was true before Darwin. Evolution was true in the sixteenth century when Loyola did or didn’t write that quotation. Evolution has been true as long as there has been life on earth, and it always will be true. If there is life on other planets, it’ll be true there too. If you pick your side carefully, you don’t have to fight as hard.
All this assumes you’re an out-of-the-closet atheist parent. Truth doesn’t live in the closet. You have to make it clear to everyone, including your children, that there is no god. If you’re not doing that every chance you get, then the other side will win. They’ll win only in the short term; but we only get to live in the short term. You don’t have to fight, but you have to do your part—you have to tell the truth. You have to be honest. You don’t have to force schools to say there’s no god, but you have to say it yourself. You have to say it all the time. No one can relax in a closet.
Those of us who are out-of-the-closet atheist parents have all that extra time on Sunday mornings to love our children. We can use that time to hold them, laugh, and dance around together. Tell your children there’s no god and be done with it. Jesus Christ, your children aren’t stupid.
“I Fought the Law”
—Sonny Curtis and The Crickets
“I Fought the Law”
—The Bobby Fuller Four
“I Fought the Law”
—The Clash
Up Your Santa Claus Lane
T
he most important thing in the world is to tell our children the truth, but we lie to them all the time. By “we,” I don’t mean people in general, and by “our children,” I don’t mean children in general. I mean my wife and I lie to our daughter, Moxie, and our son, Zolten, right to their beautiful little smiling faces. We tell our loving little children, who must trust us with their very lives, that Disneyland is never open except when we’re already planning on taking them there. We tell them the frozen yogurt place is closed after dinner on Wednesdays, and that’s after we’ve lied that frozen yogurt is ice cream. The frozen yogurt place stretches the truth that frozen yogurt is even one wispy RCH healthier than ice cream. The frozen yogurt people may be stretching the truth, but we are lying sacks of shit to the people we care most about in our lives. It’s not preplanned lying, it’s lazy lying.
I feel weird about lying to my children every time I do it. I do it less than my wife, but only because I do less child wrangling than my wife. I try to tell them the real reason I want them to do or not do something, but the real reason is often “Because I said so.”
Maybe it is better just to lie.
Emily and I don’t lie to our children about Santa Claus.
Santa Claus is an atheist battleground. Some do, some don’t. Michael Goudeau does, and he certainly has his atheist/skeptical cred. He’s the real deal in the no-god camp. He’s won a Writers Guild award and has been nominated for a zillion Emmys (another lie we tell: “It’s an honor just to be nominated”) for writing with us on
Penn & Teller: Bullshit!
He was the cohost on my radio show for a couple of years, and he’s been my close friend forever. We agree on almost everything except sports (he likes them), his shitty musical taste (he has it), and Santa Claus (he lies about him). I know a lot of great dads and Goudeau is one of them.
Every Xmas time, Goudeau argues with my wife about Santa. I think the Goudeaus do the whole production—coming down the chimney, milk and cookies, reindeer, you name some winter seasonal bullshit and the Goudeaus do it. The Jillettes don’t do any of it. Not really. This year my wife bent a little and we had a “The Jillettes Don’t Celebrate Xmas Tree.” It wasn’t even a pine tree, and no angels. And not one piece of reindeer shit. I’m not sure I’m that against Santa Claus myself (it seems like a bit less of a lie than the yogurt thing), but, man, my wife sure has a hard-on for that jolly little elf.
In interviews, when I’m asked “How do you atheists celebrate Xmas?” I answer that the Jillette atheists don’t do anything. The interviewer assumes that I’m the goofy Scrooge and I’m denying our children the joy of Xmas. I am denying our children the joy of Xmas, but I’m sure doing it with my wife’s blessing, so to speak. It was her idea, but I’ll take responsibility. I agree with her. I agree with her because she’s right. I love Goudeau, but I don’t sleep with him every night. Another friend of mine, a cynical socialist (isn’t that redundant?), insisted that his daughter be force-fed Santa, so when the disillusionment hit her hard, she’d crash and throw out the baby Jesus with the Santa bathwater. This is the same guy who wanted to send his daughter to Catholic school to be sure she’d be a hard-core atheist her whole life. Socialists love that manipulation shit. It’s good that he couldn’t convince his wife to go along with him.
I love tradition and I love ritual. My mom and dad’s Jillette household celebrated Xmas with all the trimmings. We had a tree with those bubbling lights that never really worked, and we strung colored
popcorn. We had a crèche on top of the TV with real straw and a wax candle Santa standing in the nativity, a bit out of place at three times the size of the wise men, wearing arctic clothing and with a waxy wick sticking out of his red hat. Monster giant Santa stood laughing at the baby Jesus standing next to an out-of-scale giant Styrofoam Frosty the Snowman, who looked higher than Keith Richards in the basement at Nellcôte. Once you’re buying virgin birth and dying for other people’s sins, a talking snowman and a fat elf in a flying sleigh is easy.
I’ve had a bone to pick with Frosty since I was a child. I begin ranting about Frosty incessantly from the first time Xmas music pops up on the radio until about Valentine’s Day, when Sam Cooke’s “Cupid” takes over my head. The song “Frosty the Snowman” makes me crazy: “There must have been some magic in that old silk hat they found, for when they placed it on his head, he began to dance around.” Correlation is not causation, you stupid Gene Autry and the Cass County Boys song–composing motherfucker! It’s this kind of sloppy thinking that is the real “reason for the season.” Oh, and the other reindeer didn’t all love Rudolph for any sort of humanitarian (reindeeratarian?) reason, they just needed him for his bioluminescent nose that one night—we know they will all go back to disrespecting him, laughing at him, shunning him, and calling him names the first moderately unfoggy Xmas Eve that rolls around.
My mom and dad lied to me about Santa. When I was very young, my dad was a jail guard and he had to work Xmas morning, so we had our celebration on Xmas Eve, and it was explained to me that Santa started his annual journey in New England, because we were so close to the North Pole. I bought it.
Many Xmas people think that only those with bitter childhood Xmas memories would deprive their children of Xmas, but I have only fond memories of Xmas with my mom and dad. Even when Mom and Dad’s Xmas tree changed to plastic, then finally to a little ceramic one my mom made at a senior center crafts class to sit on top of the TV, I still loved Xmas with my mom and dad. I liked my mom’s system of keeping the cards with the toys so I could write all my thank-yous. I
liked the zillion Mounds bars that I vomited up one Xmas morning that put me off candy coconut to this day. I liked my mom and dad marveling at the shoebox-size brick of a first cell phone that Teller gave me one year. My mom and dad felt a joy in watching me open presents, a joy they said I would only understand once I had children. They were right, but I don’t get that joy from my children on December 25, and we don’t talk about Santa Claus. Our children hear about Santa Claus from their peers, but he’s less of a big deal in that circle than Dora the Explorer. And since I tore Frosty a new snowy and coal asshole, allow me to bitch that “Dora” and “explorer” don’t rhyme any more than “action” and “Jackson,” unless you’re a lobsterman in Maine. When the movie
Action Jackson
came out, Teller was suggesting slug lines: “
Action Jackson:
it’s just assonance,” and “
Action Jackson:
you tell him it doesn’t rhyme.” Unfortunately, Carl Weathers never consulted Teller.
“Let’s take the Christ out of Xmas” would be a fine slogan for the Winter Solstice, and American advertising has done some wonderful work toward that goal. The right-wing fucking nut jobs are correct—Xmas is becoming secularized. That’s a good thing. It’s secular to the point that the Christ part of Xmas doesn’t really piss the Jillettes off too much. I just wish that those who are secularizing Xmas (or taking it back from the Christians—it did start out as a pagan holiday) would admit they want it secular to sell more shit to more different people. When I was in high school I had a girlfriend, Linda.
†
She was way smart (still is) and way sexy (still is). My parents never talked to me about sex or drugs, but her parents talked about little else. They were liberals. They listened to Bob Dylan (maybe not literally, but in my memory they were playing
Blonde on Blonde
all the time) and had
The Joy of Sex
on their coffee table, probably in Spanish (I was too embarrassed to open it). They read novels in Spanish. They took a bus from Massachusetts to Washington, DC, to protest the Vietnam war. They were totally groovy liberals who I’m sure are now fine with all the killing overseas, because Obama is in charge and he’s liberal. In high school their daughter and I had an opportunity to go to Cape Cod and stay on a houseboat together. We were so excited because we’d get a chance to sleep together. Really sleep. We’d done every sex act known to Henry Miller, but we hadn’t really slept together. We’d never heard each other snore. We were very excited. My parents were fine with my going to Cape Cod with Linda. If they hadn’t been fine, we would have had to talk about sex, and my parents sure weren’t going to do that. We were old-style New England. Her parents were okay with us going to Cape Cod, like they were liberally okay with us fucking, but made a comment that they knew we didn’t care about Cape Cod (who does?), we were just going to stay on the houseboat so we could sleep together. Linda was so fucking insulted and angry. She was outraged. How could her parents say something like that? She wanted them to say we wanted to go to Cape Cod for . . . what? For the . . . cod? She was offended that they didn’t believe we were going to Cape Cod as tourists and we would just happen to stay on a houseboat. She felt they should take us at our word. She thought they should act like they believed the lie.
Linda was just embarrassed about her parents talking about us sleeping together. She was embarrassed, but this is one of the things that bugs me so much about some liberals that I’ve known. I’m writing about liberals that I know personally. I’m not writing about liberals in general—I don’t know liberals in general. The self-identified “progressives” and “liberals” that I know are bitter fucking manipulative hateful whack jobs. The self-identified “Tea Party” people I know are bitter fucking manipulative hateful whack jobs. The common denominator is not politics. The common denominator is me. The liberals I know will say that medical marijuana is a foot in the door, the first step to legalizing marijuana for everyone. And when the right wing accuses them of wanting that same exact thing, they ridicule the right-wingers and say “What about the people suffering horribly from cancer who need to toke?” My liberal friends think the literal reading of the Bible is nonsense and we should celebrate other religions and cultures, and when the right says “They’re trying to take the Christ out
of Christmas,” liberals go bug-fucking-nutty. Just about everyone who writes and produces comedy on TV is a fucking lefty and is pushing the agenda of gay rights and liberal causes, and my liberal friends—even though they’re against the fucking corporations running TV—are thrilled with those writers, but when the fucking psycho right wing says the TV writers are doing just what they’re doing, my liberal friends scoff. I think that’s why my lefty friends are so comfortable calling the Tea Party people racist, even though the Tea Party doesn’t say they themselves are racist. My lefty friends just assume that everyone lies about their real agenda. Racism is evil collectivist bullshit, marijuana (and all drugs—fuck the FDA) should be legal, let’s get the Christ out of Xmas, and Linda and I were going to Cape Cod to sleep together and have intense pre-AIDS, no-holes-barred teenage sex.
And Hollywood is lefty. So what? You can say what you want about
Penn & Teller: Bullshit!,
but we don’t fucking lie about our agenda. We are libertarian atheists, and even though most of our shows aren’t about that (as a matter of fact it would be hard to tell any of that from our live show in Vegas), if you do read some atheist libertarian vibe in something we do, it’s probably because we put it there. Why wouldn’t oversimplifying, heartless, childish libertarians put their crazy selfish ideas in their shows, just like the commie TV writers put their shit in their situation comedies?
Just fucking cop to it.
As much as I’d love Xmas to be a celebration of commercialism with no religious overtones, it’s not quite all the way there yet. I’m sure it’ll get there. Commercialism is beautiful and wonderful and open and real, and belief in Jesus is superficial and creepy zombie stuff. If the urban legend about Santa being created by Coca-Cola were true, I might be able to get behind it, but Santa still has too much baggage on his sleigh besides toys.
The Goudeaus lied to their children completely, but the Goudeau children worked together and finally figured out that there was no Santa Claus. Joey, the older brother, started it off with the tooth fairy. He busted his mom and said, “So you and Dad are the tooth fairy?” Theresa
answered, “Yes, Joey,” and Joey followed up with the logical conclusion: “So you and Dad fly all over the world taking children’s teeth out from under their pillows and giving them money?” Yup, that was his thinking. He told his little sister, Emily Peach, and she went the other way with the logical conclusion, and after Joey and Emily talked for a while, the tooth fairy, Santa, and the Easter Bunny all bit the dust. It was Mom and Dad, and there was no flying-around-the-world involved at all.