I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus …

The Christmas Cheating Song

I know, I know, that cute song by wholesome little Jimmy Boyd wasn’t about cheating. Leave our cute Christmas songs alone. Leave us that one thing untarnished, at least! Santa was Daddy, dammit! Why do I have to bring everything back to infidelity?! (The clue is in the site name, by the way.)

I hear you. I do, truly.

And yet … every Christmas I find myself humming that little tune and eye-rolling. I wonder how easily duped young Jimmy might have been. Maybe Santa wasn’t Daddy after all? Maybe Mommy had noooo problem gaslighting innocent little Jimmy to protect her tawdry little secret? Maybe Mommy did waaaaay worse than kissing ‘Santa’ but freckle-faced Jimmy was asleep for that bit? (Be grateful, little Jimmy - seeing that stuff can scar a kid!) Maybe it wasn’t just last night that Mommy was tickling Santa? And maybe the ‘tickling’ wasn’t just under Santa’s beard? (In fact, maybe it was scratching at that STD itch.) And yes, what a total laugh if Daddy had seen it all go down. Hysterical. I’m splitting my sides at the mere thought.

After counseling cheaters, affair partners, and faithful spouses for so many years it’s unsurprising that such close association with cheater-think and the insidious nature of infidelity in our cultures has developed in me a Seventh Sense: I see cheaters everywhere. (Sorry, Haley Joel Osment.)

Maybe the wholesome innocence of that song is just so cloyingly cutesy that I feel an urge to smash it in the face with an infidelity machete?

And then I found this, and I felt so much better.

Wayfarer

“I'm not a teacher, only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as you.” ~ George Bernard Shaw

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