The Binary That Binds

Naughty is just another word for Other.

Just a few days ago I found myself in the hell that is the pre-Christmas Market Basket. Down each aisle I was assailed with appalling displays of the latest holiday products. Gingerbread cookies, peppermint mocha coffee creamer, Coca-Cola cans plastered the Big Man’s flabby face—each and every product was conscripted into the campaign of Christmas, promoting, propagandizing, and proselytizing under the guise of seasonal cheer.

Besieged by gingerbread and peppermint, I sought refuge in the bread aisle, only to witness a common Christmastime occurrence play out in front of my very eyes. In front of the ciabatta, a six-year-old screamed. Ostensibly about a box of hot fudge sundae Poptarts abandoned two aisles over.

His mother was helpless. She begged, pleased, groveled before him in what was frankly a pitiful display, but the child—a consumer, first and foremost—could not unlearn his learned behavior. Many spectators began leaving the bread aisle due to discomfort at this point but I lingered. Not just because the ciabatta was the very bread I needed and there was only a single loaf left, but because I had a sneaking suspicion of how this would end.

“You’re gonna be on the Naughty List,” she shrieked. “Santa’s watching, so you better stop.”

And the child stopped.

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In the earliest years of meaning making, the child is indoctrinated within the Naughty-Nice Binary, a social credit system rivaled by only China, inflicted upon the child by a corporatized holiday both practical and existential in its threats.

The child learns early, almost immediately, the rules of the game. Don’t shout. Don’t cry. Don’t pout. And you will be rewarded. Santa Claus will come to town and you will be bestowed with gifts and it will the best day of the year.

And that’s what it’s about, too. Not just the material good but the stigma—the not having. So when your father tells you he’s got a direct line to Santa and he’s not still not too happy about how you whipped a contested king-sized Kit Kat at your sister’s face on Halloween—he’s not just threatening you with no Nintendo Gamecube. He’s threatening you with social ostracism and that is actually abusive, by the way.

But if the child is nice, everything is just dandy, right? He is permitted to take part in the ritual, the social rite that is the customary enumeration of presents amongst his friends on January 2 when they return to school. He’ll be made fun of, of course, for eagerly wearing not one but two new clothing articles on the first day back, but nonetheless his status within the group will be affirmed. But what of the child who returns to school in January with nothing—no fresh Nikes, no EnV touch, and certainly no smile?

Well, they were naughty.

Johnny didn’t get anything but he never does his homework and is on like the 4 times tables and gets lunch for free and it’s kind of bullshit, so maybe that’s why he didn’t get anything for Christmas.

Or Billy? Who appallingly switched his Pokemon socks to Yu-Gi-Oh ones in the middle of the reading rug mid Strega Nona. Who told the teacher to shut up and would bang his head on the table during lunch well and also didn’t do his homework well, yeah, def naughty.

Oh and you can’t forget Manny, that fucking lunatic, who every couple of weeks would just go off, flip his desk, pummel the whiteboard, tear the pencil sharpener out of the wall and hum it at the teacher’s head. He once took off straight down the hallway and out the door and didn’t reappear until high school. Not exactly nice behavior.

So yeah. It makes sense these kids aren’t coming back from Christmas break with new shoes and shirts. They suck. We did our homework. We did our chores. We played by the rules. We deserve these gifts.

And so we march. In lockstep, into adulthood, invigorated by our common identity, indestructible in our ideology of intrinsic worth. We worked hard, we paid our taxes, we contributed to society. We were good. And that’s why we have this Grand Cherokee, and this suburban house, and this pool and this boat and vacation home and that mom—that shameless mom over there begging for $15 an hour, who’s using her EBT on Oreos, for fuck’s sake—she was naughty, we were nice.

Good and bad, winners and losers, the haves and the have-nots. The Naughty-Nice Binary stratifies us and insists its judgment is just, leaving one half othered, the other ordained. It is the central, dominating myth of Christmas, and it is with this myth that the Big Man damns us, flicking his finger left to right as we step off the Polar Express and onto the ice.