My Asexual Love for Santa

I was 2 years away from my first period when I realized that Santa was  theoretical. The longevity of my belief in Santa makes it seem implausible that I left the church at only age 15 as churches prefer easy believers.

Santa felt safer than God. I did’t believe in the penalizing “naughty list” Santa, I believed in a Santa who didn’t keep tabs. The Bible told me God kept logs of our sins, but in the absence of a Santa bible, I made up my own jolly old elf beliefs. Not only was Santa un-punishing but he was also warm, loving, and smelled of spice. He wore fur and flesh whereas God had no form, so my child mind viewed him as a huge Ice Cube in the sky. Santa was the dad who didn’t leave and the only man I never sexualized. I even stayed asexually true to Santa when Kurt Russel, who I was infatuated with since he gave grown up voice to Copper in “The Fox and the Hound,” took up the role in 2018. 

The first solid crush I recall having on an older man was when I was 15 and working at Earl May, a local nursery that sold plants, lawn supplies, and strangely enough for now but not for 1990, small mammals and fish. One of our regular customers was a man in his 60s and I’d rush to be the one to help him dip and catch his fish whenever he came in. His old blue pickup was so small that it appeared to have been built at a different scale from newer models, a toy come to life to cart him around. It fit his small stature tho. He was philosophical and uninterested in me - two traits I’d gravitate towards in men for too long. Looking back all these decades later it’s bewildering to remember being 15 and having a crush on a man nearly my grandfather’s age at the same time I was making out with a 20 year old coworker on bags of fertilizer in the stock room. 

Even Santa’s older age status didn’t make him sensually appealing. And it’s not his relation to Christmas that is an arousal killer as Christmas is full of erotic potency. 

• A choir of angels, with their perfect mouths shaped in a perpetual “O” and their softly closed eyes can elicit an erotic twinkle. 

• The hot breath of reindeer that brings the invisible into wet light on a frigid night can languid your winter limbs. Imagine their holiday herd, peeping into windows they’ve fogged up with thick exhales that drip in viscous rivulets to reveal the naked interior. 

• And then there are the carrots, all the fucking carrots.

It’s not that I saw Santa as asexual either. He was not without sex as it’s easy to see that he and Mrs Claus have a healthy sex life. Maybe it was that his sexual compass pointed only one way; home.