Santa’s Panopticon: Or; How the Next Gen Ruined Christmas

Bear with me while I try to explain how the XBox One ruined Christmas. Wednesday night I switched things up a little bit in order to make sure that I was prepared to record the podcast on time. I ran Pea’s bath at 5 so that I could make sure that she was free of the Rorshach test that she seemed to have painted on her body in art class that day before going to bed. Since I was still making dinner at the same time I pulled out the old baby monitor and put it in the bathroom with her so that I could make sure that she was safe (and not flooding the bathroom) while I finished up dinner. Skip ahead a half hour or so. Once the aforementioned kid was well scrubbed and shampooed I did the usual “paranoid about electric powered things around water” move and unplugged the baby monitor before leaving the bathroom.

After dinner I sent Pea upstairs to the game room for some entertainment time before it was time to go to bed and took to putting away dinner. I saw that the baby monitor receiver was still plugged in and thought that it was odd that it wasn’t making the weird buzzing staticky sound that it usually does when it’s not getting a signal from the monitor itself, but since my hands were full I left it where it was and went back to what I was doing. And then I heard it….Pea’s voice, clear as a bell role playing Pokemon and My Little Pony Superhero scenarios. It was coming through the baby monitor! Now the other end of it 1) should have been unplugged and 2) Was several rooms away through 3 closed doors in the master bathroom. And then I realized that the XBox One was on in the room where Pea was playing! The signal from the friggin’ connect was being picked up by my baby monitor and I could hear everything that she was saying and that meant that anyone else nearby tuned into the same frequency could hear the same thing! So theoretically some over exhausted parent in my sub-division may have been awakened at 3 a.m. on any given day to a stream of profanities about zombies and what I was going to do with a sledge saw. People could hear me! And then it hit me, what if they had a video (baby) monitor? Maybe I hadn’t been overly paranoid when I made the quick naked dash from the shower to the game room to grab my freshly laundered robe from the laundry basket only to get creeped out by the dull glow of the white XBox symbol on my Kinect and the thought that someone somewhere might be watching me. But the most fucked up thing about this situation? I asked for it. I plugged in the Kinect and chose not to mute the mic or cover that all seeing eye that signs me in to the XBox One when I plop down on the couch in the game room. 

So what, if anything, does this have to do with Christmas you are surely asking yourself by now? For innumerable years small children across the globe have been frightened into not beating up siblings, clearing their dishes, and cleaning up their rooms by the threat that Santa was making a list of naughty and nice children and checking the fucking thing twice, even! And then tortuous parents kicked it up a notch in 2005 with the Elf on the Shelf (or as the bastard gets called in my house, Simon). Now, if you don’t don’t know the book, movie, toy let me give you a quick run down. The aforementioned elf magically appears in a child’s house sometime near the Christmas season and perches his ass on some random vantage point. From that vantage point the elf watches the children of the house all day long and then after the kids go to bed the elf magically flies off to the North Pole to report back to Santa so that he can decide which list the child’s name should go on. To make it worse, the story scares the kids out of touching the elf and discovering that he is not real by telling them that if they touch the elf that he will lose his magic powers and never be able to return. No trauma there, right?

So as parents participating in this tradition we basically agree to psychologically scar our children by entering them into Santa’s panopticon. They sit all day watched by this snitch of an elf and then are so convinced of the omnipresence of Santa that they will (hopefully) be better behaved during the entire Christmas season. And once again, we asked for. Parents asked for it by participating in this new “tradition” and children ask for it by participating in the whole Santa based Christmas (and I’m sure that the big red sack full of toys plays a huge roll in that).

And while I am not writing a letter to Santa (or behaving particularly well), I do have my own kind of stalker perched night on top of my television. Now the question that I have been asking myself is will I allow this “spying” business to continue. Will Simon come back next year (or even stick around this year for a matter of fact)? And how long will it take for me to unplug the XBox One Kinect so that I run around my game room naked and curse with abandon at zombie? Am I willing to sacrifice a little tradition for some peace of mind and the chance for Pea to torture the dog with hugs without worrying about whether or not Santa will bring her Frozen princesses and Wolverine action figure/mask set. Only time will tell. Until then I’ll keep my clothes on in the game room and keep one eye on that creepy little motherfucker on the shelf.