Sunday saw Toronto’s 107th Santa Claus Parade. The parade passed the building where I live, so it was hard to miss. It was a sunny day—anomalous weather in an otherwise dreary November—and that gave all the onlookers a lift. Strangers smiled at one another. Children waved at the floats. A celebratory mood wafted through the air. It was the sort of event that sends writers into fits of hyperbole.
Not everyone was delighted to be there, of course. Some children can’t cope with the noise and the crowds. As an introvert, I can empathize with children who want to hide from it all. I discovered one boy, maybe five, hiding behind the guard rail beside the on ramp from Bloor Street East to Mount Pleasant Avenue. He turned to eye me as I took a burst of shots and he was clearly unhappy to be there.
I pushed my way through the crowds, all the way to Avenue Road, then followed the parade south around Queen’s Park Crescent. It was difficult to pass the Museum Subway station. People were lined up at a couple food trucks. But the chief culprit blocking my path was SpongeBob SquarePants. I wanted to kick him in the nuts and accuse him of being an entitled privileged sponge, but held back because I might have upset all the children who swarmed around him and asked their parents who he was. I get the feeling his day has come and gone. He will float away to join the pantheon of animated has-beens like the Jetsons, Bugs Bunny, and Charlie Brown.
Back up on the southeast corner of Bloor and University, a collection of Jesus freaks had got themselves all excited, waving their signs and shouting through bullhorns. They were decrying the celebration of Santa Claus with all his pagan trappings while the true centre of the celebration—namely the great JC himself—was going ignored. A police officer tried to calm the main spokesperson who answered the police officer’s soothing words by shouting through the bullhorn. I found the officer’s patience and restraint exemplary, especially since the loudmouth’s speech was teetering onto the hateful side of the street (notwithstanding the fact that he assumed the stance of a victim suffering the very sort of hatred he was spewing).
I didn’t follow the logic of his shouting, but he seemed to be saying that if this had been a Muslim parade to mark Ramadan, and the marchers had dressed it up in pagan symbols that were demeaning to Islam, then it would be deemed a form of hate speech and they would be prohibited from marching. The same was true of them as Christians. Their beliefs were being demeaned by these displays of paganism (elves in green leotards, pied pipers piping, SpongeBob). Overwhelmingly, people ignored their rantings. Sometimes apathy is the highest virtue. I’ve seen these same people with these same signs spouting their same passive aggressive “look at how the world oppresses me” message at the Toronto Pride Parade. If Dr. Seuss were writing his “How The Grinch Stole Christmas!” in 2019, I think the Grinch would be a fanatical Christian.
Meanwhile, at Bay and Bloor, I saw an old man with white hair lying on the cold pavement and holding out a small tin pan to collect coins. Righteous screaming never did anything to ease simple human need. Father Christmas is a beggar. While the brass band blared its peace on Earth, good will and all that, the tin pan beat time: spare change, spare change, and we all passed by like Levites on the road to Jericho.
