A new Christmas fable
Courtesy of Raconteur Press.
While Santa Claus brings gifts to good little boys and girls, and Krampus punishes children who misbehave, the less well-known Välkkykettu (Flickerfox) traditionally rewards those children who are both good and bad: those hyperactive, impulsive, chaos-gremlins we all know and (sometimes) love. To these lucky children, he brings gifts that are equal parts delightful and disastrous.
When he shows up, his tattered, jingling pack holds presents that create pure, concentrated chaos. Things like old-style chemistry sets, Nerf auto-cannons, and make-your-own glitter bomb kits. If it makes a mess or can cause minor injury accompanied by gleeful giggles, some over-excitable kid is going to get it.
The Flickerfox doesn’t check lists twice. He doesn’t care if you’ve been “good or bad”. What he does care about it is pure mischief… and that you’re smart enough not to get caught (which is why he’s also considered the patron saint of E-4s everywhere). If you don’t understand what an impulse is because you’ve never stopped to think about what you’re doing, you’re on the Flickerfox’s list.
So if you’re lucky, sometime around 3 a.m. on the longest night of the year, you’ll hear claws skittering across the roof, bottlebrush tail thumping like a drum, and a purring voice whisper outside your window: “Hey, kid, you know what would be fun...”
~Text by Sam Robb and others of the Rac Press staff.
When I first read this little scene that Sam put together I was utterly charmed.
The more I thought about it, though, the more I started to think that the world — that children — need the Välkkykettu. Children — more than ever — need that touch of chaos, that (mostly) controlled brush with danger, to find their limits; to explore those limits; and — eventually — exceed those limits. To become the healthy adults that society desperately needs.
Childhood these days has become too safe. Santa Claus, bless him, has become over-nerfed.
And that’s not entirely a bad thing, but children need to test their limits.
Saint Nicholas should bring a teddy bear, but behind him should come the Flickerfox with a chemistry set that has chlorates and permanganates in it.
There is such a thing as a too-safe childhood — and I fear that we are already there.
Father Christmas drops off the latest X-Box game, and a furry paw should lay down a wooden sword and a paper map with an ‘X’ on it. What’s at the ‘X’? Good question — treasure? A clubhouse? The corpse of a recently-deceased vagrant? The kids will have to gather some friends and go find out.
Keeping children safe is a truly honorable thing to do, but they absolutely cannot grow into what they need to be — the adults that society needs them to be — in over-regulated safety.
Santa Claus goes by the shelter and leaves a 12-year-old girl a knitted scarf and a warm coat. The Välkkykettu leaves a pen-knife, a flashlight, and some OC1.
When the nine-year-old boy who burns his eyebrows off with rocket candy2 becomes the 39-year-old man who sets the first step on the dusty red surface of Mars, the Flickerfox will chuckle softly from the shadows.
When the little girl in the shelter takes the confidence gained from her gifts to go further than anyone in her family has ever gone, a glimmer of red fur will watch approvingly.
And every time a delighted child indulges in chaos; tests his or her limits with BB guns, slingshots, model rocketry, “energetic chemistry”; learns the limits, then learns to break those limits; and becomes an adult with no limits, doing mighty things …
… The Välkkykettu dances exuberantly in his forest glade as the Northern lights flicker overhead.
I like this.
Joyous Noel, everyone, and don’t forget to give the kids the gift of a little chaos and excitement.
Ian
Boy, did I catch cornbread hell for that one. Last time I was asked to take a name from the Christmas tree.
Stump remover, powdered sugar, and rust.
Back in the early days of the milblog that I contributed to (Sgt. Stryker's Daily Brief) I remember a long comment thread all about dangerous stuff - from the mildly hazardous to the REALLY dangerous - that we had done. Stunting on bicycles, tall trees, cliffs and black powder covered most of it. The insight that I came away from the discussion was that kids had to mess around with the mildly dangerous stuff and risk injury as tweens and teens in order to learn their own limits and test their own judgement. Better to wipe out on a bike, or fall out of a tall tree and break a bone or suffer a mild concussion ... than to do something really, really reckless and daring in a motor vehicle, and crash and possibly kill someone else, or yourself.
My daughter, the very day after she got the hang of riding her two-wheeled bike, got reckless and overconfident, hit a broken bit of something in the road and went over the handle-bars. Bruises and scrapes ... but oh, was she careful on the bike after that.
I always figured there was a being like the Välkkykettu around my Christmases. There was no way that my parents would just go away and leave bottle rockets laying around for us to play with. I mean, what sane parent would leave children an explosive that they could fire at each other from across the yard?
Oh, and BB guns, and Dirt Bike's (With that long piece of wood we could make a ramp out of.)
I miss that flickerfox. The world needs more of them.