This Santa-tale, which might have been crafted by the same creator(s) of “Santa Claus in Trouble,” isn’t nearly as strong in the mythic sense. But since I’ve been writing a lot about crossovers lately, I can’t resist the temptation to hold forth on the novel idea of having the folkloric figure of Santa interact with the literary creations of Lewis Carroll.
The reader may suspect that the old “all a dream” resolution is in the offing when Santa, about to go to bed before making his Xmas Eve ride, encounters young Alice, who wants him to bring Christmas to Wonderland. Good-hearted Santa can’t resist her appeal, and she leads him to the rabbit-hole into Wonderland. Since the author has a lot of Wonderland-tropes to condense into a very short tale, Alice gets the old fellow to try a few bites of a “magic mushroom” (minus its resident Caterpillar). The two of them spend a couple of pages changing size, until Santa finally gets into Wonderland (“At least this is easier than going down a chimney”).
He soothes the weeping Mock Turtle with a toy of its own species, but the White Rabbit gives Santa attitude, so that the frustrated old elf calls him “mad as a March Hare” (more condensation). Later Santa duplicates Alice’s feat of growing too big for the house of the Duchess, and visits the Mad Tea Party, consisting of the White Rabbit, the Dormouse, and the Mad Hatter.
Santa tries to introduce the joys of Christmas tree-trimming to the partiers, but the Hatter screws things up with another size-change that takes them into “Mother Goose Land,” apparently for no reason except that the author remembered that the next Wonderland character Santa meets, Humpty Dumpty, did not originate with Lewis Carroll. “Mother Goose Land” or not, the Red Queen’s court is playing croquet in this territory, and she gets mad when Humpty spoils the game by falling upon her wickets. In the story’s best exchange, the Queen orders her card-soldiers to cut off Humpty’s head, and one guard responds, “He’s nothing but head!” The soldiers turn on Santa—Alice having absented herself from the last two pages—but he blows all the cards away just as book-Alice does, wakes up, and immediately rushes off to begin his world-wide ride.
It’s a pleasant confection of a story, whose main point seems to be exasperate Santa’s genial personality by exposing him to the terminal naughtiness of the Wonderland crew, none of whom express the least desire to learn about any aspect of Christmas, not even gift-gettting-and-giving.
No comments:
Post a Comment