Santa's Twin

As the next Christmas neared, I was taken aback when my niece Heather asked if Insanity Claus was coming back again this year. I had forgotten all about him - I saw it as a one time thing. So all you people who enjoy Insanity Claus can thank Heather Pinto for his continued existence.

The story was embelleshied this year by explaining the relationship between Santa and Insanity Claus. They are brothers. Even better, they are twins. Insanity Claus overcompensates for his brother being the dominant twin. Insanity Claus is emotionally off balance, and is jealous of his brother. He doesn't like how everyone knows who Santa is, but people don't know about him - or worse, mistake Insanity as being Santa.

Insanity moved as far from his brother as he could. He doesn't have unkind feelings for his brother, he just needed his space. So he settled at the South Pole.

Origins

As a parent of young children and a Christian, I wanted to separate Santa Claus from the Religious aspect of Christmas. I knew my kids would eventually learn that Santa Claus was a lie - a really big lie! It doesn't take much to extrapolate this to the Nativity. So I needed to find a way to keep the fun part of Christmas as fun, and the holy part of Christmas as holy.

So I decided to create my own Christmas theme persona - after the fact.

We had bought a floor futan to use in the tiny hallway we called a family room. Having small children, it got dirty fast. We washed the cover of the futan matress, and it shrank. So I thought: What are we going to do with this huge zippered bag?

Then a lot of thoughts came rushing in at once. I remembered a Groucho Marx movie called Coconuts where Groucho and Chico are arguing over a contract. During the discussion, Groucho keeps tearing parts off of the contract to discard those clauses. They eventually end up with a tiny peice of paper, which they both sign. Part of the dialog went like this - Groucho looks at the document and says "Insanity Clause! There aint no Insanity Clause!". This is where the name of the persona came from.

I envisioned Insanity Claus coming in the bag with the gifts. His head was sticking out of the bag, and he was jumping around like you do at a summer picnic rally race.

So - how do I differentiate Insanity Claus from Santa Claus, but still leverage the mental image of Insanity Claus we all share. I had to keep the "outfit" basically the same, but really easy to tell the difference. I decided to make his outfit green, opposed to red, because it is the other Christmas color and because it was my favorite color (at the time).

Next was the "Ho! Ho! Ho!". Insanity Claus needed to laugh differently, so he goes: "Ha! Ha! Ha!".

So what does Insanity Claus bring to children? Crazy stuff, of course. He started out simple, bringing my kids (and niece Heather) their favorite foods (whatever I could find around the house). Heather got 10 LBs of potatos. Amy got chocolate pudding. Katie got a huge bottle of pickles. Jennie got some meat product in a can. Emily was a baby and I can't remember what she got.

That's all I had come up with when Insanity Claus first came.