Santa has kicked the habit in time for Christmas. No, not the sugar plum habit, or his fur-wearing habit, or his penchant for romping recklessly around open flame.
No, gentlepeople, this is the year the man in red gave up pipe tobacco, at least in a new book version of "Twas the Night Before Christmas" that has received attention from some lofty corners, including the American Library Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The self-published Pamela McColl of Vancouver, Canada, has a mission for her story, to protect children and their parents from the ravages of smoking. She mortgaged her house and sunk $200,000 into her telling of the 189-year-old holiday poem, touring the states to promote it ahead of its September release.
What, particularly, did McColl do? She excised these lines: "The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth. And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath." And she added to the cover: "Edited by Santa Claus for the benefit of children of the 21st century."
And she included a letter from Santa on the back jacket flap announcing that "all of that old tired business of smoking" is behind him, claiming (by the way) that the reindeer can confirm his fur outerwear is faux out of respect for animals, including the polar bears of his beloved North Pole.
"There is a huge debate raging," McColl said of the attention. "I have been called every name in the book. One person said the only wreath they want to see this Christmas is one on my grave. Shame, shame, shame on you is the most common."
The 54-year-old entrepreneur and mother of adult twins said she's on Santa's case about smoking because she has seen firsthand how harmful it can be, recalling how at age 18 she had to pull her own father out of his burning bed after he fell asleep with a lit cigarette. She smoked herself as a teen but quit and is thankful her kids never took up the habit.
Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the ALA's deputy director for intellectual freedom, doesn't have a hard heart. But she doesn't see tobacco addiction when she considers what McColl has done. She sees "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer."
A publisher put out a combined version of those classics last year as edited by Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben, who replaced about 200 occurrences of the N-word with "slave." Of McColl, Caldwell-Stone said:
"This wasn't a retelling. This wasn't a parody. This wasn't an adaptation. This wasn't a modernization. This wasn't fanfic. This was presenting the original but censoring the content. That kind of expurgation that seeks to prevent others from knowing the original work because of a disapproval of the ideas, the content, is a kind of censorship that we've always disapproved of."
Caldwell-Stone said as much in a statement the ALA publicly released. She said the two cases involve the "altering of a classic work of literature with a view toward protecting modern sensibilities, or preventing children from being aware of the character of the original work."
Next Story
