Freedom Cowboy
While most of the continent professes a belief in Santa Claus, aka Kris Kringle, aka Father Christmas, aka Saint Nick, in Else City the fat man gets less respect. There may be a few families who pretend faith in Uncle Presents, but your typical Else City sprat hasn’t even heard of the jolly elf. In Else City they don’t care about sentiment. In Else City, the holiday season is all about the spending.
Thirty-eight years ago the Else City Jaycees got together and developed a plan of action for holiday season. It was getting too commercial, people were saying. It was getting too much about the merchandise, too much about packing people into stores, about securing end-of-the-year bonuses and about greasing the wheels of commerce. The Jaycees liked their income as much as anybody, so they came up with a plan, and they called their plan Freedom Cowboy.
There’s a Freedom Cowboy in every Else City retail outlet, or at least, every Else City retail outlet worth patronizing with your hard-earned holiday dollars. Officially Freedom Cowboy is said to possess powers of divisibility, such that he can be in many places simultaneously; older children deduce that Freedom Cowboy can use these powers only sparingly and in fact relies on a small army of helpers, stalwart men clad in the green-and-black checked vest, chaps, and trilby hat. Some of the Freedom Cowboys are women, even, who lack natural stubble (mostly) and instead fake it with carbon black or flocking. Even the women smoke, though.
You stand in line like a supplicant, and sooner or later you make it to the front, and Freedom Cowboy beckons to you, and you climb up onto his big wooden (usually) horse and he blows smoke in your face and asks you what you think you deserve, security or freedom, and when you say freedom he claps you on the back and tells you you’re a smart kiddo and asks you what kind of presents you think you deserve.
What kind of presents you actually get don’t usually have much in common with what you say here, unless you’ve been very loud about it to your parents, and they know that if you don’t get a Desenex Tricolor Locomator (or whatever godawful toy you’ve been duped into thinking will make you happy) you’ll curl up into a ball and sob yourself to death.
Freedom Cowboy doesn’t care whether you’ve been bad or good, so there’s no risk of your parents refusing to buy you presents at area merchants due to perceived lack of virtue on your part. It’s not about the virtue. It’s about the freedom.
A few years ago they tried to spice things up a bit with annual holiday themes, but after “Year Six of the Floodway: It’s About the Freedom” they didn’t really have anywhere to go with it. The year Seven of the Floodway was themed “Freedom: Else City Style!” but hardly anyone bought the banners and the whole themed year concept was quietly retired.
If you tell Freedom Cowboy you’d rather have security than freedom, he picks you up and throws you into the air and before you hit the ground he shoots you seven times with his trusty green-and-black checked seven-shooter, which is like a six-shooter but one more. You lie on the ground and everyone is invited to spit on you, because you told Freedom Cowboy the wrong thing.
I don’t remember anyone actually doing that, ever, but that’s what they said would happen. One kid, Eggy, said that he told Freedom Cowboy he wanted security, and Freedom Cowboy acted like he hadn’t heard right, and patted him on the back just as if Eggy had wanted freedom, but Eggy was a liar. Eggy also said he’d seen Freedom Cowboy breaking into his parents’ house, which everyone said was crap, because (as everyone knows) Freedom Cowboy can teleport.