Copyright 2006 Ben S. Pollock
St. Nick came from a family himself, but little is known about them. One relative everyone has heard something about is Grandfather Claus, who is Santa’s brother, with obviously a family of his own, children and their children.
Santa as everyone does know rewards good little girls and boys with presents at Christmas. (And their first cousin Hanukkah Harry loads up the Jewish children.) The bad children either get nothing, lumps of coal or bundles of switches. Switches are sticks for spanking, not electrical switches fired by lumps of coal-fired power generators.
Grandfather Claus handles adults. He rewards them whether they’ve been good or bad, and at any time of year. If a law or rule is established, and you violated it before it was set up, Grandfather Claus makes sure you go scot-free. Good people are helped when confusing tax laws are set up and they sign up for the wrong deductions — “Ignorance of the law is no excuse” doesn’t count here — as sometimes they are forgiven, thanks to him.
In my Fayetteville, if you are a developer and want the first building 3 to 5 times the height of all the other buildings in the neighborhood, all you have to do is ask for it before the master plan or ordinance or comprehensive zoning that the city’s been working on for years actually goes on the books.
Thank you, Grandfather Claus! Can I shoot varmints in city limits? Can you marry me to my underage cousin? Can you allow my village to keep its school district even though it’s so small many college-prep classes are not taught? Maybe Grandfather Claus can.
Actually though, sometimes he cannot. Retroactivity needs to be written into the code, as a clause. What gets interesting is that commentators, not to mention developers, assume grandfathering must be a right, must be somewhere in the Constitution. They’d be surprised to learn the phrase began in the Jim Crow era, to keep blacks from voting.
Long after adults stop believing in Santa Claus, they still believe Grandfather Claus is a given, the guy Santa shared bunk beds with at the North Pole when they were kids. Santa plays fair, and Grandfather plays fair, each in their own way.
Here, the question is whether in the future the brothers Santa and Grandfather Claus can party down on Dickson Street or elsewhere in downtown Fayetteville, with tall, largely vacant buildings (because in a decade it’ll be obvious they can’t get enough tenants).
There’s the “Legacy Building (seven stories), the Lofts at Underwood Plaza (nine stories) and Marriott Renaissance Hotel (16 stories),” to quote the Northwest Arkansas Times, in its editorial about the 16- and now 10-story Divinity Hotel and Condos project, which Brick predicts will have a revolving Cracker Barrel restaurant at the top.
So the next time you stay at an older hotel — obviously not one of these — look to the ceiling. Not even Grandfather Claus will stay in a roadhouse that doesn’t smoke sensors and maybe sprinklers. In some places, even the latest Fire Code revision that forces new hotel construction to include those may not require them to be retrofitted in existing inns. The elves call that Claus for alarm. -30-
