Speaking of Santa Claus...

Poststructural Pub
21

Our children are much smarter than our adult brains logically allow ourselves to believe they are. Once they start to get to that ‘critical thinking’ cause-and-effect age, which for my kids is somewhere between 6 and 8, they get it. I think for the most part, they just don’t want us to know they get it.

And this “perpetuating a lie” thing is way over the top.
It’s not a lie.
It is a story.
It’s about believing in something bigger than yourself.
It’s about magic.
And love.
And fun.
And joy.
And children.
And puppies.

God help me (yes, I said “God” help me) when I stop believing in the spirit of giving that is really Santa Claus.

Our kids get it. Don’t kid yourself.
I’ve never once heard of a serial killer ending up using the “My Parents lied to me about Santa Claus” defense in a court of law.

Yes, brewerpaul, there is a Santa Claus.

And, though kitschy, and I would never own one, this image always brings a little tear to my eye:

22

I have a newly-acquired sister-in-law that has more money than good taste. I almost dread going to her house for Christmas dinner. It’s not about the food, because the food will be tasty and plentiful. It’s about her obsession with Santa Claus figures in all sizes. They are literally all over the place throughout the house. They talk, they wink, they move their arms, and they won’t shut up. I understand that one of the children’s rooms that is no longer occupied is now being used soley to store all of the Christmas gear during the off season. Folks, don’t get me started about the outside of the house. Poor hubby sits in his chair in the living room, watches football on the large-screen TV, and keeps his mouth shut. He knows better than to say anything about the Christmas circus in the house. Whenever I enter their door, I long for the simplicity of a few, well-chosen festive items to celebrate the holiday season.

23

“So ya wantcher hair back, do ya?”

djm

24

I’m lucky, I suppose. I still believe in Santa Claus. Of course, like my belief in G_D, it is quite different from the generally accepted norm. I believe that Santa, as an actual entity, is a conglomeration of actions and attitudes of people who give what they can to others without any need for recognition. The unseen, wish granting, stocking stuffing being of love that arrives without usually leaving even a footprint to trace (though sleigh tracks and hoof prints have been seen, and the evidence of crumbs and empty milk glasses has also been catalogued) So, when my children came to the age to be told the ‘truth’ about Santa, they were brought into the fold of his robes, so to speak. They got to become Santa. Talk about an eyes wide joyful dawning of an idea… whew! Stand back and let them at the plans!

25

The story is not the lie. The insisting that the story is the truth, is the lie. It may seem a subtle difference, but it is an immensely important one.

Like you, I totally believe in sharing the magic, the miracles of life, love, fun, joy, children, puppies, fudge and grog. I perpetuate the stories. I just like to include the truth in there with them.

I believe in the spirit of Santa Clause. Oh… and by ‘spirit’ i don’t mean a hauntie. :slight_smile:

(Edited to note that when I wrote this reply I was fresh from the religious discussion and was thinking more along that line than the Santa one. Still fits, I think, so I won’t delete it. And edited a second time to add an important thought…well… important to me, anyway. :smiley: )

26

While we’re on the subject:

Santa Claus:An Engineers Perspective

I. There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18 ) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the Population Reference Bureau).
At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per house hold, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.

II. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second — 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

III. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the “flying” reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can’t be done with eight or even nine of them— Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

IV. 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance — this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake.

The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.

Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accellerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 g’s. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.

Therefore, if Santa did exist, he’s dead now.

:smiley:

On a more serious matter. I am a Christain, although I never did believe in Santa, but I don’t see anything wrong with it. After all, it’s never done any damage and it gives an added… something to this time of year for those who do think the myth to be a reality.

27

Yes, of course the above is all well and good, but the Santa story is about magic and not Engineering. Some people just can’t get that through their skulls. :wink:

Leave it to those d**ned Engineers to Scrooge-ify things.
(I’m an Engineer, so I can say that).

28

Scrooge-ify? Did somebody say he existed? lol :smiley:

29

don’t be such a little dickens…

30

Is Santa really so different from the Sesame Street myth? What do people who don’t want children believing in fictional characters such as Santa tell their 2 or 3 year old when she is watching Grover on television? What do they do to curb her innocence and imagination so that she doesn’t believe that the cute characters are real? What do they say to the child when they see one of the characters in the mall? Do they tell the child that it’s just someone wearing a costume who is trying to fool her and that the character on the tube is only a stuffed animal puppet with a person hiding off camera pretending to be the character’s voice? Do they tell them that it’s silly and a waste of the adult’s time for her to go hug the character in the mall because the character is fictional? I don’t believe I could do that for any child, even one I didn’t like. But that’s just me. I suppose, though, that can be seen as a good thing to do for a child. At least, she can never resent the adult for letting her believe a lie when she was little. (Although a cynical few may consider this last reason to be more for the adult’s benefit than the child’s. :wink: )

I’m not trying to be confontational either. But this myth that adults perpetuate on children is far bigger than the big guy in the red suit. And these characters are nondenominational. (Except for one of the teletubbies who, I’ve heard, is gay - but that’s different.) Truthfully, it never occurred to me that children should never be allowed to believe in such things. I always thought that was part of the beauty of childhood.

Anyway, I’m curious too. How do the “non-santa” people here handle these issues? Thanks.

[Paul, I’m not trying to hijack the thread. It seems like this is the same question you were asking, only broader. If you prefer I can start a new thread.]

31

ditto

I respect anyone’s feelings about this either way. Especially when it comes from a religious perspective. I do, however, know people who still practice the Jewish religion and who, they say, never missed going to visit Santa and always exchanged gifts at home on that day. This was a secular holiday to them without the religious undertones. I think Santa (even in light of the three wise guys) is hard to place in the truly religious context of what the holiday means to the Christian faith.

32

this probably belongs here rather than in the other thread

Good points. My counter would be that if my child asked me whether Grover was real I’d tell the truth right away. I’d say that Grover is a puppet that is worked by people you can’t see, and they are creating a character for you to enjoy. I’m not even sure we’re spoiling anything by teaching them the fundamentals of fictional charcters.

With Santa, we work so hard to turn a fictional character into a real one, and that is what I rally hated. I loved the Santa thing as a child but I really pained me to keep woking the deception year after year. Disclaimer: my wife is Jewish and the kids are raised Jewish but we celebrate both and have a tree and everything. I even took them see santa at the mall once. Half their gifts are Christmas and half are Hanukkah. So I was working alone in the Santa department.

The result of that is that my kids both tried to believe in santa, Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy etc long after they really did becasue they thought the gifts would dry up. And my son actually believed in the Easter Bunny longer than anything else. I said, “Are you nuts? The Easter Bunny is the most unbelieveable of them all.”

33

this is leading to a lot of cross-posting :laughing:

Thanks for responding. I totally see your point and agree with it. But it sounds like you are telling the child when the child is old enough to question what is “real”. I don’t know, but I would think most people probably do this with Santa when the child starts asking. But maybe not. Anyway, it sounded like some people go out of their way to quash the Santa myth before the child even knows who he is. Therefore, not giving the ciild a chance to believe. So, what I was really asking, I guess, is do those people do the same thing with Grover, tooth fairy, Mickey Mouse, etc.? If not, why not? Just curious.

Also, I also know Jewish people who believed in Santa and celebrated the holiday strictly as a secular thing. Which I don’t think is hard to do. But let me reiterate what I said earlier, I totally respect anyone’s attitudes on this subject either way.

34

Well, if they ask when they’re 5, do you tell them? The tradition is to keep it alive as long as posssible. But we as keepers of the tradition have to decide how and when to tell. I mean at 5 they still have 2 or 3 good believing years left, especially if they have a younger sibling. I think mine asked when they were even younger, like maybe 4. But at 4 they aren’t really questioning but maybe confirming. So it’s easy to say yes when you only have to say it once with conviction for them to be happy.

35

I never believed in Santa. Santa never came to my house in the poor inner city. I was cynical before I could pronounce the word. I told some neighbor’s kids the ugly truth. I was clinical about it and insistent about it. I regret it now. I wonder now, about how I was given such a hard heart at such a young age, but life in a tough neighborhood may have a lot to do with it.

I see that Santa does come to some inner city neighborhoods. In some ways I find it touching, in some ways it touches a raw nerve about how poor I grew up, and how utterly joyless most of my childhood was. Some of the poor kids get the very best toys now, from various charities, including my own church. Tough subject.

In most cases, Santa is an innocent passion, analogous to cartoon characters or other fictional characters. Santa teaches kids a lesson about generousity. Santa does all he does for some milk and cookies. Some of the Scrooges and Grinches around would do well to learn to give a little more, or a lot more.

36

I had forgotten about this post from awhile back. In case you missed it …

Best wishes,
Jerry

37

Well, I tell ya what… I just watched a movie called “Bad Santa” and now, I am not so sure that he exists, after all.

38

At the ripe old age of 4 I didn’t believe in Santa Claus.

But I was curious enough to ask why there was an angel on the top of the tree. The explaination my father gave me still supports my belief in Santa Clause to this day! Here’s what he said:

"Ah! The angel?? On the top of the tree??? Well my boy, this is why the angel is on top of the tree:

Once upon a time, it was approaching Christmas day. Up in the north pole, Santa was in a foul mood. He’d been in the workshop all day settling an elf-strike, the elves were banging-on about their work-load and sprouting memorized slogans about work/family balance and reasonable toilet breaks that the union elf had primed them with in the morning. He finaly got some industrial peace after pointing out how far it was, over the freezing snow and ice, for them to find a better job down there at Wallmart. On his way home, he tripped over the sleigh that the logistics elves had left out and barked his shins. He got in the door only to find Mrs Clause had hit the Christmas cheer early and was passed-out on the sofa in front of the TV - the room was filled with smoke from the carbonized carbonara smoldering on the stove. After throwing the blackened pots out into the snow, Santa went to raid the fridge, but found nothing there but a piece of moldy cheeze and a limp carrot. SO he ate some dry bread and crackers washed-down by the quarter bottle of Christmass cheer that Mr’s Clause had wedged between the cusions of the sofa. Thoroughly seasoned, Santa fell into bed and passed-out, In the morning the harsh arctic sun woke him to the worst hangover he had ever experienced. The banging in his head turned out to be not in his head, but someone banging insistently on his front door. In the foulest temper, Santa, in his underpants, head throbbing like big-ben pulled on his slippers, only to find that Rudolf had left a nasty surprise in one of them. Slopping nasty footprints accross the shag-pile, Santa raged to the door, wrenched it open and shouted "WTF Do YOU want??? Standing there was a cute little angel with a small pine-tree in tow. "Yule-Tide deliveries Mr Clause!!! Where do you want me to stick it???

And, my boy, from that day to this you will always find an angel stuck on the top of a Christmas tree!"

39

Sorry, but this is a very wrong concept. Santa does what he does because it is the right thing to do. He does not do it for any form of compensation. That some people may put out milk and cookies for him, and carrots for the reindeer, is an act of kindness by them; not necessary, not required, and certainly not as any form of payment.

djm

40

I rather like this explanation from the NORAD “Track Santa” site:

http://www.noradsanta.org/en/real.htm

Redwolf