I have to say I think Cecil blew it. From the article:
Come on Cecil, you’re willing to take on homeopathy, acupuncture, jet contrails/chemtrails, the illuminati, oil company conspiracies, and the “whole nine yards” origin. But you’re scared by the fat guy and his elves? Think he won’t bring you any more christmas gifts? Think Rudolph and the gang will run you down some cold winter night? Expecting a sleigh drive-by from the elf goon squad? Or are you just afraid if you tell on Santa, someone will tell on you?
Children grow up. Eventually, they want a straight answer, not a wishy-washy dance around the topic. They want someone in authority to confirm what they suspect, to treat them with respect and tell the truth. Their friends could be lying, their parents may not be ready for them to grow up, the media gladly plays into the myth. Somewhere they want to find one person with the integrity to answer the question honestly, truthfully, no shinola. Isn’t that the spirit of the Straight Dope? Telling it like it is?
Cecil blew it. Shame on you.
Oh, by the way, Santa Claus is not real. He’s a myth, a fairy tale, a story we tell to get in the spirit of the holiday and bring out our giving natures, but he isn’t a person.
Pretty good for a rant, but I can only give it a 9, because you left out “Where’s your Santa Claus now? I spit on your Santa Claus!”
Anyway, happy, um, Winter’s Solstice. Just remember that the sun’s low point in its travels comes in a couple of days, so it is vitally important for everyone to scare it with a lot of banging of pots and pans, etc., otherwise it might continue to drop lower in the sky until it falls into the sea.
Winter solstice? We can give Irishman better celebrations than that, whitetho. He can choose from one of these:
Butter Sculpture Festival
Chaomos
Diwali
Dosmoche
Feast of the Ass
Ganna
Hari-Kuyo
Midvinterblot
Night of the Radishes
Sacaea
Saturnalia
Wassailing the Apple Trees
whitetho, cute. Actually, I did attend a Solstice party. And since it was early, I reminded everyone to encourage the Sun to return.
Arnold, “Feast of the Ass” sounds pretty fun. :looks again: You know, that could be taken another way that doesn’t come so flatteringly.
“Wassailing the Apple Trees”? What did the poor apple trees do? Will the sue over this?
Colibri, it’s not a debate. I don’t have to prove it. No one has proven his existence, or provided reliable evidence. Spare me semantic arguments about me asserting a negative case. My point was not to debate the issue. Cecil makes the comment that he won’t be the one to state it plainly. I say that if anyone should be the one to state it plainly, it should be Cecil. Since he didn’t I did.
Kat, yep, sorry to burst your bubble. Now you might want to think about what else you’ve been lied to about. And just why your parents and everyone you respect and admire would want you to believe something patently false. It’s a conspiracy, I tell you. But I respect you enough to tell you the truth.
jaimest, interesting. Are you suggesting Santa Claus doesn’t spend all his time at the North Pole, and hangs out in his alternate addresses to get a break from it all?
Yes, I liked the Feast of the Ass celebration too. (Those of you obsessed with sex should go read the description of the celebration at the link I posted above before you start making your jokes.)
But Irishman, I guess that when you check your stocking this year, you may find some cold, dark, sooty rocks, because S. C. doesn’t like to be defied.
I read the descriptions, and the Feast of the Ass sounds more fun than I guessed. I can just imagine leading a donkey into my parents’ church and watching the congregation bray like asses.
About the wassailing, it says the men must guess the name of the roast being prepared. What, “Bessie?”, “Patches?”, “Elizabeth?”
The last thing I intend to do is to discourage people from using the phrase “Feast of the Ass,” as this is clearly something which our society is sorely lacking (no double-entendre there, thank you), in spirit anyway, but I thought I might see if anybody wanted to bite, not on the question of whether Santa exists, and also not on an Ass, but instead on the question of whether belief in Santa is overall a force for the improvement or detriment of society and humanity. To either spark off some issue here or bore you to tears and make you stop reading this, depending on how you feel, here is a possibly obnoxious view of the Santafication of our society:
The purpose of fantasies is to make the unbearable bearable, either in order to cope with the unavoidable, or in order to allow repressive societal practices to continue without challenge from the oppressed. Is Santa a fantasy in this sense, or just good fun? Well, what repressive tendencies could it be that Santa would make bearable?
We all know the disturbing song "Santa Claus is Coming to Town." Santa teaches us that you get goodies if you are good, not that you get goodies because your parents want to be happy and love you (although of course you might be taught that elsewhere). This means both that we tend to think of the moral as connected to the pleasurable such that we do not learn to be moral for only its own rewards, and also such that we make the reverse deduction, that if we have goodies then we must by that fact be deserving. Therefore, Santa is a capitalistic liberal individualist patsy, which trains our children to adapt to a society based on ruthless and meaningless production of buying power rather than virtue and caring. Materialism and Consumerism a-go-go!
How do all y'all feel about this? Wrong-headed, convincing, or just disturbing?
Santa Claus is a device to make people conform. Santa never came to me as a child because my parents said that we lived too far from town. I was good all year. I never did wrong. And I see the kids who beat me up all year at school get a whole heap of presents from Santa. What was this supposed to tell me?
Santa always gives presents. Who has ever recieved coal in leiu of presents? It doesn’t matter what you do, if you pretend to be good at the end of the year, presents come your way. So it doesn’t even send out a moral lesson.
But I do agree that moral values are obscured by Santa. Who does good things for the feeling of it, rather than a materialistic reward? This is why we have panhandlers, beggars and so on. In old times they would have been taekn into someones house and fed and everyone would have lived a nice communal life. Oops, that was probably a bit too much. But the point still stands.
And the gnomes in Zurich control the world’s monetary supply, aided by the Trilats and the Illuminati.
Yes, Virginia. And it ain’t Santa’s fault if materialism has obscured the truth.
OK cecil won’t say it so I will.
Damn right there is a Santa.
You know there seems to be a big misconception about getting sticks and coal for christmas.
What kid wouldn’t grin if he found a big bundle of sticks under the tree if he or she was the one that had to go out in the cold and gather,chop or what have you fuel for the fire.
It was a much simpler albeit harder time “back then”.
