As a young child I would see the local weather folks show a graphic of Santa making his way across the US on Christmas Eve. Usually a very large cutout profile of Santa, his sleigh and reindeer would arc across the screen.
It used to piss me off to no end! That graphic is too large! Where was he really? Give me a pinpoint, a glowing dot, crosshairs, anything to narrow it down! What did that weather guy think I was, stupid?
That Santa graphic took up 10% of the map of the US. IT WASN’T SPECIFIC ENOUGH! Drove me nuts.
Anybody else bothered by this as a child, or some other logical issue for the season? Or was it just me?
I was bothered that you could see Santa moving, what was he going to deliver to one house on the east coast, the one on the west, then back to the East coast?
Better yet, was he really delivering presents to houses where it was not even DARK yet? Tell me he’s in Australia or somewhere, if you want to be remotely believable.
I guess my parents didn’t let me watch TV on Christmas Eve. I didn’t see Santa on NORAD until I was an adult.
My logical conundrum was our lack of a chimney. I knew that Santa had special magic so that he could get down some pretty slim chimneys for a fat guy, but I knew that they at least had to be brick chimneys which ended in a fireplace. Ours was a metal pipe ending in a gas furnace, so I knew he couldn’t use it. (For some reason, the fact that it wasn’t brick was more of an impediment than the fact that we had no fireplace.)
Of course, I soon realized (and Mom says I came up with it on my own, although it’s certainly not unique to me) that Santa had a magic key which could unlock any door. But he’d only use it for houses like ours, without brick chimneys.
Just yesterday I was having this conversation with my son, WhyNot. He was troubled by our gas fireplace, which goes nowhere. I gave him the magic key explanation, with additional magical unknown powers thrown in for good measure in case he didn’t buy it. I think this is our last Santa Christmas anyway.
I spent a rather large part of my youth in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington DC.
The rotunda lobby is (was?) dominated by a large stuffed elephant. Somewhere off to the side of this elephant, on the edges of the lobby was a large stuffed leaping tiger. Sometimes this tiger’s location was changed. I seem to recall it was in front of the gift shop for a while.
The thing was the tiger was leaping. None of it’s feet touched the ground. I knew this was not possible, yet there it was. I spent a long time circling the tiger. It was definitely suspended in midair.
It didn’t really bother me. I actually felt very special to have discovered my own private miracle. No one else noticed. I never pointed it out to anyone.
Somewhere around the age of 12 I finally saw the stick that supported the tiger hidden in the grasses beneath it.
Anyone with the StarWalk app will currently see Santa flying around the ecliptic. We just had to tell my son (9) that Santa wasn’t real, and a few days later he fires up StarWalk on the iPad and laughed. It’s too bad he still didn’t believe as that would’ve made him flip out, then I would have to explain how Santa doesn’t need pressurized spacesuits or oxygen because he breathes Aurora ions to charge his magic sleigh or something.
Seriously? I always thought they tracked it by just showing where it was midnight everywhere in the world. I admit I’ve never really paid much attention to it since I never noticed the tracking until after I figured out the truth. But they seriously don’t keep track of whether it’s dark yet?
I do know I’d never care if the dot were too large, though. I was used to that sort of thing. The big dots that showed the capital cities weren’t to scale, either. And, looking back, it even makes sense. They couldn’t track Santa, just estimate where he is. He actually has to stop at like 10,000 houses per second (assuming only a billion houses in the world). Dude’s so fast he’s more like an electron, with only probabilities of where he is at any given time.
We had one that was a metal tube ending in a Franklin stove; I had the vague idea that he somehow just oozed down it sort of like a fleshy version of the liquid metal Terminator (although T-2 hadn’t been made back when I still bought Santa).
He had to be going from house to house, right? Rationally speaking, he would have been below any radar coverage, lost in the ground clutter. Why would he pop up 500-1000 feet to hop over the the next roof?