People who take it too far-like my aunt and uncle not decorating their Christmas tree until after the kids went to bed on Xmas Eve then telling them that Santa did it?
D_Odds makes his 16 year old kid profess Santa in front of his friends under the threat of no presents for Christmas and I am the ass?
Interesting.
And for the record, I don’t kick puppies.
I boil kittens.
God has you doing his dirty work when we masturbate??? :eek:
It’s a small price to pay for all the pork products I care to eat without all the fatty, heart attack side effects.
mmmmmmm… unexplained bacon.
Heh. Nice one…
I agree with most of your OP, but not enough that I want to fight the professional arguers and bellyachers about it. So I’ll just make a statement that IMO whole point of Christmas is supposed to be the sharing and caring and love people show towards each other, the festiveness and hope for a better year to come, gathering of families and friends, and yes, giving gifts as a show of affection or to provide comfort to people. Telling children the truth about what Christmas is supposed to mean seems to be a bit better than saying “don’t worry, Santa will take care of everything, including all those poor/homeless/runaway children and their families”. OK, that excludes the middle, but then so do a lot of the parents I know.
The beauty of Christmas is in no way diminished or enhanced by Santa. Christmas is bigger than Santa, or else if damn well should be. Ironic that in the linked article someone snickers:
And I wish you had read it and understood it yourself, so you knew how silly you look saying this.
~
Just speaking out loud, given how angry people on here get over the least insinuation of religion into public schools, it’s somewhat hypocritical for some to be damning one faith-based completely un-scientific belief system while saying another one can and must stay unchallenged. I think what people opposed to the teacher’s actions should really be saying is that the teacher should either say nothing OR defer to the parents on matters like this. That is, say “You need to ask your parents about Santa Claus; this is school and we’re going to learn about Eigenvalues now…”
However, if a child is smart enough to ask a pointed question, like “Wasn’t Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer just invented in an advertising campaign?” (which, given kids and Google, might not be too hard to imagine), what would one have the teacher do then? Refuse to answer? Lie? Say yet again “ask your mom/dad”? If one takes the kid aside and tells just them the truth, we know where that ends up - the kid ends up getting into a fight with the others over it, and teacher has to moderate and finally come clean, otherwise the kid that speaks the truth gets their ass beaten every day by the other kids for not believing in the Cult of Rudolph. Seems to me at some point one must just tell them the truth. You know, fight ignorance and all?
That’s what I love about this board. I learn something new every day.
Daddy Bricker, will you please read me the story about Goldilocks and the Three Coprophagic Bears again? 
Hmm, your logic is strong.
(“Professional arguers and bellyachers” - they’re not actually professional, you know - strictly volunteer work. 
)
Behold the vehement and un-Christmaslike hostility…
For people who think the Santa Claus myth is “special” or “important,” I say: get a grip.
Phfff.
I figured Santa out when I was about six – another kid in my class told all of us that Santa wasn’t real, really, and I naturally took the subject to the Ultimate Authority on All Things – i.e., Mom. She hemmed and hawwed a bit and explained the whole Santa idea, and I was cool with it. But it was still fun to pretend, and I was getting presents from Santa until I was about eleven. These were always the presents that would arrive JUST before we unwrapped, the ones that hadn’t been sitting under the tree wrapped all up for the past week.
Then again, I don’t think my parents ever specifically told me that Santa was real. “Go to bed early, and when you wake up, Santa will have come” was about as detailed as they got.
No… the saga of the vengeful killer peacocks was the soul-scarring lie that I still remind them of to this day. Much to their amusement. 
If it’s known to be true that there really is no Santa Claus, then any assertion otherwise is necessarily a lie. A well-intentioned lie, but a lie nonetheless. A story, yes–a fiction. A shared imagination, if you will. But in terms of reality, a big fat whopping lie, and the teller of such a story: liar, liar, pants on fire.
As though parents don’t lie to their kids. As though all untruths communicated from parent to child are simply stories. Parents lie to their children everyday. It would be remarkable how much and how often they lie were it not dwarfed by how much and how often children lie back (once they learn how…I’ll not speculate on where they learn it).
This reminds me of one episode of the Sopranos: the son, A.J., learns in school that Columbus was really a savage, brutal man to the natives he encountered. When the father Tony learns about this, he pounds his fist and says, “in this house, Columbus is a hero!”
It’s one thing to believe in the harmlessness of lies; it’s quite something else to believe they’re not actually lies in the first place. Just because you meant no harm in telling them, or just because everybody else does it. If you’re going to tell your children “stories,” then you should be prepared to deal with the fact that the world at large is eventually going to undermine your, uh, narrative perspective.
Ah! So Hemingway, Faulkner, Shakespeare, Nabokov, L’Amour, Tolstoy, de Maupassant, Goethe, Cheever, Homer, and all their sordid pals are simply LIARS. That is good to know.
I’m pretty sure (most) of these guys don’t portray their stories to be true.
According to Sequent, there is an equation between fiction, shared imagination, and big fat lies. (There are people who genuinely equate fiction and lies, so if someone wants to dump that thought into the discussion, we need to carry it through to its logical conclusion. After all, the fact that some parents go overboard in getting their kids to accept Santa has been a recurring theme among the folks who need to make this an issue of always lying.)
I sincerely doubt that the individuals in question in this topic, to wit, Johnny Angel and Sequent, actually bear those monikers as their legal names. Clearly, then, they are lying. 
:rolleyes:
Only if they make the claim that those are their real names, which they have not.
Og, I hope this is a whoosh. I’d hate to think you really thought you had just presented an argument.
It’s quite clear that Sequent made no such statement. What he said was:
My emphasis, of course. **Sequent ** made the exact same point that I did: a story becomes a lie when someone, who knows otherwise, claims that there is empirical truth behind it. The Santa Myth satisfies this condition. Someone is claiming to children that Santa has a physical reality, and while tomndebb may have successfully managed to never make a definite comment one way or the other, other people have not. That claim, not the fictional nature itself, is what makes the Santa myth a lie.
Actually, I know very few people who claim that there is empirical truth behind the Santa story. (I cannot rthink of anyone in my circle of acquaintances who do.) The story is in the culture with no serious claims to reality. I have already noted that people who do try to prop up the story in the face of kids’ skepticism are out of line. I just think its silly to drop the big “It Is A Lie” claim on the story.
Sure…if you’re the Taliban. :rolleyes: Homer might actually be the interesting exception on this list, as one could debate whether or not The Iliad is presented as an accurate historical account. But then did Homer have access to resources which would have shed definitive light on what was fact and what wasn’t? So we could say he was doing the best he could. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt–maybe if the Santa Claus had myth served as one of the cornerstones of Western literature as we know it, I’d give you the benefit of the doubt? Probably not. They actually found Troy, after all. When they dig up Santa’s workshop, let me know.
Until then, liar liar pants on fire! We’re not talking about a bedtime story. You know the reality of how those presents got there, yet you supply your children with an explanation that simply isn’t true. That’s a lie. When you continue that behavior for years, when you withhold the truth so that others may make their children believe the same thing, then yes, it’s a BIG lie.
I’m not saying that makes you evil or a bad parent or whatever; I’m not saying you’re scarring your children for life. They’ll figure it out and still love you, I’m sure. What I am saying is that it’s folly to tell yourself it’s not a lie when in fact it is, that you’re not really lying when in fact you really are. Just because it’s between you and your children with nothing but love doesn’t make it less of a lie, nor does the fact that it’s a cultural phenonmenon. So maybe a you’re a great parent; I’m not saying this lie or any others take anything away from that. But don’t try to tell me it’s some kind of sacred story form worthy of canonized among the finest literature. That’s just silly. It’s an explanation for reality that simply isn’t true: a lie.
Nonsense, as others have already pointed out. The registration form said “Choose your user name,” not “enter your real name.”
What about propping up the story* before* tbey become skeptical? The kids may have heard about Santa “culturally” instead of from their parents, but buying gifts and telling the kids that Santa brought them is certainly offering supporting evidence for the truth of the story.