Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for December 11, 2022

The 25th is a Sunday, in two weeks in fact. I wonder if the "figment off her imagination: will be bringing gifts

Well, of course, I mean we all know that Santa Claus isn’t real, so Duh!!

Monsters are easier to believe in than Santa bringing her presents for being good.

Santa is more that a belief, Santa is a state of mind.

Too many people get caught up in the commercialization of Christmas and forget the joy of what Christmas means; on several different levels.

This calls for for a Santa joke

Santa is having a no good very bad day. The workshop is behind schedule. Three of Santa’s elves are sick and the replacements called in can’t keep up. Santa finally got to loading his sleigh and the bag of toys fell over and they all spilled out. When he’d gotten it all back in the bag and loaded he went to hitch up his team. One of the reindeer is pregnant and about to deliver and can’t go. Two others have escaped from the pen and are nowhere to be found. Just the there is a quiet knock at the door. When Santa opens the door there stands a tiny angel with a Christmas tree. The angel asked Santa where she should put the tree ………. and that’s how the tradition started

My mother, like most others, told me about Santa Claus when I was very small. As I got older and saw people dressed as Santa in stores, she taught me about Santa’s helpers who were not to be confused with the real Santa. As I grew, I was soon able to arrange in my mind a theology of Santa, Santa’s helpers, elves, and any other magical beings I heard of — while never truly believing a word of it.

For some reason, I was able to maintain a belief in God until I was twelve. Did not think about it when I was thirteen. Was a confirmed atheist from fourteen on.

The way to know if the thing under your bed is a monster, Danae, is if you spot a puddle of drool.

To be fair, the monsters are more believable than you. Just watch the news. How many people just give away tons of stuff for free with zero strings attached and no one will stop them in doing it.

I believe in Santa Claus

Monsters Inc was a great movie.

Sometimes you have to protect your parents from what’s going on in your in your head or from certain things going on in your life. (They wouldn’t understand it or believe it.)

Love the idea of Santa and the myth surrounding it. But seeing santas everywhere must be confusing for the very young, even in this digital age.

Spoiler Alert!

I don’t remember ever believing in Santa. I guess my folks didn’t push it. I was born precisely 9 months after Dad got back from his duty as a medic in WWII; and that changed his worldview on a lot of things.

It’s all about the context. You hear something coming down the chimney on Christmas Eve, you’re likely to think it’s Santa. Anything coming from beneath your bed at night is likely to be a monster. Even after seeing him, I’d still be suspicious that it’s a shape-shifting monster trying to gain my trust.

A fat old man with a long white beard and red suit hiding under a little girl’s bed really is downright creepy. Sounds like the latest schlock Christmas slasher movie. No, thanks.

So, is this the ghost of christmas never yet to come? Let’s see where this goes. I’d like to see Danae get Scrooged.

I had a friend who lived in the Bedford–Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn back in the 1960’s. He said that he did not believe in Santa because there was no way a white man was coming into that neighborhood after dark.

Monsters are real. Skeptical? Just check the newsfeed.

It was the struggle to keep believing as you got a little older because you were a little afraid that there’d be no gifts if you didn’t. We generally kept the faith for another year!

Sown the stairs came the man with a sack

While I waiting in silence and planned my attack.

He was dressed all in red, jeez what a sight.

and that’s when I hit him, babdda-bing with a pipe.- from A visit from St Nicholas to the Bronx

The mixing of Christian and Druid beliefs; the angle being Christian, the eternal tree being Druid

Santa can’t be that big anymore. Since everybody shops online there aren’t that many people at department stores.

As the eldest of three kids, had to “believe” until my Sister stopped, when I was about 16.

It came to the attention of the FAA that Santa had no pilot’s license. So he was required to take a written test (which he passed) and have a flight check with an FAA examiner. Entering the sleigh, he noted the examiner had a shotgun and asked why. The examiner told him that he was really not supposed to warn him but he was going to lose an engine on takeoff.

It was a long childhood before I understand there was a different “Santa” for rich kids and poor kids. We never went hungry but no one was going to get a mountain bike for Christmas.

Always with the figments. Why not raisinments of the imagination?

My parents told me that I “figured out” that there was no Santa when I was five. Can’t say I recall. Monsters, on the other hand, were no problem with all the cats we had around to protect us.

Myths, fairy tales, fiction are all important because they cut out distractions and focus on a message. They can show what can be or what should be, not what is, opening up the mind to discover, invent, apply. They are also simple ways of explaining the basic principles that help is live in our complex societies.

Santa Claus represents a concept much older than Christianity although the concept is fundamental to Christianity— generosity, charity and the joy of giving to others [It is better to give than to receive]. In the 16th century, this concept became associated with a person, St Nicholas, 280 – 345 AD, who personified generosity and kindness. Giving gifts at Christmas began with the Magi, the Three Wise Men, who brought gifts to the Christ child . And it became ‘the thing’ in part due to the Protestant Revolution [1500s] and the concurrent move away from having so many feast days [they were becoming economically unfeasible].

The custom of St Nicholas giving gifts at Christmas came about at the beginning of the 19th century, and at some point expanded to include the idea that one is rewarded for ‘being good’. Santa Claus took on a specific image in 1822, due to CC Moore’s poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” and Thomas Nast, a civil war cartoonist [originally Santa Claus had a blue coat for the Union, but Nast changed it to red after the war].

Unfortunately, Santa has become so personified that there are people who argue about who can ‘play’ Santa Claus. Personifying concepts can be good because it is easier to remember and connect with a visual image than an amorphous concept. But sometimes it can be bad, because we become so tied to the image, that we forget that it is just that, a made-up representation that has no actual bearing on the concept itself.

Santa is as much of a ‘figment of her imagination’ as the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, or even the Great Pumpkin. ‘God’ is LIE told to children for a longer lasting ‘imaginary friend.’

The Santacloset Monster!

Danae is nothing if not supremely Inconsistent.

If she admits that Santa is real, she also has to admit that She is #1 on the Naughty list.

One of the great advantages of being an atheist is that I can celebrate everybody’s holidays without fear of being accused of blasphemy, apostasy, heresy, or deviancy.

I remember a past story where Danae visited the North Pole and every elf knew her by name because her “naughty file” was too heavy to lift.

Why is Santa hiding under the bed?Maybe the world finally scares hm.