GENIUS FORUMS

The Holiday lies start early. Babies given a big Christmas whoop-dee-doo before they are conscious enough to know what is happening. Birthday parties at the pizza joint at age two. Make no mistake, the parents are doing this for the parents.

Girl at work is taking her daughter Halloween trick-or-treating. Daughter's age: six months. Mom is so excited, mom is already in a tizzy: "she looks sooooo cute" in that costume. Daughter will be dressed as a cow. How appropriate.

NLPRN wrote:

Elizabeth Isabelle wrote:
You might be amused at my story of learning about Santa - I'd like to hear your experiences and opinions as well.

As a kid I often wondered how Kris Kringle, after coming down the chimney, got out of our sealed, cast-iron stove.

The suit was assumed flame-retardant.

What was your experience of learning that there was no Kris Kringle? How did it effect your world-view?

Liz,

I don't think it changed my outlook significantly, if at all. I realized from a mathematical understanding it was impossible for Mr. Kringle to reach every "good" child throughout the world in one night. I figured even if he spent seconds only per household, he couldn't deliver to all families in just North America alone.

I think the most significant parental lie that affected me as a young child was the frequently regurgitated maxim: "good things happen to good people" and likewise "bad things for bad people". Quite an enjoyable ethical/philosophical fiction for me now, as a child I was later disappointed. Nothing significant, just another life-lesson learned. I guess someone forgot to tell Ken Lay (Enron) this supposed aphorism, or maybe he was simply a "non-believer"?

NLPRN wrote:I realized from a mathematical understanding it was impossible for Mr. Kringle to reach every "good" child throughout the world in one night.

I was told he could magically stop time, and that's how he got to everybody's house right at midnight on Christmas Eve, check to see if the kids were in bed (because we would all be frozen right where we were at midnight in our time zone), and why we couldn't see him check even if we were awake in bed because we were all frozen in time.

I heard that too, but not until later as an adult did I learn he could interrupt the fourth dimension. In my childhood naivete, I just assumed Santa could suck in his gut (maybe have his elves oil his body?) and slide down chimneys. My parents, best described as secular, failed to advise me of Santa's ability to manipulate the space-time continuum. This apparantly was fortunate for me as I didn't endure the handicap of belief to question my adolescent assertion that time was surely Santa's handicap, that and alcohol so evident from his perpetually red proboscis and jolly demeanor. Or maybe I'm thinking of my grandfather?