At the Santa Claus Café...

... the traditionalists here at Althouse seem to believe that Christmas is not complete without this photograph from 1953.

"Should Santa Claus still be fat?"

"Santa is a role model, and kids don't want to have a role model that's fat."

Kids don't want? Has any kid ever complained about Santa being fat? But various adults are keen on controlling the messages that reach kids, and in this light, Santa needs to be thoroughly examined for inappropriate messages. I'm going to begin a list:

1. He keeps a list. I have here in my hand a list... This is McCarthyesque and oppressive.

2. He's checking and rechecking the list. This is the stuff of obsessive compulsive disorder.

3. He's a grown man obsessing over whether children are naughty and nice. Obviously creepy. Also puritanical.

4. He watches children when they are sleeping. This condones the invasion of privacy (or worse).

5. He smokes. (This bad-example-setting has already come in for censorship.)

6. He wears fur.

7. He stokes materialism.

8. He takes credit for the work of others (deflecting appreciation that properly belongs to the parents).

9. He operates as an endorsement of a rigid class system by creating the impression that wealthy children are more deserving of gifts than the poor.

10. He breaks into houses at night.

11. He relies on sweatshop/slave labor.

12. He exploits animals.

Quiet Santa.

For children with special needs.

In Portland: "He heard the gunman say, 'I am the shooter,' as if announcing himself."

"A series of rapid-fire shots in short succession followed as Christmas music played..."

Brance Wilson, the mall Santa, said he heard gunshots and dove for the floor. By the time he looked up, seconds later, everyone around him had cleared out. Merchandise was scattered in some stores as he made his way to the door.

"Santa will be back," Wilson said. "It's not going to keep Santa away from the mall."

"The whole time I thought he sounded like Pedro/Pablo from 'Napoleon Dynamite.'"

One comment from a community college student who was pranked, along with the rest of his  Speech 101 class by classmate Jose Barrientos, who faked a Mexican accent for 4 months, and then, comically, dropped the accent:



One girl knew he was a fake. You see her at about 3:00. I think it's not a mere coincidence that the young woman is strikingly beautiful. Well-tuned bullshit detector.

If my older readers don't get the "Napoleon Dynamite" reference, you could get the highly amusing movie at Amazon, which, as you may know, I'm hoping you will enter through the Althouse portal when you do any shopping you might need to do. But if you don't want to get up to speed on Pedro from "Napoleon Dynamite," I'll bet you remember Bill Dana doing the Mexican accent as Jose Jimenez. Here's Bill Dana as Jose Jimenez playing an expert in how Santa Claus is supposed to speak:



Dana retired the Jimenez character in 1970. It was considered in bad taste to get laughs playing a dumb ethnic stereotype with an accent. But it's not the 70s anymore, and maybe it's okay for Barrientos — who is a standup comedian — to do this routine, since his agenda is to expose the prejudices of the audience and to critique them and dispel stereotypes. I don't know. It seems to me that there was some real hostility in doing the accent for 4 months on the theory that people would think ill of him. He could have been building relationships. Going public now, he's leveraging his comedy career on deceit and betrayal, which only seems worthwhile if they really were small-minded bigots. In that regard, note that the 2 most fooled students were a couple of black guys — highlighted at the very end, for maximum comic effect.

Merry Christmas!

(That's the traditional Althouse blog Christmas photo... from 1953.)

ADDED: More "young Althouse" Christmas pics — from 1958.

"I want a baby doll and a waterproof with a hood and a pair of gloves..."

"... and a toffee apple and a gold penny and a silver sixpence and a long toffee."

100-year-old letter to Santa, found up a chimney.

"He portrayed the Irish as drunken apes, and the image still remains today."

The New Jersey Ancient Order of Hibernians opposes inclusion of Thomas Nast — the great 19th century political cartoonist — in the New Jersey Hall of Fame.

Nast—whose drawings gave rise to Uncle Sam, Santa Claus and the elephant and donkey that symbolize the American political parties—was critical of the Irish as supporters of Tammany Hall. He pilloried the Vatican for trying to recruit children from public schools into parochial institutions....

Nast was an abolitionist who supported equal treatment for blacks and Asians. The anti-Irish tenure of his cartoons was a product of the times...

Here's Nast's "Uncle Same's Thanksgiving Dinner" in which Uncle Sam and Columbia serve murdered bird to a bunch of racial and ethnic stereotypes:



(Enlarge to see the outrageous details.)

"12 Days of Religious Liberty."

The ACLU highlights its work in the field of religious freedom, in a series of blog posts.

Day 1: ACLU Defends Church's Right to Run "Anti-Santa" Ads in Boston Subways

... In 2002, the ACLU of Massachusetts filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) for removing subway ads promoting the views of a local church and refusing to sell additional advertising space to the church. One of the controversial ads, paid for by The Church of the Good News, said that early Christians did not celebrate Christmas or "believe in lies about Santa Claus, flying reindeer, elves and drunken parties."

The ACLU argued that the MBTA cannot refuse advertising space to groups it disagrees with.

"Don’t come down here and tell me there is no God."

"This nation is a Christian nation regardless of what those fruit loops and fruitcakes in Washington D.C. say. Hell will freeze over before I vote to have it removed."

So says Joe Hall, the Henderson County Commissioner, defending the Athens, Texas nativity scene from an attack by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which — for the record — is from Madison, Wisconsin.

The foundation asked for the baby Jesus to be removed, or for a sign to be put up next to his crib that would read: “At this season of the winter solstice may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.”

But while some believe Santa is “but myth and superstition,” no one has asked for a sign to be placed next to him, clarifying his non-existence. The town has several other seasonal decorations up, such as reindeer, garden gnomes and snowmen, but the nativity scene is the only decoration has been criticized as a religious symbol. As for Santa, he’s more of a tradition than a religious icon, so the foundation has not taken issue with him.

The traditional Althouse Christmas photograph.

(What we wore and how we looked in 1953.)

Choir from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University covers “Bed Intruder Song” as X-mas carol.

(Via Bloggingheads.)

Here's the original. Kinda puts Santa in a different light doesn't it? He's climbing in your windows....

ADDED: "The Bed Intruder Song" has a long Wikipedia entry.

Critical reception

... Jason King, a music professor at NYU was quoted by NPR as saying "It's catchy. It has a really good hook, but it's problematic, too. There's a way in which the aesthetics of black poverty—the way they talk and they speak and they look — sort of becomes this fodder for humor without any interest in the context of the conditions in which people actually live." Baratunde Thurston of The Onion told NPR:

"As the remix took off, I became increasingly uncomfortable with its separation from the underlying situation. A woman was sexually assaulted and her brother was rightfully upset. People online seemed to be laughing at him and not with him (because he wasn't laughing), as Dodson fulfilled multiple stereotypes in one short news segment. Watching the wider Web jump on this meme, all but forgetting why Dodson was upset, seemed like a form of ‘class tourism.’ Folks with no exposure to the projects could dip their toes into YouTube and get a taste. [...] The creativity unleashed has been amazing, and what mitigates my fears of people minimizing the gravity of the situation is how Antoine himself has responded and taken charge of his own meme."

The original interviewee, Antoine Dodson also has a Wikipedia entry. He was chosen "Meme of the Year" in the 2010 Urlie awards. Here's a Washington Post piece declaring that Dodson "is one of the strongest people we’ve seen in a while," that he has "an inner strength that is worthy of awe and respect."

Stopping at the Pennsylvania welcome center at the New York end of I-90.

It's eerie late at night...



At the foot of the "Pennsylvania Wineries" column, lies inebriated Santa:



But don't worry....



"You can't make a wrong turn in Pennsylvania."

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian yells: "FROSTY THE SNOWMAN NOT SANTA." Oh, yeah! Good point. Ha ha. I need to get my American iconography straight. 

Santa Claus, Uncle Sam, Easter bunnies, and dispassionate judges.

A joke about judges, in a 1944 Supreme Court opinion:

All schools of religious thought make enormous assumptions, generally on the basis of revelations authenticated by some sign or miracle. The appeal in such matters is to a very different plane of credibility than is invoked by representations of secular fact in commerce. Some who profess belief in the Bible read literally what others read as allegory or metaphor, as they read Aesop's fables. Religious symbolism is even used by some with the same mental reservations one has in teaching of Santa Claus or Uncle Sam or Easter bunnies or dispassionate judges.

Have you ever laughed so hard at a joke that the person who told it got mad at you for laughing too much?

I have!

Not recently. Long ago. Something just reminded me of it. The something was the observation that I'm especially amused by jokes that have to do with the size of things. Oh, I'll be completely specific. We were talking about the expression "postage stamp lawn," that is, a very small lawn, perhaps the size of an area rug. But what if there really were a postage stamp the size of an area rug? That would be a huge postage stamp. Ha ha. Imagine the size of the envelope you'd put it on. Okay. That to me is hilarious, and it reminded me of the joke I found so funny — decades ago — that I laughed so hard the teller of the joke got mad at me for laughing so much. I was cutting the joker's hair — I used to think I could do haircuts and acted upon that belief — and I noticed a bright red dot on the top of his head — the size of a pimple, but not a pimple — and not something he'd ever have noticed. I said, "What's this red dot on top of your head?" He said, "That's my Santa Claus hat!"

Now, maybe the joker will read this post and get mad all over again. Or, that is, get mad for a new reason, that I've blogged about a time he got mad at me. To him, I'd say, I have remembered "That's my Santa Claus hat!" for more than 30 years, and — in my little sense of humor — I still think it's the funniest thing I've ever heard anyone say. It may not be the funniest joke I've ever heard, but I'm sure it's the funniest completely spontaneous remark I've ever been present to hear on the spot. On the dot.

I'm quite serious about replacing the depressing Father Time/Baby New Year with the New Year's Tick.

I like to frontpage comments, you know, and now and then, I need to frontpage my own comments. This is one of those times.

There was that "tick" post on New Year's Eve Eve (i.e., last night):

"New Year to arrive a tick later."

Oh! A tick!

Ricpic waxes poetic:

The New Year came in wobbly.
A tick or two behind.
It threw off lonely sticklers.
The rest? They didn't mind.

And Stephanie says:

?retal kcot a evirra ti t'nseoD

(Wait a sec, I have to do this.)

Then blogging cockroach says...

tou ieduv siht kcehc einahpets yeh

... and links to this:



That drives reader_iam to poesy:

i do love the backwards elements of the cockroach nature
as don't we all
or at least should
if not ought

Blogging cockroach responds in kind:

that should be tuo
which proves i ve had too much
spilled cheap merlot tonight
to be hopping around backwards
lookout when the champaign flows
tomorrow night wheee
which i hope doesn t turn into
eeehw
anyway here is tick tock gone bad
and too long
but you can stop it when it
ceases being funny about 40 seconds in
hey they can t all be gems
and i promise never to trip
trippingly to reader s ear
a cockroach doing that would
freak some people out
but just don t sleep on the kitchen floor
and we ll all be fine

Chip Ahoy says:

.diputs era stac yhW

dnuora gnifoog tsuj s'ti swohs swollof taht oediv etunim 4 ehT .yllaer toN

The cockroach continues to inspire reader_iam:

ah but cockroach
your trips are tweets to the ear
like birds in dawn of spring s own dawn
here here see here they sing
back again as always are we
so wake up
if only, and to ...

The cockroach skitters on across the keyboard again:

not having the vers libre poet in me
i fear my prosaic nature sometimes
misses the subtleties of
dear reader s lovely lines
which is not to say
reader should not write
a lot more of them
because you always want more
when someone doesn t quite
write enough rather than when
they write too much
which is also true about food
but i m not as appreciative when
the cook has cleaned up
too well afterwards

Then, when everyone is nestled all snug in their beds, I am awake. It's 2:23 a.m.:

And where is everyone? Last night, you guys were talking all night, and now here I am with insomnia and no one is around.

Were you afraid of the tick?

Thanks for all the poetry, but it was all before midnight. If you can't stay up until midnight tonight, how do you expect to celebrate New Year's Eve tomorrow night?

I think I'll try to draw a picture of the New Year's Tick. Or see if I can get people to send pictures of the New Year's Tick. And I'm going to push for the adoption of the New Year's Tick as the new New Year's mascot, replacing that stupid — and frankly depressing — Old Man and Baby mascot. Or the Ball. What the hell kind of symbol is a Ball?

I hope that doesn't offend blogging cockroach. You must understand that we can't have a cockroach as a holiday symbol. Not for New Year's anyway.

This insomnia is giving me grandiose thoughts, but I really think this New Year's Tick thing can catch on. Perhaps if we draw it the right way. I think Santa Claus wasn't such a big deal until those Coca Cola ads got the character drawn just the right way. People loved him once his attributes became appealing and standardized.

Help me do that with the Tick.

Also, that "Night Before Christmas" poem helped with the popularization of Santa Claus, so maybe some of you poets can write something similarly beguiling about the annual arachnid.

Inside the kitty cat wall clock he hid/Our eagerly awaited arachnid.

See? I can't do it!

An arthropod/From God/Trod...

No... I need help with the poem. And with the drawing. And with the sleeping.

The children were nestled all snug in their beds/Not knowing the Tick crept so close to their heads....

(Links added.)

In the cold light of morning — and it's 0° — I can see these are not mere insomniac ravings. I really do want drawings — or photoshoppings — of the New Year's Tick. I will reward you with frontpagings and tags. More poems too. I love the poems and the depictions of ticks — detickshuns, if you will.

We went out in the icy snow and celebrated last night. Tonight we stay in. I'll be live-blogging New Year's Eve, so please join me. I will reward you profusely with frontpagings and tags... and ticks.

"Santa, baby...."

Eartha Kitt, died on Christmas... in 2008, at the age of 81. She was famous for singing that song about Santa Claus. But she was also famous as Cat Woman on TV's "Batman" ...



... "She may be evil, but she is attractive"....

... and for telling Lyndon Johnson that he should end the Vietnam War. And, as I've said before, I'll never forget the monkey fur dress she wore in the 60s.

An Althouse blog Christmas tradition: the 1953 Santa Claus.

Here we are, probably at Wanamaker's in Wilmington -- or was it Newark? -- Delaware. I will be 3 in January, and my sister is 6. I don't think either of us is buying that beard, but my doubt is tinged with trepidation, perhaps because the right jolly old elf has got me in his grip...



... Meanwhile, I seem to have a lollipop.

Blue Santa.

Remember "Blue Christmas"?

Operation Santa Claus squelched.

Because the Post Office discovered that one guy -- who probably only wanted to do a good deed -- was -- like 644,000 Americans -- a registered sex offender.