Secret Santa

It is very possible that the stress caused by The SANTA LIE causes a child to suffer POST TRAUMATIC STRESS SYNDROME and causes a wide range of serious mental illnesses for a child as they reach Adolecence from bed wetting, anxiety, OCD and bi-polar disorders to depression, hyperactivity, eating disorders, obesity, anti- social behavior and drug & alcohol abuse. NO ONE HAS EVEN STUDIED THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DAMAGE DONE BY THE SANTA LIE and I seriously doubt if anyone ever will.

- "THE SPIRITUAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL DAMAGE OF THE SANTA LIE!

I am confused and concerned, and I need your help, dear readers.

I went to the page that's linked above.  And I read the entire thing.  And it filled me with dread and concern.  The unnamed author of the page claims or implies that "The Santa Lie" leads to bed-wetting, obsessive-compulsive disorders, eating disorders, and drug abuse.

Awful!

Prince Of Lies.

The author also calls someone who repeats "The Santa Lie" a "bonified liar".  Now, I initially assumed they meant a skeleton liar--you know, like the ones Sinbad fought in the Bible--but then I remembered that skeletons can't talk and so I went and looked up "bonify" and found out it means "To convert into, or make, good," which doesn't seem like it would be a bad thing at all.

Still.  The bed-wetting thing bothers me.  It's bad enough the cat sometimes throws up a hairball on the comforter.  ("Hairball" being a misnomer: it ought to be called a "clog of hair, partially digested kitty food and Satan juice"; but I digress.)

And so I went back through the webpage.  Several times.  And I looked for links.  And now I need your help.

Because, you see, unless I missed something, not once, not a single time did the author of the website say what "The Santa Lie" actually was!

This is terrifying, obviously.  What is Santa lying about?  What does he have to hide?

I can think of things.  Some of them aren't the least bit sinister and I can't see why they would lead to permanent psychological damage.  Santa being gay, for instance: sure, it wasn't that long ago that a celebrity who works with kids might be concerned about his image and even go so far as having a sham marriage to cover up his preferences; but these days, you know, it's no big deal to be out of the closet and many famous actors and celebrities are totally open and out there--Tom Cruise and Albus Dumbledore both come right to mind.  It just seems like it's only fair to let Mrs. Claus know about it.

Or, for instance, maybe Santa Claus has a secret identity.  Maybe, for instance, Santa is really Batman, though that seems really improbable seeing as how Santa is a morbidly obese elderly male and Batman looks suspiciously like the guy who played the wife in Mr. Mom.  A more plausible hypothesis is that Santa is really the alter-ego of Superman, since Superman should have no problem constructing a special adamantium corset to hold that gut in.

Again, though, I can't see why this secret would be so soul-shattering.

Have you seen this man?

Which suggests more nefarious or awful possibilities.  For instance, maybe Santa once killed somebody.  Here's a scenario: what if Santa used to have a really bad drinking problem.  And one year, see, he's really hitting the bottle harder than ever because it's World War II and his lists are totally unmanageable--the "naughty" list for Nazi Germany alone is the size of a complete library of Encyclopedia Britannicas.  So he's really sloshed and decides he's going to head out a coupla weeks early and try to do some advance deliveries, at least get England off his to-do list, and somewhere over the English Channel--BLAM!--the sleigh hits something.  He doesn't know what it is, barely remembers it, but the next morning when he goes out to the stables he finds the sleigh has a huge ding in the side and a banged-up trombone he's never seen before in his life is wound round one of the runners like a pretzel.  And he turns to the reindeer, none of whom meet his eyes (except maybe insouciant Dancer) and says, "Any one of you even whispers a goddamn thing about this, even in one of your damn games, the whole herd of you are stew, hear?" and stalks back inside to nurse his hangover with a little brown jug.

Or what if Santa isn't really human?  I mean, okay, so, we know he isn't exactly human, being a million years old and all that.  He used to bring spearpoints and fire to all the good early hominid children and leave lumps of freshly-killed dinosaur for the naughty ones.  What I mean is, what if Santa is positively inhuman?  What if Santa is an alien from another planet, or, more likely, some kind of shambolic, non-Euclidean, eldritch horror from a dimension of pure nightmare beyond all earthly ken?  Think about it: the former tend to die from colds, but the latter only manifest themselves on our mortal plane "when the stars are right", implying some kind of periodic occurrence, e.g. the same date every year.  Maybe Santa isn't fat at all: maybe Santa's quivering gut, so reminiscent of a bowlful of jelly when concealed behind his bright red coat, is actually made up of tentacles and snot and eyeballs and stuff.  Or penises, if you go by that H.R. Giger's renditions of that kind of thing.  Santa's coat conceals lots and lots of penises.  With teeth.  And the teeth also have penises and some of the penises have vaginas.

Santa?! Why, Santa, why?!

But that doesn't make sense, either!  If "The Santa Lie" is that Santa Claus is really a terrifying creature from Beyond that can only manifest itself in our material universe when the Earth is on one side of the sun and one side of it points a particular way (because, I dunno, gravity and solar radiation and stuff), then I'd really rather not know.  It isn't the "Santa Lie" that's going to make me wet my bed and chant, "Ia!  Ia!  Yog-Sothoth!  Santa!  Fat Man of a thousand presents!  Clausthulhu fhtagn!"  No, that would be the truth that's going to drive me insane and cause me to pen an incredibly elaborate journal explaining everything I've discovered in increasingly lurid detail just before I stick my pen in my eye and set myself on fire.  (Carefully placing the journal out of harm's way where it's certain to be discovered and ruin someone else's Christmas.  And speaking of: why do people do that?  Write about their discoveries in cosmically vague terms that only get into specifics twenty pages later, I mean.  Wouldn't it be more useful to just make it a single page? "Pickman's not making this shit up, stay the fuck out of the subways."  "Winged-octopus-snot-monster in South Pacific, stay away from ugly islands with crazy-looking buildings."  "Goddamn rats and my grandparents made me eat a dude, sorry.")

So what is it?  Now I've worked myself up into such as state, I have to know.  I realize this truth may not set me free, that I may never look at Santa the same way again, may have to look at whether I can get the gas company to block my fireplace so he can't get in even if it means I never get another present again!  But I have to know, it nags at me like a hangnail, gnaws at my brain like a small animal that gnaws on brains (koala?)!

I call upon you, loyal readers: if you know what this "The Santa Lie" business is all about, explain it to me.  Whisper it in my ear, leave your comment in invisible pixels, something!

Let me know, let me know, let me know.

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This is also as good an opportunity as any to mention there's a slight change in the comments policy: you'll now be required to have some kind of "registered user" account--a Google account or OpenID or whatever else Google will accept.  Now that I'm no longer updating Giant Midgets every day (part of my "write when you have something to say, don't-when-you-don't" experiment), I'm spending more time clearing out the spam and moderation queues than I am writing the blog.  Actually, Google's filters have become so useless, I was nearly doing that anyway even before I cut back on how much time I spend on the blog.  I doubt the change will have any effect other than inconveniencing Real Actual People, but I'm feeling a little desperate, and for all of Google's changes to Blogger in the past year or so, addressing the spam problem hasn't been one of them--the spam, in fact, has gotten a lot worse.  I don't even know if Google wants to fix the problem, but there it is.

My apologies if the policy change shuts anyone who isn't a spambot out.